Found a new flying podcast, what a great way to start 2021! Will be listening on the way to BOS Logan today. It’s called When Women Fly, and here’s a direct link to the Patty Wagstaff episode. “Flying is not the hardest part of it at all, it’s the mental aspects – so you learn a lot about yourself in …
Think of Something Else
Reread the classic 1942 aviation adventure book West With The Night by Beryl Markham. Beautiful writing distilling life. And quotes like this, using airmanship to turn and climb in better air rather than just full power into mountain downdrafts:
How Much You Don’t Know
Beginners Mind met Perpetual Pursuit! Always learning. Sometimes embarrassingly large amounts of stuff I was blind about!
In This Corner . . .
Every flight is a fight! Human Error be old and out of shape, but never count him out.
Put Your Eyes Here
Overheard from in third-grader’s zoom classroom, the teacher telling my son to focus — “Put your eyes here Alex”. Very clear directions from an experienced elementary school teacher. A teacher who knows if you’re not looking at the words, you’re not reading the assignment. So simple. But very powerful for him. And me. Because last night I read in the …
I Went into the Sky
I pass right by Walden Woods on my way to work at Boston’s Logan Airport. I hear Thoreau’s words in my head mostly as he wrote them in 1854. The exact quote from his book Walden; or, Life in the Woods is: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of …
Airbus Stick Technique
I normally write about ideas that apply to flying any aircraft. But today is different. This is Airbus specific. Very specific! Recently read a couple of peer-reviewed scientific research papers that do a great job parsing Airbus stick skills and fine-grain aircraft control. I’ve learnt some new things, confirmed some suspicions, but still have questions. The four topics are: The …
Judge Yourself
From the excellent 2019 book The Passion Paradox.
Robin Olds on Flying
Fighter pilot legend. Triple Ace. Multiple combat victories against Messerschmitts and MiGs. Married to a Hollywood actress. Son of a General, who became a General himself. College football star. Best Wing Commander in Vietnam. Hard-drinking mustached maverick, who eventually was Commandant of the Air Force Academy. Robin Olds had an amazing career. But let’s look here at some of his …
Stunts?
Autopilot babies and paint-by-numbers piloting are not new ideas. Back in 1942 a Marine Corps Major wrote about it. People were calling anything past a gentle bank a stunt. We needed pilots to know the full envelope of flight then — and now. You can’t learn this type of flying out of textbooks … It seems rather silly to be …