“Challenge and perfection is the greatest gift of life. Embrace it and use it well. To turn your back on the challenge of perfection is to close the door on your spirit, your freedom … your very existence.” Betty Skelton Betty quoted in 2011 book Betty Skelton First Lady of Firsts by Henry Holden. An amazing aerobatic pilot, she also …
Preflight Beginners Mind
One of the hardest things for me is to really see during preflight. But kids beginners mind helps a lot. Down and dirty to look underneath. A nut on every bolt. Climb up to look at the high wing. Then my 8-year-old spots a bolt just sitting on the ramp! Every pre-flight needs a mindset of new eyes.
Fully Automatic?
Guess what year this newspaper article was published: 1946? 1976? 1996? 2016? Answer: Rain, Fog, Snow! Future Airliner to Go Right Thru: Automatic Devices Will Handle It. Chicago Daily Tribune. 6 June 1946. Yep! 1946. And the next year Time magazine reported on a military aircraft flying from Newfoundland to England under the control of an autopilot programmed on punched …
I’d Rather be Flying . . .
“I would rather be in my glider and think about God, than be in church and think about my glider.”
Chair Flying
I go back to airline flying next month. Been a long time. In my basement I have followed Space Shuttle Commander and test pilot instructor Rick Searfoss’s advice: “For best effect, chair flying even involves moving the hands as if you actually have a stick, throttle, and multiple switches in front of you. I went so far before my first …
Watch the Thing Fly Itself
Concorde or Cub, the thinking is the same: “If everything was going absolutely perfectly, then you could just sit there and watch the thing fly itself across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound. But all the time you had the think about what you would do if there was some sort of an emergency.” Concorde Captain John Hutchinson. …
Flying Fatigued, from 1890
On 12 July 1890, in Eastleigh, England, the London & South Western Railway had a collision that resulted in one fatality. A light engine ran some stop signals at North Junction and then crashed into the rear of a freight train. The accident report cited the cause as the engine driver and stoker failing to “keep a proper look-out”. Pilot …
Psychological Skills of Elite Military Pilots
Fifteen highly-rated pilots were interviewed at a Royal Canadian Air Force base by university psychology researchers as part of a larger longer project on how master performers differ from those of us that are merely ‘good’. Some of the results were published in 2014 — Examining the Psychological Skills Used by Elite Canadian Military Pilots — and it makes for interesting …
10 Don’ts from 1939
Published in 1939, Robert Winston’s book Dive Bomber takes us back to the exciting world of 1930’s US Navy aviation. It starts great — “Eighteen dollars an hour. That’s what they wanted for dual instruction at the flying school on Long Island. I had expected flying lessons to be expensive, but I didn’t think they were going to tear such …
Inside the Tunnel
Three-time US National Aerobatic Champion Patty Wagstaff clearly explaining the inner game: Quote and original movie still from the 2004 documentary America’s Heart & Soul.