“Ships are to little purpose without skillful Sea Men.” Richard Hakluyt, 1589. As a piloting quote, these words ring true across five centuries. And as a quick social media meme they seem true for many activities we humans want to feel important about. And that’s good. But there’s a lot more here than just a two-second meme. Richard Hakluyt (1553 – 1616) …
Dear Prudence
The sun is up, the sky is blue,it’s beautiful and so are you.Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play? This song first appeared on The Beatles famous White Album, the lyrics by John Lennon are about actress Mia Farrow’s sister, Prudence Farrow, who became obsessive about meditating while practising with Maharishi Mahesh in Rishikesh, India. She’d stay in her room meditating all the …
Always Listen . . .
When I’m flying, what thoughts and actions can I leave out? What is excess, noise, waste? I have to prune, it allows me to see and do the things that are truly important.
What Not Who
Hats, braid, big pilot bags. Age, experience, ego. Someone’s the captain, but the what is right always trumps the who is right when it comes to matters like gravity, aerodynamics, weather. “It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.” Thomas Huxley Picture is a cool looking Pan Am 707 flying to Moscow.
No Such Thing as Luck …
“There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.” — Robert Heinlein, ‘Have Space Suit—Will Travel’ (1958). Photo is a very cool little LS-4 single-place sailplane that I was lucky enough to fly last year at Sundance Aviation in Moriarty, New Mexico.
Gesamtkunstwerk
Gesamtkunstwerk: a German word (did you guess?!) means ‘total work of art’ or ‘synthesis of the arts’. Wagner’s artistic credo translates for us as smoothly integrating stick, rudder, thrust, gravity, wind, weather, crew, everything— into a flying whole. . (Original airshow photo by Gabriel Gusmao on Unsplash)
Academic Airmanship Paper
This week I read an interesting research article on airmanship in standardized airline cockpits. The lead author is Torgeir Haavik, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology with an engineering background in oil drilling, who more recently earned a PhD in the sociology of risk and safety. The paper is wildly — for an academic journal — titled: ‘Johnny …
The Drama of Flight …
“The drama of flight does not take place between the pilot and the environment, but between the airplane and the pilot, and between the pilot and himself.” David Mamet, Flying magazine Feb 2019. For the first time in years I’m excited for Flying magazine! Mamet has a Pulitzer Prize, Tony nominations, a parody Twitter account, flies his own plane. And now …
The Impossible Climb
I was lucky enough to get an advance review copy of a new book coming out in March 2019: The Impossible Climb: A Personal History of Alex Honnolds’s Free Solo of El Capitan and a Climbing Life, by Mark Synnott. It’s pretty dang awesome. Highly recomended. Alex Honnold, the world’s greatest climber, went 3000 feet up shear mountain face, alone …
My Book Says . . .
Shoutout to all new safety clipboard holders! Hope Santa bought you a shiny new hat, and a deep appreciation of how work really gets done in dynamic tightly-coupled high-risk professions.