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.
Author: Dave English
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 was here: From airmanship to airlineship’. It was published by Applied Ergonomics journal in 2016. So: Who’s Johnny? What’s airlineship? And can pilots learn anything useful from the journal Applied Ergonomics? Read on, all will be revealed! “Airmanship belongs to a … Continue reading Academic Airmanship Paper