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 time. This all has little to nothing to do with a super cool airline pilot research paper I recently read, but it’ll sorta make sense in a couple of minutes. The paper is Character Strengths of Airline Pilots: Explaining Life … Continue reading Dear Prudence

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)