Author: Dave English

Put your eyes here

By Dave English

Overheard from my third-grader’s zoom classroom — “Put your eye’s 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 excellent 2019 book Controlling Risk: Thirty Techniques for Operating Excellence, by five-time Shuttle commander Jim Wetherbee, of the same idea. When he was a Navy A-7 pilot there were several crashes caused by computer limitations that forced pilots to manually enter navigation coordinates while flying close to … Continue reading Put your eyes here

I went into the sky

By Dave English

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 life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” For me, flying is learning to live deliberately. Seeing the New England fall foliage … Continue reading I went into the sky

Airbus Stick Technique

By Dave English

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: Where to hold the side stick? Separate up/down and left/right inputs, or move the stick in 2-D? Aim for perfectly centered or smoothly tracking? What else did the researchers learn? The main research paper is Stirring the Pot: Comparing Stick Input … Continue reading Airbus Stick Technique