Reread the classic 1942 aviation adventure book West With The Night by Beryl Markham. Beautiful writing distilling life. And quotes like this, using airmanship to turn and climb in better air rather than just full power into mountain downdrafts:
Beginners Mind met Perpetual Pursuit! Always learning. Sometimes embarrassingly large amounts of stuff I was blind about!
Every flight is a fight! Human Error be old and out of shape, but never count him out.
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 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
