This is a link to an excellent article, Illusions of Safety, published yesterday by the Royal Aeronautical Society. It’s written by Dr Rob Hunter, Head of Flight Safety, British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA). While it is most directly aimed at the safety professionals that regulate and manage airline safety departments, it has interesting reverberations into any personal risk management discussion. Is safety number one? The whole piece is well worth reading, if only to learn about the origin of the phrase ‘you’ve got to draw the line somewhere‘. Some powerful lines include: Some pilots say that they are fearful of reporting … Continue reading Illusion of airline safety systems
“The clearest mind has the advantage.” “Red Bull Air Race pilots spend hours visualising their course. Some sit staring into space, simply picturing the air gates; others physically construct a scale model of the course in their hangars, walking through it over and over again.” “You should be listening to your plane.” ~ Paul Bonhomme. “You need to be incredibly precise without thinking about it. You always need to be ahead of the game.” ~ Nigel Lamb. “To fly through those pylons relies entirely on feeling: it should feel like two wings attached to my body. Extracting the … Continue reading Red Bull air racers inner game
If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail. ~ Amy Pritchett, Professor of Cognitive Engineering at Georgia Tech. Quoted in the New York Times article Planes Without Pilots. The same piece also quotes the normally enthusiastic Professor Mary Cummings, a former fighter pilot and currently director of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Lab, as saying: You need humans where you have humans. If you have a bunch of humans on an aircraft, you’re going to need a Captain Kirk on the plane. I don’t ever see commercial transportation going over to drones. What … Continue reading Planes without pilots?
AOPA Pilot magazine magazine has a great article by Dave Hirschman in the April edition about the Mavericks, four Florida pilots who fly formation aerobatics together. They are mostly in their mid-70’s. With long backgrounds in all kinds of flying. Ageless aviators with wisdom to spare: Just like artists or musicians, we’re constantly striving to master our craft, to try new things, to improve. Bob Gandt, 75, US Navy, Pan Am & Delta. I still get a rush of adrenaline whenever we fly. Ron Keilin, 78, thirty-five years of airshow aerobatic experience. No two flights are exactly the same. And … Continue reading Ageless aviator wisdom
“Enlightenment, the monk says, isn’t a point where everything stops and you’ve made it, forever surrounded by a halo of bliss. It is something alive, something that pushes you on every day, whether you are a Daigyoman Ajari on Mount Hiei or a data-management assistant in an office in Hounslow.”
Article in The Guardian on Japanese monks who run long-distance every day for 1000 days.
