Judge Yourself
From the excellent 2019 book The Passion Paradox.
Airmanship Quotes
Robin Olds on Flying
Fighter pilot legend. Triple Ace. Multiple combat victories against Messerschmitts and MiGs. Married to a Hollywood actress. Son of a General, who became a General himself. College football star. Best Wing Commander in Vietnam. Hard-drinking mustached maverick, who eventually was Commandant of the Air Force Academy. Robin Olds had an amazing career. But let’s look here at some of his (almost sensitive) writing on flying. He first flew at the age of eight, in an open cockpit biplane with his father, a former WWI instructor pilot who became an accomplished aviator and Major General in the United States Army Air Force. In … Continue reading Robin Olds on Flying
Stunts?
Autopilot babies and paint-by-numbers piloting are not new ideas. Back in 1942 a Marine Corps Major wrote about it. People were calling anything past a gentle bank a stunt. We needed pilots to know the full envelope of flight then — and now. You can’t learn this type of flying out of textbooks … It seems rather silly to be explaining the term “airmanship.” But it has been necessary and is still necessary and will be necessary until people learn to speak of perfectly executed aerial maneuvers as “airmanship” instead of “stunts”. Major Al Williams, 29 April 1942.
Greatest Gift of Life
“Challenge and perfection is the greatest gift of life. Embrace it and use it well. To turn your back on the challenge of perfection is to close the door on your spirit, your freedom … your very existence.” Betty Skelton, quoted in 2011 book Betty Skelton First Lady of Firsts by Henry Holden. An amazing aerobatic pilot, she also held many speed and altitude records. Her Pitts Special airplane now hangs inverted, forever looping, in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Here’s its final climb:
Fully Automatic?
Guess what year this newspaper article was published: 1946? 1976? 1996? 2016? Answer: Rain, Fog, Snow! Future Airliner to Go Right Thru: Automatic Devices Will Handle It. Chicago Daily Tribune. 6 June 1946. Yep! 1946. And the next year Time magazine reported on a military aircraft flying from Newfoundland to England under the control of an autopilot programmed on punched cards: “The plane behaved as if an invisible crew were working her controls. … The commanding robot was a snarl of electronic equipment affectionately known as “the Brain.” Everything it did on the long flight was “preset” before the start. … Continue reading Fully Automatic?