I’m never going to be a good enough father. I’m never going to be a good enough husband. I’m never going to be a good enough actor for myself. I just never will be, and I have to get comfortable with waking up every day and trying to move some little increment closer to the person I have always dreamed of being. This is the journey.
Will Smith, interview in Esquire magazine, March 2015
“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 last knot of speed at the expense of poor handling isn’t the way to go. Air racing is … finding the right line, not going too wide, not making sharp edges, just smooth, energy-conserving lines.”
~ Hannes Arch.
All this, much more and pretty pictures in a great article by Red Bull covering the inner game of the pilots getting ready for the 2015 air race competitions.
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 do you think? What’s the real value of humans in cockpits?
People only do their best at things they truly enjoy.
Jack Nicklaus
