One of the hardest things for me is to really see during preflight. But kids beginners mind helps a lot. Down and dirty to look underneath. A nut on every bolt. Climb up to look at the high wing. Then my 8-year-old spots a bolt just sitting on the ramp!
Every pre-flight needs a mindset of new eyes.
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. It received radio signals from a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. Later it picked up a beam from Droitwich, England, and followed that for a while. When the plane neared Brize Norton, the wide-awake Brain concentrated on a special landing beam from an R.A.F. radio and made a conventional automatic landing. On the way over, the crew checked the course and watched the instruments. Most of them had little to do. They played cards and read books.”
No Hands, Time magazine 50(14), 1947.
The future is coming. But as someone who owned a Tesla for two years, I don’t think it’s coming tomorrow!
“I would rather be in my glider and think about God, than be in church and think about my glider.”
I go back to airline flying next month. Been a long time. In my basement I have followed Space Shuttle Commander and test pilot instructor Rick Searfoss’s advice:
“For best effect, chair flying even involves moving the hands as if you actually have a stick, throttle, and multiple switches in front of you. I went so far before my first space mission to set up a full-size paper copy of Columbia’s instrument panel in my home office. My kids laughed at Dad and his toy orbiter cockpit, but it aided in my preparation tremendously. Even to the present day, after I’ve flown eighty-four different types of aircraft, mental simulation is a key part of my preparation in learning a new airplane.”
Pretty amazing how useful a couple of cut up moving boxes, a taped up training poster, and my youngest son’s unused piano stool can be.
—
Rick Searfoss was a veteran of three Space Shuttle flights, one as mission commander, a test pilot instructor, flew two other rocket-powered aircraft, and was briefly a B737 pilot for Southwest Airlines. The quote is from his 2016 book Liftoff: An Astronaut Commander’s Countdown For Purpose Powered Leadership.
Concorde or Cub, the thinking is the same:
“If everything was going absolutely perfectly, then you could just sit there and watch the thing fly itself across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound.
But all the time you had the think about what you would do if there was some sort of an emergency.”
Concorde Captain John Hutchinson.
A snippet of his interview with Markus Voelter on the wonderfully in-depth podcast Omega Tau, 18 February 2015. He went on to discuss some of the major implications of losing an engine in supersonic cruise over the Atlantic at 50,000 feet.
