Alan Watts would have turned 101 yrs-old today. This is an excellent comic page from Zen Pencils illustrating one of his quotes, the full “What would you like to do if money were no object.” For me the answer is easy. Fly airplanes.
Richard Champion de Crespigny was the Captain of Qantas Flight 32, an A380 that suffered massive systems damage when number two engine exploded and severed many connections. It is the kind of crazy emergency that we don’t train for. It’s the type of crazy emergency that shows airmanship isn’t all loops and rolls. It’s deep systems knowledge. (Quote from an ‘Airways’ magazine interview, May 2015.)
“The appeal of a physically perilous sport … isn’t the inherent danger of it. It’s about the process of managing risk and anticipating challenges. You need to figure out how to prepare and control everything you can, and then you need to be ready for the things you can’t control.”
Ashley Merryman, co-author of ‘Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing’, writing in this month’s Red Bull Bulletin.
We think of all the what ifs, we think of getting into the maneuvers, getting out of the maneuvers, we talk about each individual person’s role on that flight. We talk about risk … and we talk about ways that we take the risk and minimize it to the lowest level possible so that we go out and execute the test safely.
