Tag Archives: Blather

Aviation, Ramblings

2 Posts In 1

Good morning world!

Today I am trying hard to stay motivated. It’s one of those days with regard to getting things done that need doing. Trying not to be moody is making it harder to get going on projects. I am hoping to break this by doing some writing, so here are a couple of posts wrapped up under one roof.

Post The First…

The weight loss stuff is going reasonably well. Today is the fifth day I have been tracking and so far so good. Since there is not much to say about how great or how hard the last WHOLE FOUR DAYS have been I guess I can leave it at that. 😉

Post The Second…

Last night I went to an FAA Safety Team meeting for CFIs. It was a good meeting and it was really nice to be around folks who are interested in aviation. Hanger Talk is always one of the highlights of being around aviation folk for me. To the rest of the world it’s like water cooler talk, but with pilots it’s a little different. We often talk about accidents and the stupid stuff “other” pilots do as well as our own harrowing stories of adventure. It sounds a little morbid, but we talk a lot about accidents.

I spend most of my hanger talk time around career pilots, people who fly for a living or are working at making that the case. It has been my experience that this segment of the pilot community definitely has something in common with the early aviators. It is a cultural thing that has many aspects but when you think “barnstormer”, “WWI Ace” or Fighter Pilot” you get close. There is a little of that in every career pilot I have met.

On the surface it’s a dare devil attitude, a “kick the tires and light the fires”, “need for speed” appearance, beneath that however, there is a very sober, meticulous even retentive attention to detail that keeps career pilots alive. There is a line in the sky, a line between life and death, if you blink you can easily miss the line. The “line” is that attention to detail, knowing your personal limitations, the limitations of your aircraft, and the environment around you. Early in my flight training an instructor I knew was talking to some other students about career pilot mortality, “sooner or later, a friend will die in a plane, and it will have been his fault.” Harsh words, but true. I have been flying since 2003, I have been acquainted with three pilots who blinked. All of them CFIs, all of them doing something they knew was stupid, but for whatever reason, they did not take their responsibilities seriously, at least once, and thats all it took.

That’s why we talk about accidents, it reminds us that it only takes one mistake or over site to start the “accident chain” rolling. It’s rarely just one thing that brings about an accident. It is inevitably a chain of events, errors and over sites, that bring about bent metal or the demise of a fellow aviator. We talk about those errors and over sites to keep them top-of-mind. Accident chains are usually fairly long, 10 or so links, often several of those links are check list items. Some times if a pilot had just read through his check list, instead of skipping it because he was used to the plane, the chain would have been broken early and the event wouldn’t have been one at all.

Not using checklists properly and weather account for nearly all of the General Aviation accidents in the United States. Vigilance, professionalism, and a meticulous attention to detail are required skills for a career pilot, and should be for all pilots. Using a checklist is such a simple task and not doing it can be so costly.

For those who are now scared to fly, remember this… Pilots on their own time sometimes ease up on their vigilance and blink, thats when they make the news. Flying is not dangerous, there is however inherent danger in the act of flying. ALL career pilots and ALL air carriers do what they can to mitigate the risks involved in flying. Commercial flying is still one of the safest modes of transportation, it just gets more press when things go wrong. Just ask Capt. Sully.

Ramblings

Great Googly Moogly!

A month has gone by since my last post. You might think I have been running around franticly getting tons of stuff done. Well, sort of.

I have been doing some work with friends to close out an estate, that has been taking up time. I have also been helping friends with Extreme Clutter Busting and when I say Extreme I mean EXTREME! We have made lots of headway and things are coming along nicely. There has been some maintenance/construction stuff getting done too, for friends and here at the homestead.

With all of the spring cleaning and clutter busting I have been doing with others, I have also been doing lots of it around my own home as well, yesterday for example was a homestead cleaning day. Pick a room and turn it inside out, then put it all back together. There has been more than a little mental house cleaning going on for me too, purging and sorting the physical clutter helps a lot with the psychological clutter.

I have been struggling with focusing my direction for a while, in truth, a few years. I have a lot of projects up in the air with varying levels of completion and this state has been feeding my stress and detracting from my focus. I can barely keep track of all of the projects, let alone get any of them done. There are so many things I want to do in life, but as I get older, I am thinking more about time and how quickly it can slip away if you are just floundering about. It’s time to cut the project list down to size.

What makes me happiest is flying. I love to fly. I want to build aircraft, and fly them. I want to make movies about pilots and aircraft and fly in them. I want to teach people how to fly and share the joy I feel each and every time I go up. I have a long list of ratings I want to add to my pilot and instructor certificates. If I can achieve my desires in aviation, I will be an extremely pleased person.

Getting by month to month on side job income makes achieving many of these goals difficult it is not impossible, though I do need to get some outside support. One of the biggest obstacles is covering the monthly nut and flight expenses while still having time to get anything done.

I have had the beginnings of a plan to get the ball rolling for some time now but the plans require me to sell Me, something I do not have a very good track record doing. I am great at implementing projects where someone else is the Face, not so much in being the Face. While I am quite confident in my abilities to perform, I don’t seem to have that same level of confidence in my ability to sell my abilities. I am not sure why that is, it is a personality thing about myself I just don’t understand. I guess it’s time to get over it and start pushing forward.

Now its off to the drawing board to make some formal business-type plans and start selling The FlyBoy.

Ramblings

another year…

Another year has passed.

As I get older I find that I understand more, not necessarily know more, though I strive to keep learning, what I mean is all those things we are told as kids “you’ll understand when you get older” at some point do make sense. Maybe not the way we expected to understand them, but we, or at least I, understand a great many things much better than I did just a few years ago.

This “new understanding” and all of the opportunities to learn new things are some of the reasons “getting older” doesn’t bother me at all. The silver hair, no problem, it’s a badge of experience. Getting a little thin on top, again no problem. It is all a part of life. Mortality itself is not much of a worry, we are all born, grow up, grow old, and eventually die, it’s how nature works. What dose weigh on me around this time of year is that it’s a marker in time, a recognition that the earths has made its way around the sun once again, and there is so much I wanted to complete before this marker in time came around.

As kids, we all have things we want to accomplish in life, we want to “be” something when we grow up, “do” something before we get “old.” As time passes those goals change for most of us, and thats fine, more often than not, they should. We grow and evolve, we become more experienced, we are exposed to things that as children, we never would have imagined we would see or do. It’s part of the cycle.

When we are young adults we have new goals and desires, we pursue other paths, it’s the next phase of the cycle. At some point when we “grow up” most of us find that we have settled into a path and wonder haw we got here. For some of us it is a great ride that seems to get better as we go, for some… well the ride is less fun. I have no complaints about the paths I have chosen, the choices I have made. There are of course some things I might have done better along the road, different choices, but the major course changes, I stand by them.

Each time the earth makes it way back to this point around the sun I just tend to think about time slipping by, what I had hoped to do, but didn’t. Not so much a regret of things not done, but of letting the time itself slip by without making the best of it. Or did I? Was I making the best of what I had/did, or was I just coasting? If I was coasting, was that the best thing to do? You know… second guessing myself, my motives. I suppose it’s more of a contemplation thing for me than a self doubt thing.

Reflecting as I type, I guess this annual contemplation is one of those times I find insight in the “you’ll understand when you get older” truths. I guess thats what this whole post is all about.