Was tasty food served in uniquely aeronautical settings a major driver of my quest to fly? No, it wasn’t even a consideration when I first got started in this business. But those mom and pop restaurants scattered from central Florida, to South Texas, to New England surely did provide a welcome perk that made all the studying, testing, and medical exams worth the trouble.
Everything flows from belief
The Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacque-Étienne watched the smoke rise and surmised the smoke itself could be the secret to human flight.
Carry that weight with style and accuracy
Weight affects performance. Sometimes positively. Sometimes negatively. Sometimes catastrophically.
It’s about heart, not heft
People have a tendency to discourage friends and family from seeking great adventures in aviation. The belief is often expressed that we aren’t prepared, or funded, or that we’re operating machines that were never meant to fly such a distance. Poppycock, I say.
It’s all about the blades
Propellers are a mystery to most. Even to pilots they are little more than an afterthought. They seem simple enough. They are little more than a fixed form attached to a spinning shaft that produces thrust when run up to enough RPMs. How it works, why it works, and what can be done to make it work more efficiently rarely comes up in conversation.
One size does not fit all
With approximately 18% of the pilot population holding a CFI ticket, it would seem obvious that scheduling a flight with a CFI would be easy. It should be a cake walk. So why isn’t it?
It’s always a good time to be proud
There is an old joke that virtually every pilot has heard and agreed with immediately. “How do you know there’s a pilot at your party? They’ll tell you.”
What will they think of next?
The communication systems available to us today are amazing. We can listen to music via Bluetooth through our noise cancelling headsets, call home to let our family know we’re just half an hour out, and monitor two ATC frequencies simultaneously. But does that make us better pilots?
Community spirit to the rescue
It has been said that no man is an island. Clearly, that is true. General aviation is, indeed, a community in the best sense of the term. We care for each other. We go to bat for people we don’t even know, just because we see a glimmer of ourselves in them.