Superbowl Sunday was anything but super. Not only was the game a huge disappointment to anyone who enjoys competitive sports, but earlier in the day news broke that Philip Seymour Hoffman had been found dead in his Greenwich Village apartment. Aviation shares something in common with sports and show business, whether we choose to believe […]
Politics for Pilots
Searching for that last straw
Long, long ago I was fortunate enough to hear a joke that’s stuck with me for all these years. What I hadn’t anticipated was that a single joke would help inform my political sensibilities forevermore. That’s right, a joke has become a guiding light to my method of dealing with others. Emo Philips, the comedian, […]
Courting the cross-over effect
While out and about recently I saw something that left an impression on me. It was a line of sports cars and a Formula racer parked right there on the ramp in Sebring, Florida. They were bright red and carried names like Porsche and Mazda. Their engines had the ability to put out significantly more […]
Everybody has a game plan
General aviation is something of a massive storage locker that houses a plethora of game plans designed to save the industry. It seems as if virtually everyone has one they’ve been working on, refining, honing to perfection. And the story of each plan is the same. It’s better. It will achieve more impressive results. Honest, […]
AOPA gets back to basics
With the new year came a big new announcement from our friends in Frederick, Maryland. Six new fly-in events will grace the calendar starting in 2014, spreading from the east coast to the west coast, with important bases of operation in the middle of the country, too. Yes, this is big news. It signifies and […]
One size does not fit all
Imagine walking into a restaurant, sitting down, grabbing a menu, and finding only a single item listed there. One entree, that’s it. And let’s limit it to only one size of that entree. You don’t get to choose between the 6 ounce steak, the 9 ounce, or the 12 ounce. It’s the 12-ounce version or […]
Mentoring our way to success
Every week or two I spend time with a young man I have come to respect. He’s smart, creative, curious, and searching for a better way to identify and achieve his goals. So we sit and chat. Sometimes we have coffee and a snack during a brief get together. Sometimes we jabber away for hours. […]
Where’s our message?
If you’re like most people, you commuted to work this morning, set up shop, got involved with the projects on your schedule, took a lunch break, got back to work, and then commuted home again. The whole process took something like nine or 10 hours and in that time you were bombarded with messages, advertisements, and […]
That’s just my opinion, I could be wrong…
Dennis Miller, the comedian, social commentator, and all around intellectual bon vivant, once had a popular cable program that was famous for two things. His guests were encouraged to disagree without becoming disagreeable. There was no shouting on Miller’s show, even when the topics were incendiary enough to have degenerated into a slobbering, spittle-spewing, scream-fest […]