Celebration

It’s been a long, hard road for a lot of people over the last year or two. I guess I don’t need to mention that unemployment numbers are unlike anything most of us have seen in our lifetime, but I did anyway.

I’ve sat and commiserated with a good number of unemployed people over the past year, a truly shocking number of them highly educated and until recently, with very successful careers. CFO’s, CPA’s, IT guys, directors and managers of all sorts, many of them have begun to get extremely discouraged and frustrated, wondering when they will start drawing a regular paycheck again.

But last night I was able to celebrate the wonderfully unexpected success of one of those people, a corporate jet pilot, re-entering the workforce and best of all, as a contract corporate jet pilot. As you might imagine, those positions are not easy to find these days, given the current political view toward corporate owned jets. And to add to the wonder, I think my pilot friend wouldn’t argue with me if we simply said that he has a LOT of hours in his logbook.

So to quickly get to the point of this rambling post, I would like to offer my friend the most heartfelt congratulations, wishing him blue skies and tailwinds always. Fly safe, Tom.

AlphaTrainer 3D

Here is a video I’ve edited and narrated for a buddy of mine. He’s a corporate pilot who’s developed a small bit of educational software that is used in conjunction with the fantastic flight simulator, X-Plane. Although this video gives you a good idea of what the software is all about, more detailed information about the plug-in can be found at alphatrainer.com.

Duck Pilot

For this post, I thought I would combine a couple of past posts into a single cartoon. So I grabbed my duck sketch video and plane sketch video, added a few new elements to jazz it up a bit, and put them together.

Space Pilot

From the Los Angeles Times: “Robert M. White was a 38-year-old U.S. Air Force major and record-setting test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in 1962 when he joined the elite ranks of America’s four astronauts.

But Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, Virgil Grissom, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter went into space seated atop ballistic missiles and returned in capsules that parachuted onto the ocean.

White did it as the pilot of a rocket-powered X-15 research airplane, flying nearly 60 miles above the Earth’s surface and completing a conventional landing on Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base.

His out-of-this-world adventure earned him the distinction of being the first pilot to earn a winged astronaut rating by piloting an airplane in space.”

Photo credit: NASA

The Jetpack Is Here

Finally.

And you won’t need a pilot’s license to fly one either, just a few lessons. But that’s not the problem in my household since I informed my wife that I was going to learn how to fly, the issue is more about convincing her to buy me one.

With a range of just over 30 miles at 63 miles per hour, this could make for a nifty commute that would even make you look forward to Monday mornings.

This Day in Flight

Stephen W. Thompson (March 20, 1894 — October 9, 1977) was an American aviator of World War I, and the first person in the U.S. Military to shoot down an enemy aircraft, on February 5, 1918.

This Date in Flight

The Space Shuttle Columbia accident occurred on February 1, 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, with the loss of all seven crew members, shortly before it was scheduled to conclude its 28th mission. The disaster was set in motion when a frozen piece of foam dislodged from the main propellant tank during launch, striking the left wing and damaging the leading edge. That damage allowed the heat from re-entry to enter the interior space of the wing and destroy the internal structure. Amazingly, a video recording of a portion of the re-entry, shot by the astronauts themselves, survives.