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.

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

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.