Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.
Category: Flying
Sent to me by Neil Kelly, a long-standing friend in Devon, England.
Wish I could add something witty to this, but I can’t! But it does remind me of the saying, there’s no such thing as error-free software!
P.S. the image is too small to read the copyright notice – anyone help out? It would be good to credit it properly.
By Paul Handover
It’s a funny old world …
Recently I was asked to run a detail lasting 4 hours in an Airbus simulator, for a film crew coming from Australia.
I was told by the training office that this was just operating the instructor panel on the simulator to help them get the information they needed regarding certain situations that would be explained in a television documentary to be aired on a Sunday evening weekly program.
Apparently the various people involved had visited Airbus, and were due to return to Australia for interviews with some of the major airlines operating Airbus aircraft.
I soon gathered that the likely scenario was to be the loss of instrumentation and automation as experienced by an A380 crew recently, and what might have been the case with the A330 lost over the Atlantic.
The introduction to this Post was published yesterday. The rest of this Post is Lex’s words and published with his written permission.
I don’t tell this story very often. Although the events inside it happened almost 12 years ago, the memory is still fresh, and still painful.
Over the years I’ve told it to two ready rooms, both by way of instruction – a kind of “been there, seen that,” in order to prevent anything like it from ever happening again. But it’s not one of those sea stories you tell over a beer, among friends. It’s a sad story. Maybe I post this one. Maybe I don’t.
A theme about flying, pilots and fate.
Many, many pilots whether civil or military or private, have read the book by Ernest K. Gann entitled Fate is the Hunter. Ernest Gann was born a little under a hundred years ago, on October 13th 1910 and died, aged 81, in 1991. He
is known, in the main, as an aviation writer and airline pilot pioneer but achieved much more besides.
Fate is the Hunter is a book about the workings of fate. And this Post is more than a reminder of Ernest Gann’s book and the message it carries, it is also about fate, as Part Two published tomorrow reveals.
Fate or serendipity has happened along to cause a number of recent Posts to be about flying. We had the Post about low-level RAF flight training in North Wales – Mach Loop. Then we had three Posts about air carrier operations prompted by the PBS Series, the first one being published on the 2nd October. Today, circumstance brought me to the Blog of another naval aviator, published by Neptunus Lex. More about him and links to the Blog later.
I want to set the scene by using the words of Ernest K Gann as he starts the preface to his book.
Carrier pilots learn about pitching decks, in the dark!
Yesterday we published the first of two 10 minute videos on YouTube about carrier operations on the USS Nimitz. Here’s the second video. Warning: Once you start watching you won’t be able to stop until the very end!
By Paul Handover
Carrier pilots learn about pitching decks
A fellow author of this Blog, John Lewis, was chatting to me about a whole variety of items surrounding the Blog and future topics, etc. Our conversation strayed into flying and John asked if I had seen the YouTube extracts from the PBS Film about the USS Nimitz. I had not. They are gripping. Here is the first of the 10 minute videos. The second one is here.
A perishable skill? Watch and all will become clear.
By Paul Handover
When the original Post on Barnstorming was published on this Blog on September, 18th, we had an enormous response from viewers and the Post had one of the highest ever figures.
Anyway, the producers have just announced,
Announcing the Houston Premier of Barnstorming October 17! We will be screening the film at the 1940 Air Terminal Museum, Hobby Airport, Houston, Texas. Showtimes are 11:00 am and for the fundraising “Hobby Hangar Hop” in the evening. For more information visit the museum website!
Cool building, by the way.
High speed military aircraft at low level – all in a day’s work.
Most private pilots love to watch the professionals at work, whether it’s in the cockpit of an airliner or fast military jets.
Does this not get the blood stirring?
As the film says, Friends can really drop out of the sky.
The pluses and minuses of skydiving.
This looks great. Cameraman is Paul Lewis.
And here’s that Paul Lewis again. Having a really, really lucky day!
Funny, there is a saying amongst us (amateur) pilots. Why would anyone want to throw themselves out of a perfectly serviceable aeroplane!
Exactly!
By Paul Handover
