A personal story about a wonderful flying experience.
This is a tale about my cousin Richard. He has never been a pilot but has always been fascinated in flying. He was reminiscing the other day about an event in a lifetime, flying in a military jet. But this was no ordinary jet, this was the iconic Hawker Hunter.
These are Richard’s words.
It all started early in 2003. Lynne and I decided to take her son Henry and his friend to Tangmere Air Museum.
We were looking around, and were particularly taken by the bright red Hawker Hunter (WB188), in which Neville Duke had broken the world speed record on 7th September 1953, between Littlehampton and Worthing piers.
The curator of the museum was listening to us, and said – ‘Sad, isn’t it, we were hoping to have a 50th anniversary re-run of the flight. We have the aeroplane and the pilot, but nobody will sponsor us the fuel‘.
In the way that Lynne does, she just said ‘That’s alright, Richard will sponsor you the fuel!’
Well, that was all very well, but how much would it cost?
Anyway, to cut a long story short, a cheque for £1,600 ($2,400) was sent to the Hunter Flying Club at Exeter, which was followed by a telephone call from them. Basically, they said they were going to use a 2 seat Hunter, and as I had paid for the fuel, would I like the left hand seat!!!
On the morning of 7th September, I drove to Exeter Airport, and was introduced to the ground crew, and to the pilot Jonathan Whaley, who has his own multi-coloured Hunter ‘Miss Demeanor’, which I am sure you will have seen on the air display circuits.
WV322 looked stunning with newly painted top, tail and fuel tanks in gleaming red to remind us of WB188, which was painted bright red so that it could be easily seen by the timekeepers.
Settling into the LH seat!
After an hours tuition on the use of the ejector seat, the time came to be shoe-horned into the cockpit, and we taxied out. Special permission had been given for us to take-off towards the East, even though the pattern for the day was to the West. This was to save as much fuel as possible, as we had a long way to go!
A very smooth take-off, and a cruise at approx 3000 feet along the south coast to Chichester, followed by a sudden turn to the left and a dive into Goodwood, where the Revival Meeting was taking place. After nearly taking the roof off the Grandstand, a climbing turn and a low pass over Tangmere (where Neville Duke was watching), and on towards Selsea Bill.
Hunter and me!
A sharp left turn, and we were on our way past Littlehampton, and on towards Worthing Pier, where family and friends were waiting.
Well! We passed Worthing Pier at about 400 knots and at 400 feet, immediately going up into a Derry turn and pulling 4G!
It was unbelievable. I remember seeing the sea a few feet above my head, followed by the pebbles on the beach, at which point I thought ‘He’s never going to get round to the end of the pier – he’s going straight across the town!’
Of course, I was wrong, and we made a slower run back past the pier, and Jonathan gave a nice little ‘Wing Waggle’ for the people watching.
Back to Selsea Bill, and Jonathan said to me that he had heard that Neville Duke had actually done three Victory rolls across Tangmere to celebrate. ‘O.K., we’ll do the same‘
Three very sharp rolls later, and he realised he had ‘rolled’ over the wrong greenhouses!. (Tangmere these days is covered in greenhouses). So, three more very tight rolls – this time in the correct place – before a fast run back into Goodwood before a sharp climb and three more rolls – wow! Nine rolls in a matter of seconds!
A turn towards the Solent, and we formated with a Russion Yak, with rear cockpit open, and a photographer giving Jonathan instructions so that he could get a good variety of shots.
YAK - photo platform!
Then, with limited fuel, it was time to go. Imagine how I felt when Jonathan handed me the controls! All my birthdays had come at once!
As we approached Exeter, the weather was closing in. We just had time for Jonathan to play his favourite game – Up over a big cumulus cloud, down the other side, banking hard through a small gap between the clouds.
At this point, I confess that the negative ‘G’ had the cold sweat appearing on my forehead. Then it was back into Exeter and a smooth landing, braking hard before the end of the runway.
‘That’s fine‘ said Jonathan, ‘We’ve still got 7 minutes fuel left‘. Sensing my concern, he added, ‘Don’t worry – You can go a long way in 7 minutes in one of these!!‘
Taxiing back to our stand, followed by being told to keep still while the ‘seat’ was disarmed, and a shaky me made my way down the ladder onto the ground, where I was offered a cup of tea – it was wonderful. The grin on my face stretched from ear to ear.
The total flight was 70 minutes, and it is 70 minutes of my life that I will never forget
Rather than dilute Richard’s account here, I will add another article with some general background information on the Hunter in the next few days.
Elliot was ‘exposed’ to the Learning from Dogs readership on the 22nd March as our first Guest author. He wrote about the US Government and Poverty.
Elliot has one important distinction with respect to the other authors of this Blog; he is the right side of 30 years old!
He is going to use this perspective to reflect on schooling, something that most of us ‘aged’ peeps take for granted, assuming we can remember our school days! 😉
It promises to be a fascinating reflection.
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Setting the scene
I’ve had a plethora of experiences over the past 17 years of my life. I’ve made and lost friends, had romantic
Elliot Engstrom
relationships, read, traveled all around the world, lived in France, and done countless other things that I consider myself immeasurably blessed to have experienced.
Despite the fluidity of where these different experiences have taken me, my entire life since the age of four has had one characteristic in common – I have been a school student.
In the spirit of “Learning from Dogs,” I thought it might be interesting to reflect a bit upon the core dynamic between education (not learning, which is a far broader topic) and schooling.
I often ask myself just how effective the modern US schooling system is as a tool of education, and whether or not its costs outweigh its benefits. I hope to have at least a rough answer to this question in the final post of this series.
In the following three posts, I will examine three topics:
– In what ways does the modern schooling system function as a positive tool for education?
– What costs involved in modern schooling hinder its ability as an educative tool, and even make it a negative influence on students?
– Considering the analyses put forth in the first two posts, do the costs or benefits or this system outweigh the other? On the whole, are school and education complements or antagonists?
This series is going to be exciting for me because, to be quite frank, I have no idea what my final answer is going to be. I guess I’ll just have to stay tuned to see where my brain takes me – and so for you!
On the 22nd March, Learning from Dogs had the pleasure of a Post from our first Guest Author, Elliot Engstrom. We are doubly delighted to have Per Kurowski join us as our second Guest Author.
Per Kurowski
Per is a prolific blogger. He has had a full career including serving as an Executive Director of the World Bank from 2002 until 2004 for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Spain and Venezuela. More about Per’s life experiences can be found here.
Here is Per’s first Guest Post for Learning from Dogs.
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The GPS and the AAAs
Not so long ago I asked my daughter to key in an address in the GPS and then even while I continuously heard a little voice inside me telling me I was heading in the wrong direction I ended up where I did not want to go.
Whither we are led?
Something similar caused the current financial crisis.
First the financial regulators in Basel decided that the only thing they would care about was the risk of individual financial defaults and not one iota about any other risks.
Second then, though they must have known these were humanly fallible they still empowered some few credit rating agencies to be their GPS on default risks.
Finally, by means of the minimum capital requirements for banks, they set up all the incentives possible to force them to heed what the GPS said and to ignore any internal warning voices.
Of course, almost like if planned on purpose, it all ended up in a crisis. In just a couple of years, over two trillion dollars followed some AAA signs over the precipice of badly awarded mortgages to the subprime sector. Today, we are still using the same financial risk GPS with the same keyed in instructions… and not a word about it in all recent Financial Regulatory Reform proposals
I hate the GPS type guidance of any system since I am convinced that any kid brought up with it will have no clue of what north, south, east or west means; just as the banker not knowing his client’s business or how to look into his client’s eyes or how to feel the firmness of his client’s handshake, can only end up stupidly following someone else’s opinion about his client on a stupid monitor.
I hate the GPS type guidance system because, on the margin, it is making our society more stupid as exemplified by how society, day by day, seems to be giving more importance to some opaque credit scores than to the school grades of their children. I wait in horror for some DNA health rating scores to appear and cause a total breakdown of civilization as we know it.
Yes, we are buried under massive loads of information and these systems are a tempting way of trying to make some sense out of it all, but, if we used them, at least we owe it to ourselves to concentrate all our efforts in developing our capacity to question and to respond adequately when our instincts tell us we’re heading in the wrong way.
Not all is lost though. I often order the GPS in my car to instruct me in different tongues so as to learn new languages, it gives a totally new meaning to “lost in translation”, and I eagerly await a GPS system that can describe the surroundings in more extensive terms than right or left, AAA or BBB-, since that way not only would I get more out of it but, more importantly, I would also be more inclined to talk-back.
The winter can seems very long when the temperature remains extremely cold and the news headlines show dramatic pictures of villages completely cut off by drifting snow. And the old debate about cold weather payments for pensioners comes around once again.
We are often still able to enjoy time in our garden well into October, but the weeks that follow up to March can be very long and drawn out. Then comes my favourite flower, The Snowdrop.
Snowdrops
There are several different types of this beautiful little plant, and in the county of Hampshire in England [where Bob and his family live, Ed.], in particular there seem to be clumps of this special white flower everywhere.
Heale House
However the other day I was able to see a complete field of them in the grounds of Heale House, a private residence owned by Patrick Hickman,an ex Lancaster pilot, now 89, who is still very active and keeping his yew bushes well trimmed in the art of topiary.
Heale House is open at this time of year for people to visit the lovely gardens and again enjoy the snowdrops.
Spring has arrived, but it is the first flower that is my favourite!
The Celebrity Eclipse has recently left her construction dockyard at Papenburg, Germany bound for her home base. This enormous new ship attracted some news simply because the exercise of getting her from the dockyard to the open sea required some ‘shoe-horning’! This YouTube video shows why (amateur filming but a great soundtrack!):
The Celebrity Solstice leaving the dockyard (backwards!) at Papenburg
All would wish any ship that sets out to sea safe travel. But one wonders whether this huge ship, that must require such huge sums of money just to stay afloat, and that must have been conceived and ordered when times were much rosier, will ever be a commercial success?
Wikipedia have an interesting, and well referenced, entry on Air Safety. Within that entry is a table showing comparing deaths by air to other forms of travel.
The table in Wikipedia is much easier to read, it’s here, but the data is shown below for those that do not want to click through.
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There are three main statistics which may be used to compare the safety of various forms of travel:
It is worth noting that the air industry’s insurers base their calculations on the number of deaths per journey statistic while the industry itself generally uses the number of deaths per kilometre statistic in press releases.
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Interesting to see how air travel varies in terms of comparative safety depending on how it is measured. But also interesting to see that however it is measured, riding a motorbike doesn’t come out so well.
Finally, that word’ billion’ is too easy to throw away, as it were. A billion hours ago was over a 114,000 years ago – when mankind was living in the Stone Age. A billion kilometres would represent 114,285 trips between London and Los Angeles.
To publicly comment on the singular importance of the Iraqi elections without crediting President Bush for having the courage and fortitude to free those people from a tyrannical leader who threatened the security of the free world – shameful.
Of course, you also failed to acknowledge President Bush’s role in enabling the historic Afghanistan elections of 2009. I just hoped you would have matured a little since then.
The media is not doing much better on this issue. But then we expect less of our media than our President.
An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class.
That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan“. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A…
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
What has become very clear to me, after watching the U.S. Health Care Summit between Democrats and Republicans as objectively as possible, is that the President’s goal was not to craft a thoughtful approach to shoring up and improving the U.S. health care system.
Pres. Obama making one of many points at Healthcare Summit
No, the reason for the President and the Democratic leadership to convene the so-called summit was to grandstand; to make a show; to create a photo opportunity; and, most importantly, to try to garner enough support from the Democrats in Congress to ram through the Reconciliation option on the behemoth, disastrous 2000-plus page version of the bill, filled with incomprehensible, internally conflicting doublespeak.
A sad day for American politics. A very sad day for American citizens. We deserve better.
Even in the midst of great pain, we must think through our choices
The last week has been really mad. I have been working in different companies and organisations and having to be part of redundancies, power struggles and people rebuilding their lives.
For example, I was in a company that had just let its second lot of people go in as many months. It’s gone past losing ‘dead wood’ and now people with valuable skills needed for recovery are going. I’ve noticed previously that good, employable people with key skills start to get concerned and will often take voluntary redundancy rather than hanging around to see how things pan out.
End of job!
It’s the shocking way that it’s done as well that’s unbelievable. No warning, just a phone call to attend a meeting, no hint as to what the meeting is about, then an envelope slid across the table and then a rapid escort off site. All done and dusted in 5 minutes.
Having been through this myself some years ago, it’s not something you forget in a hurry. Lots of feelings of rejection and feeling unvalued and unwanted are what I remember. Perhaps its part of being bought up in a job-for-life culture and then having that illusion shattered.
Working with people in this situation is literally quite shocking and traumatic because it clearly affects them and their lives and the lives of their families, and it affects me because the work we started comes to an abrupt end usually with little or no warning, and so does a source of income to be brutally honest. I don’t even have chance to say good-bye in many cases.
Every Thursday I become a trainee psychotherapist and work with people who mostly struggle to hold down any sort of job. The reasons for this are generally because of upbringings that are awful beyond description. The shock and trauma that is in the air when working with these people is amazing, and so scary for them that the idea of being present in the room with me and is virtually impossible.
So that brings us to managing in a world where lots of mad and non-integrous things happen. I believe that mindfulness can provide a key to these situations; being present for another does more than any instruction manual!
Being present means we make ourselves available at many levels to someone who is suffering. By avoiding the subtle invitation to join someone in their shock and trauma but by being there for them, to the best of our ability and listening to them at depth, we can provide an environment where real reflection can take place. Then options may be chosen which are not born of panic and reaction but come from reflection and response.
I believe that this approach gets us out of the ‘noise machine in our heads‘ (that is forever churning and worrying, in my case) that we have no control over, and creates space for more subtle things to come through the quiet and calm.
Most people I’ve met in my engineering work like to assume that they think their way out of tight situations but I’m not convinced that this process is actually effective. I have heard and practised many times the activity of ‘sleeping on something’ and then being able to decide on a course of action the following morning with relative ease. My psychotherapy clients can’t think their way out the awfulness because thinking about things has got them into a spiral
Albert Einstein
process which is highly addictive, predictable and virtually impossible to break without the intervention of a higher level of awareness. I think it was Einstein who said something like, “you can’t use the same intelligence that created a problem to solve it“! In other words, a different approach or level must be used.
I believe that this different approach or level can be used to solve most problems we have. By bringing a different level of awareness to a challenge, whether it is redundancy or some other sort of deeper problem always gives different results and provides more options. It’s just that initially it needs to be facilitated, until we can do it under our own steam. I am heartened that even in the depths of a recession that there are still companies out there that support this approach and the work I do.
By Jon Lavin [This article from the BBC is worth reading in conjunction with Jon’s excellent Post. Jon may be contacted via learningfromdogs (at) gmail (dot) com]
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