Way of the Wing

👨🏼‍✈️ Dave English, Airbus & glider pilot.
✈️ Posting my perpetual pursuit of piloting perfection.

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

#pilotlife #flying #mastery

The best pilots work on improving themselves, not proving themselves.

✈️

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

In a 2013 Plane & Pilot magazine interview, legendary pilot writer Richard Bach said:

“I want there to be an organization called Captain Chicken. The only way you can join is by writing an account of something you decided that you wouldn’t do, even though there were other people who could. I’m so glad I’m a chicken. One of the old maxims of flying is that pilots’ funerals always happened on sunny days. Early aviators would die in the weather, and at their funeral three days later, the storms were gone. They could have waited. So can we.”

What a great idea! We should celebrate those decisions that seemed like chicken at the time, and maybe still do, but we are alive to think about it.

My first flying job — in a time without Google Maps or Waze — was spending 5 hours a day 1,000 feet above rush hour, looking at the traffic. We reported to a bunch of radio startions and a TV show. Competition was tough against other news gathering organizations. We only got paid if we were flying. But motto of the broadcast aviation association applied:

“Better to miss the news at 5, than be the lead on the news at 6.”

Count me as a chicken!

https://t.co/Vvw2IGWtVv

#captainchicken #flying #safety #richardbach

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between work and play; labor and leisure; mind and body; education and recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
Education Through Recreation, 1932.

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

“I’m still learning. It’s a never ending process.”

New Rich Stowell Podcast. Great stick and rudder discussion from a master instructor who has over 35,000 spins in 240 something single-engine airplane types. Forty years of flight instruction yields some valuable insights: https://t.co/IzAAjlTbc0

Questions include which control turns an airplane? What would you change in flight instruction? What have you learned about flight instruction from learning martial arts?

“The checkride is an event. Learning to fly is journey.”

“The learning is in the struggle.”

You can go to https://t.co/ls5qQzGzuz and download a whole bunch of great stuff for free. Lot of actionable stuff to read on a rainy day.

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

#perpetualpursuit #flying #work

I’m going to keep working on flying. It is work. It is a job. I may never really get it right. But I do enjoy it so.

#Hemingway said it better. But his job was writing.

Quoted in Hemingway’s In Our Time: The Biography of a Book, by Michael Reynolds, 1995.

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

“Do everything with a mind that lets go. Do not expect praise or reward.”

~ Ajahn Chah

The picture is AI generated, because I don’t have a Pilot of the Month coffee cup! And what awards I have received over the years, I’ve (mostly) thrown away. #Flying well is the reward.

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

#flying #safety #humanfactors #B737

A lot to think about here. Take the time to read, becasue sometimes taking your time will save your life:

https://t.co/sGzCCzHMlR

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

“Mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it, the impatient can't rush it, the privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.”

Derek Sivers, How to Live​​, 2021.

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

Any advice on flying to the Moon?

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

#studentpilot #perpetualpursuit #flying

“Despite my level of pilot certificates, I consider myself a 47-year student pilot. There is always more to learn.”

Sabrina Kipp, AOPA Pilot magazine March 2024.

https://t.co/KXmIDUsJNa

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

“I hate it if someone calls me a thrillseeker or an adrenaline junkie because I am not. I like the whole planning.”

Felix Baumgartner, before his record-breaking 2012 skydive from the edge of space.

https://t.co/ARL9fyBZGs

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

#perpetualpursuit #flying #testpilot

Looking back on 6000 hours, and, “humbly forward, thinking how much more there is to learn.”

https://t.co/oCcwVdAp71

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

#flying #safety #riskmanagement

“The fundamental thing is you have to figure out an alternative to your problem and be willing to give up on a goal.”

John King. In a great article about 50 years of teaching flying to more people than anyone else ever.

https://t.co/x2Ec8lQPcE

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

“A year from now, you will wish you had started today.”

Karen Lamb

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

“For me, the least appealing side of BASE jumping is the fact that it is dangerous and scary. I hate the feeling of standing on a mountain and being super scared. It’s not about the fear or the danger or the risk. It’s about the love of flying.”

~ Amber Forte, currently ranked the #1 female wingsuiter in the world and holder of the world record for the fastest female in a wingsuit. In the amazing new documentary movie Fly, 2024.

#wingsuit #flying #risk

[Way of the Wing @WayoftheWing]

“As we took to the skies it seemed the aircraft was almost an extension of his body, carving its way over the water and through the air as if it already knew what inputs came next.”

Niki Britton, describing Aaron Singer fly a seaplane over San Francisco. AOPA Pilot magazine, October 2024. It's what good flying looks and feels like.

#flying #onewith #seaplane #AOPA