“There is a word for being really sure you are on the right path and willfully ignoring the advice of others who suggest course corrections, it is Hubris.
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I am not particularly religious, but one can get a look at the Old Testament to see some fine examples of how the Universe is said to ‘reward’ people who suffer from hubris. I have never seen anyone turned into a pillar of salt, but I have seen unpleasant things happen to people who never stopped to think that they might be wrong about what they are doing in aviation.
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People who really know me, understand that on the outside I am willing to share with confidence what we have long proven in flight to be true. But when it comes to new and unknown, I approach with great caution, and always asking myself the quiet inner question “What am I missing about this?” It is the only path to improvement in aviation that I have consistently seen rewarded. Hubris almost always ends up elsewhere.
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-ww.
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Above a 11 year old photo from our Edgewater hangar. Our 601XL sits behind our newly built torque reactive dynamometer. From the 2004 caption: “Its operation is very simple. Everything seen in blue rotates on the crankshaft’s axis. If you look closely, you can see that the bearing is the front spindle, hub and wheel removed from a late model Corvair. The bed type mount is slung low so that the crankshaft centerline lines up exactly with the spindle. The reinforcements below the engine contact a bearing at the bottom of the stand for additional support. This is a Corvair blower bearing rolling sideways on a steel plate. It effectively has no drag. Below the spindle is the mounting point for the hydraulic cylinder. The green oxygen bottle has been converted to a gravity feed fuel tank on the test stand.”
