Tests – vs – Talk

Builders,

You can go on any internet or social media site, attend any EAA meeting or hang around any small airport, and without fail, people will present “Information” as if it was the data from a scientific test they were qualified to, and personally ran themselves.

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Some of these people, perhaps the majority, are just repeating things they honestly believe to be ‘true’.  This is the idea I was speaking of here: Thought for the Day: Opinions based solely on Opinions. This is considered ‘harmless’, but three decades of working in aviation trying to share actual data with builders has taught me that disinformation, even from well meaning people isn’t harmless.

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You can’t do anything about this, it is now cooked into our national character. The country has been indoctrinated into an entitlement mentality, where the majority believe they are not obligated to read data or listen to logic which they emotionally don’t want to hear.

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You can’t fix this, it was done by consumer forces of great power and insidious method. It works on the eternally effective principal of telling people what they want to hear. The only thing you can do is decide for yourself that you will not give in to it. As far as your aviation hours are concerned, It is my strongest suggestion that you seek out real information and the company of people who prefer it. At the same time, give a wide berth to the dispensers of old wives tales and situational truths. Aviation is too expensive, to risky and too important to engage in it, only armed with the observations of the blind and the logic of the clueless. Your life is worth more than that.

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Remember this phrase of mine:

 “Talk is cheap, testing costs money, and being ignorant costs a fortune.-ww.”

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Above: Actual Testing. When I write about Corvair ignitions, it is from personal testing. This is a picture taken a month ago in my workshop. This is a pile of ignition components I have tested in the last six months. These are the systems which didn’t work as well as we need them to. You are looking at $1,000 in parts and maybe 200 hours of work. When anyone tells you their ‘fact’ about homebuilding, understand the difference between an opinion and a real fact, is testing. 

The next time someone tells you an aviation ‘fact’ as if they know it to be true, as them when they personally conducted this test, or which printed manual, about the specific subject they retrieved the data from. 95% of them will have no personal first hand experience with what they are speaking of, at best they will offer you something they saw years ago with a different brand of airframe and power plant. If you want to accomplish something in aviation, particularly find out how much you can learn not how little, avoid such people, it only delays you from discovering people who know what they are speaking of.

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ww.

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