Category: Philosophy

Friends,

When people arrive in the land of Corvairs, they are looking forward to learning a lot of things about the engine. I have a lot to share on the subject, but I do try to share some other things I have learned from many other aviators along the way. When you’re new to homebuilding, people often think of the mechanical things that they need to learn, but over time I understood that many of the most important things you can understand in aviation fall into the categories of judgement, philosophy, and the human condition. These are the hidden truths of flying. Popular magazines never touch these subjects either because the staffs don’t know them, or they would have a hard time tying them into sales of their advertisers’ products. Here, I am restricted by neither of these issues. I am free to share things that other people taught me, things that often came at considerable cost.

Let me share something it took me many years immersed in aviation to learn: One of the most common human reactions to an accident or something going very wrong is an observer saying or thinking “If only someone had told him….This could have been avoided.” People new to aviation often have fears that they may not be told something in their training or building that would put them in such a bad position later. Experience has taught me that this concern is unfounded. In almost every one of the bad situations that I can draw to mind, it was not the omission of important data that caused the problem. In almost every case, the unfortunate person at the center had been told, often previously warned more than once, but they chose to ignore the warnings or discount them for reasons that frequently seem hard to remember after the damage is done. It is not the lack of information, but the willful choice to ignore it that is at the root of trouble.

You can’t reach some people, and it isn’t your purpose in aviation to do so. That isn’t the focus here. What I would like to bring to your recognition is that you need to observe your own information reception from a third-party perspective. You can’t help people who don’t want to listen, but you can make sure that you are receptive to valid information, especially from people with specific experience, when it is delivered.

In the course of my work I frequently have to tell people when something in their plane or the operation of it is a bad idea. We are not just talking about points of style, we are speaking of things that I know will not work or are specifically dangerous.  Close observation has taught me that 50% of the people hearing what I have to say are developing a rebuttal or a defense before I get to the end of my second sentence. This isn’t a productive way to respond. I don’t mind any question, and I am prepared to explain at length. But many times the things I have to say are received by a person with their arms folded and an explanation that cites some local expert, a guy on the Net, or their Tech Counselor. If we were speaking of pickup trucks, sailboats or snowmobiles, you could understand people just wanting to be left alone to do it their way. Aviation has different consequences but often generates the same response to differing opinion, even when it comes from people with very specific experience. If you are new to homebuilding and even yet to solo a plane, I can say with confidence that you will do well, just as long as you are always ready to listen to experienced people who are trying to teach you important stuff.

Would more people listen if I wrote it in shorter sentences? The Manual says “never fly any aircraft you even suspect may detonate.” A month ago I got an e-mail acknowledging this sentence and then asking if “some detonation during routine leaning to save fuel was ok?” I have said in countless places that you must have a cooling shroud on every engine during a ground run, yet you can see people going without it on YouTube for 6 minute videos. There is a big difference between honest errors and people who are trying to develop a rationalization for why they don’t have to follow anything I want to share. I have been working with Corvairs for a long time and I can say that people who read information, ask questions, develop their understanding and accept proven concepts are successful at a rate many times higher than people who treat their engine build with the same respect for directions that people reserve for the ones that come with particle board shelf units from Wal-Mart. Would people listen more if I told them that in 1/3 of the cases of people damaging or destroying Corvair powered planes, they were doing something that I had previously specifically asked the builder not to do in person or on the phone? Maybe a specific example is worth considering…..

Here’s a true story: Several years ago I am in my shop and  working on distributors at nine o’clock at night. I get a telephone call from one of our successful builders (we will call him  guy “A”) who has approximately 150 hours on his flying plane. He tells me that the next day his plan is to take another pilot flying (guy “B”), and give him a check out in his plane. To do this, he will be flying his own airplane from the right seat for the first time ever. Like his plane, guy A has 150 hours.  Guy B is an experienced aviator who has not flown in a number of years.  The last flight guy B had been on was as a passenger, and it ended in a crash which killed the PIC. Guy B was understandably nervous about going flying again.

Upon hearing the plan, I tell guy A that this is the luckiest phone call he will ever make in his life. I flat-out tell him that I understand the good Samaritan motivation, but what he is thinking of doing is not just a bad idea, it’s insane.  If you’re new to flying, here’s why: Flying a plane from the right seat is a normal skill that any pilot can learn, however it is always done with a real flight instructor in the other seat, who can anticipate and catch any transition mistake on landing.  Second, people who have just been involved with an accident are very likely to flinch or freeze when confronting pressure, especially if they are in the same model of plane, or if it were a fatal accident, or both. I told him that likely the flight would go fairly well, but that guy B might have a serious problem close to the ground. The second part was a personal insight from being a crash survivor myself. We spent an hour on the phone and he offered his sincere thanks for my very serious and direct language.

Does my approach sound like sticking my nose into other people’s business? Did I really need to come down on a guy who is just being kind to another builder? Think I was a little paranoid? I mean after all, we are all equals in this world, and the guy sounds like he was going to be careful, besides, you can’t listen to all of the long stories that guy William writes anyway….

48 hours later, I am back on the phone with guy A. His aircraft is destroyed. He had heard me, but the next day had changed his mind, perhaps it seemed that I was blowing the whole potential of a problem up unrealistically. What really gets him is that he tells me that it happened just like I said. Guy B was rough but OK most of the flight, but when he came in for a landing he leveled off about 15 feet above the runway and froze. When guy A said something, guy B just pushed the stick forward and flew the plane into the runway. Neither were seriously hurt, but a plans built plane that took years to build was destroyed. There was no insurance. Guy A who should have had 3 or 4 more decades of flying is soured enough that he exits flying for good.  People who were at the airport who heard who was flying in which seat and the experience level probably thought “If only someone had told him….. “

Postscript: I got on the phone with guy B, who I considered a good guy and a friend. He explained that he was not going flying anymore. He has in his 70’s, and he was now going to hang it up. When I asked, he said that other than the last two flights, flying had been good to him. He was going to sell his home-built, which had only one flight on it. He mentioned that he was concerned about liability as a builder. I made the forward suggestion that he sell off all the avionics and the firewall forward, and turn in the N-number to the FAA and list the aircraft as destroyed. He could then give the airframe to guy A as a gesture of apology, one without liability.  Then guy A, a person who had proven he was a good apple, would back into a position to have  the same shot at a few decades of flight, just like guy B had. I really meant it when I told guy B that it was a real chance to salvage something good, and that he would end his own flying days with a noble act that would stir the heart of anyone who loved aviation. I told him that most people in aviation  pass through it without notice. Some are remembered in a negative context, But the ones how are cherished by the people who love aviation are the ones who chose to do something redemptive, something for the next man. At the moment we were on the phone, I was sure that he was going to do it. But he later changed his mind just as guy A had three weeks earlier. The incident didn’t change my feelings about either guy, but I did come away from it having to admit that I have a very limited ability to communicate with people who are of other mindsets. I sought a mixture of solace and understanding by drinking a few beers and re-reading, Speaking of Courage, a chapter in Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried.  Norman, the central character in the chapter is destroyed by his inability to find anyone to listen to a bitter truth he knows.-ww

(If you are one of the handful of people who after reading the story might know the identity of the two people above, I ask that you keep it to yourself, mentioning it to anyone will serve no valid purpose. Just take the lesson with you and leave the names behind.)

Friends,

I wrote this piece about my Father in December of 2009. It originally appeared on our main Web page, FlyCorvair.com. If you have joined the Corvair movement since then, please take a few minutes to read the story.  Every good quality I may have is directly attributable to my parents. On this Father’s Day I share this story because my Father remains the hero of my life.

Many people in the Corvair movement have had a chance to meet the real William Wynne (Dad) at airshows or one of the 5 Corvair Colleges he has been to. Just today, Steve Glover called from California to fill me in on the Golden West Fly in. The first thing Steve shared was that he spent some time speaking with an aviator who knew my father in Vietnam. Dad has to take things a little slower these days, but we are working to have him at CC #24 in Barnwell, S.C., in November.  I hope that everyone has a chance to spend some time with family on Father’s Day this year, and take a moment to consider the men who made us who we are today.-ww

This week marks the 84th Birthday of my Father, William Wynne Sr. To commemorate the day, we share three photos from the family archives. Above, on the left, my Father stands in the rubble of the AT&T building in downtown Seoul, Korea, in 1952. At the time, my Father was a company commander with ACB-ONE, a U.S. Navy Seabee battalion which landed at Inchon. The South Korean capitol is less than 50 miles from the border with the North. It began to resemble Leningrad because it changed hands several times during the War. In 1974, my family toured South Korea, and it was a bright, thriving country, without an external trace of the conflict it had survived. Its vibrant character was a testimony to its people.

George Orwell was thinking of Stalinist Russia when he wrote 1984. Seven decades later, I think North Korea is actually the country that bears the greatest likeness to 1984. Kim Il Sung really is “Big Brother,” and just about every facet of the book is a fair description of life in the North. The North Koreans live under a maniacal regime that controls every detail of life, squandering its meager wealth on nuclear weapons and missiles while its people starve in the cold. In utter contrast, the South Koreans live in a society with a first world standard of living and freedom undreamed of by their Northern brothers. The Koreans suffered horrific losses during the War, and their dead were joined by 38,000 Americans whose sacrifices prevented the North from enslaving the South in their nightmare.

My Father’s 33 years in uniform were guided by a single principal: No human being, regardless of race, faith or nationality, deserves to live in a totalitarian police state. While most people would agree with this, my Father is one of the men who care if this is happening to families on the other side of the globe, even if they are not Christians, don’t speak English and don’t have anything America needs. Just being a human trying to raise a family in peace is enough. My Father is a realist who understands that the last resort will always be free men with weapons meeting the totalitarians in battle. Since he joined the U.S. Navy at age 17, he has been willing to be one of these men. Yet my Father did not fight with just the tools of war. He felt that ending a violent communist insurgency in Northern Thailand in 1972 was a major triumph. His “weapon” that gained the loyalty of the Hill Tribes was providing medical care for their families.

Most Americans of a certain age can recall some of President Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” These were not mere words to men of my Father’s profession, it was a cause to pledge your very life to. My Father did not care if the poor of the world chose collective farming or workers wanted social reforms. He just recognized that political systems that don’t value individuals always degenerate to Gestapos, concentration camps, gulags and mass graves. My Father fought to stop the spread of these things.

In the china cabinet of my parents home in New Jersey sits an engraved brass plate. It was given to my Father in 1974 by Commodore Vong Sarendy, Chief of Naval Operations for the Khmer (Cambodian) Navy, to thank my Father for his efforts to thwart the communists in Cambodia. Before his acceptance speech, my Father was warned by the U.S. State Department that he could not promise further aid. It had only been 13 years since we promised to “pay any price,” but Washington had changed. The Commodore bitterly understood this, and told my Father that the Americans could go home, but he and his family would fight to the death. They did. Within a year, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge controlled the country and exterminated several million people. Being able to read and write was cause for being sent to the killing fields. I love my country, but holding that brass plate in your hands, it is easy to understand that our two biggest flaws are a short national memory and the fact that the average American has no idea what the term “totalitarian police state” means. People who have never read A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich think you can understand what cold is by watching the Weather Channel; people afraid of the dentist glibly discuss torture in foreign places; TV commentators call each other Nazis over pathetic small differences while a tiny group of elderly Americans with small numbers tattooed on their forearms know the real definition of the word.

In the above photo, my Father stands with my brother Michael and sister Melissa in front of the world’s first atomic power station, Shippingport, Pennsylvania. The photo is from 1959. The reactor was tha same design that the U.S. Navy used in its ships and submarines. My Father was the project officer working directly under Admiral Hyman Rickover. My Father has been a stalwart proponent of nuclear power for the past 60 years. It was a very different time in America when a town was proud to be chosen for such a project of national importance.

After retiring from the Navy in 1976, my Father went to work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The project was the world’s first fusion reactor. Few people in the general public understood the potential of fusion to produce unfathomable power without generating radioactive waste. After Three Mile Island, the public turned against atomic power of all types, and the country blindly went back to building coal and oil-fired powerplants. Many of the anti-nuke protesters of 1979 are now climate change activists, missing the role they played in the U.S. staying dependent on fossil fuels that are at the forefront of the climate debate. If you have ever wondered how France, a country of 60 million people with no hydro power, nor coal or oil reserves, can afford to be a tireless critic of U.S. Middle East policy, the answer is simple: Virtually all of the electricity produced in France is generated in nuclear plants.

By far, the greatest joy of my Father’s life has been being married to my Mother for 59 years. The above photo was taken circa 1949. They met at the New Jersey Shore just after World War II. Throughout my entire adult life, whenever I encounter anyone in difficult straights or a terrible position, my first thought is always “without the luck of being born to my parents, that could be me.” It is not possible to overstate the positive role my parents have played in any qualities of character I have. In this Holiday Season, I have a multitude of things to be thankful for, but this always is first on my list.

“Real freedom is the sustained act of being an individual.” WW – 2009

Friends,

Below is a story about an aviator that I always think about on Father’s Day.  Sijan’s name and story are well-known to many aviators, particularly people who served in the USAF.  However, there is one small part of the story that always comes back to me on Father’s Day.

If you have not heard of him, take a few minutes to read his story on Wikipedia at this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Sijan  It is a small introduction to the life of a man who had willpower and bravery seen in perhaps one out of a million people.

In the past 20 years I have passed through Mitchell airport in Milwaukee many times. Without fail, I always go to the little museum upstairs. There is a lot of good aviation stuff in there, but I go in to look at only one thing. In the back there is a small glass case with a few items from Lance Sijan.  Milwaukee was his hometown, and someone carefully and lovingly put together this small case to house a few things from his brief life.

I would like to tell you that I find Sijan’s story inspirational, and that returning time and again to the glass case is uplifting, but I don’t feel that way. For reasons that are difficult to explain, I have the profound feeling that I could understand something very fundamental about the value of human life if I just looked close enough with an open mind and heart. To me Lance Sijan was the human embodiment of pure, un-alloyed courage. When I was much younger, I thought mostly of his heroic actions, but I came to understand that his death was a tragic loss, not just for our country, or the USAF, or his fellow airmen, but particularly for his family. This change in perspective came from reading the memoirs of the two airmen who were present on Sijan’s last day.

Guy Gruters and Robert Craner did everything they could to care for Sijan in the Hanoi Hilton as his life ebbed away from the beatings, torture and neglect he suffered from the North Vietnamese.  While every POW who encountered Sijan spoke of his fearless resistance to his captors, only these two men were present to hear the last words that Lance Sijan said.  Both men stated that Lance lapsed in and out of consciousness all day while they cradled his head. In his last hours he came to just once and clearly said: “Oh God,  it’s over…. Dad, I need you.” 

This single sentence humanized Lance Sijan. Prior to knowing this, it had been much easier, and frankly convenient for me to think of him as a super human hero.  Putting people in such a category insulates us from having to really consider their suffering and courage.  Coming to understand Lance Sijan as a human being, understanding that he had the same  loves and fears as all of us, and that he had no special immunity, forces us to contemplate his real suffering, and the courage that it took to never give in to his captors. He was not granted heroic qualities at birth, he was made of the same material as the rest of us. What made him a real hero is the courage he was able to summon and the willpower he brought to bear.

In the past 20 years, I have not passed a single Father’s Day without thinking about the last words of Lance Sijan.  I think they are the most profound expression of the bond between fathers and sons.  Many sons, even ones of incredible courage,  have wished only for the presence of their Father when they reach the limits of human endurance.  What allows some sons to exercise indomitable will and pure courage? Where do such people come from? I have looked into the little case in Milwaukee many times over the years, but I have never found an answer. It remains a mystery, and I can only offer my humble awe at the courage  of a son who died with a last wish to be with his Dad, 44 Father’s Days ago.

Lance Sijan’s parents at his grave. I found this photo in a Serbian newspaper. His family roots were from Serbia, and to this day he is regarded as a heroic figure there. His father Sylvester  died Friday, September 9, 2011, age 92 years. – He outlived his son by 43 years.

Friends,

My Friend Arnold is well-known to many of the people in the Corvair movement. He hosted the enormously popular Corvair College#17, he has attended many others, and was one of our earliest contributors to the movement. If you look at the first pages of our conversion manual, Arnold is in the photo with us and our Pietenpol at Brodhead 2000. We had just flown it up from Florida.

Arnold’s experience in aviation is diverse, his talents are many. A skilled pilot and an IA, he knows traditional construction, but is well-known in the high-end composite industry, having worked for outfits like Legend and Adam Aircraft. He is addressed by the moniker “The Repair,” as in “Get me The Repair!”, because he once fixed a Lancair IVP that had its tail completely severed by a helicopter which ended up embedded in the top of the cabin in a ground collision. The project was delivered ahead of schedule and on budget.

Today his shop, AvMech, specializes in high-end GA aircraft maintenance, but he still is heavily involved in working class EAA stuff, he has revived his local chapter into a hard-core building group and he regularly flies his 1,000 hour VariEze, including taking it to Oshkosh last year with his son Cody. I have been close friends with Arnold for 18 years. We don’t agree on every small point, but he is always worth hearing out. Above all else, we both agree that the day belongs to the man In The Arena, not the critic on the sidelines.-ww

Corvair College #17 host Arnold Holmes and his son Cody at Oshkosh 2010

From Arnold Holmes:

I believe that airplanes for lower economic situations already exist. They are commonly referred to as “Plans built”. Although there is no doubt that various economic factors plague the ability for blue-collar people to own aircraft, it is not a complete deterrent. I often think that other factors for owning aircraft are often overlooked. For instance, our society has generally been conditioned for “instant gratification” and as such we have left much of our hands-on craftsmanship behind for the ease of assembling a kit. Granted that kits still require craftsmanship, but when purchasing a kit you are trading your time for money.

Second, I tend to think that our own success as an organization (EAA) is also our biggest failure. If you look at Sport Aviation Magazine from the 1960′s/70′s and even deep into the ’80′s you will find a treasure trove of new/one-off designs that often times were built by people who had no engineering degree. Sport Aviation Magazine was full of this stuff every month. As you pointed out in your post, J Mac started out doing a story about a TBM (not the Avenger by the way). Complete garbage for our publication and the membership should have taken the editors to task for such tripe.

Back to the point however, the failure in our success is really that we progressively featured only the very best award winners and show planes in the magazine. I think that over the years this has cultivated a common ideology that if you did not build an award winner than you are not worthy of building anything. People have come to believe that the requirements for success are so high that the ideology itself is defeating.

Now don’t think that I advocate doing poor work or skirting safety because I don’t; however I do believe that people get so caught up in trying to be the next OSH Grand Champion that they never finish their project. In addition, sport aviation as a recreational activity has become big business. How often do we think of something that we need and instead of saying “how can I build that” we instead pull out the Aircraft Spruce Catalog or call Van’s Aircraft and use the credit card for instant gratification. This drives the cost up way beyond where it should be. I am as guilty as anybody for this kind of stuff but I try to design and build as much of my own stuff as I can.

I think that it is mostly hopeful wishing to think that some “company” of any size is going to produce a low-cost airplane for the low-cost market. Why? Economy of scale might be a good way of looking at it. Despite simple airplanes being simple, there is only so much cheap you can design in and there is only so much cheap that you can run a company on. People and vendors need to be paid fair wages if they plan to stay in business and these things alone drive the cost up significantly. The sailboats you mentioned sold 30,000 copies; at that scale you have some financial cash flow and resources to work with. A cheap airplane may sell a few thousand copies if they are lucky; when you look at total investment, cash flow issues, vendors and materials (and insurance!!) it’s simply not possible to make an airplane in today’s market that cost what a sailboat or nice car costs. Assuming that sailboats and nice cars are within the reach of blue-collar society. This of course negates the ongoing cost of owning an airplane.

Now I still believe however that a nice one or two place airplane is within the reach of the common man. The common man however has to have his expectations recalibrated. Common man needs to set aside fancy kits, splashy avionics and powerful engines if he wishes to fly. Common man needs to go back and learn how to cut tubing and learn to weld with a gas welder, no need for an expensive TIG machine. Common man needs to curl up with a nice EAA book on woodworking, if they still sell such a thing. Common man must realize that his airplane will take a number of years because he will build it from scratch, one piece at a time, stick by stick and weld by weld (or layup by layup if you’re so inclined).

This return to the old ways is how common man will have his airplane. Yesterday I was asked to service a dead battery on a new Communist built airplane. As I poked around the plane becoming acquainted with its merits I quickly come to the conclusion that it was built using the same general engineering and manufacturing methodology as the Thorp T-18. Only this Communist airplane cost about $100,000 dollars more than the nicest T-18 you could ever find. Commie airplane flies 40 kts slower and is ugly as hell and is not rated for any aerobatics. Incidentally the cost of this airplane recently floated upward some 40% from its introductory cost. Now if the largest GA manufacturing company on the planet using Commie labor cannot produce anything cheaper than $150K and having a simple sheet metal construction that any homebuilder could replicate, how would it be possible for a small startup to pull it off. I know, I know there are several angles to that argument and I look forward to your rebuttal.

Arnold Holmes
A&P 2712249 IA
Av-Mech LLC
EAA Chap 534 Pres.

  

In a 2006 photo, Arnold Holmes and I stand behind the engine installation on a V-8 powered Lancair IV-P. This is an EngineAir package that I helped develop from 1993 to ’98. It’s 450hp, geared, injected, intercooled and turboed, and featured air conditioning and pressurization. This is complication. Eventually, about a dozen of these took to the air. They were stunning performers. I flew from Oshkosh to Daytona Beach in three hours and five minutes in our first airplane, cruising at 29,000′. The development of this engine took the work of many clever, dedicated people, and one guy with cubic yards of money, Jim Rahm. It worked, but taught me that homebuilders at all levels tremendously underestimate the effects of complication, primarily its delays and expenses. Whenever I read discussions about electronic injection or computer controlled engines, I can tell in an instant who has no practical experience with attempting to prepare these systems for flight. Get a good look at the size of the 5-blade MT propeller. Both Arnold and I have spent a lot of time working on projects that cover the full spectrum of experimental aviation, but after two decades, we both understand that getting the working man a place In The Arena is far more challenging and important than high-end products.-ww

Friends,

The previous post on affordable aircraft and why they matter in aviation sparked a lot of email and a number of calls. Not everyone saw it the same way, but just about everyone had a different facet of the same issue to illuminate. As always, all thought out perspectives are welcome.

To further illuminate my line of thinking, let us look at the same issue from a different passion, sailing.  Looking from the outside, many people think of sailing as some type of elitist activity, but I can make a good case that it is as American as Baseball or Jazz, and there is a longstanding connection between sailing and flying where many people are heavily into both. I grew up in a Navy family, and we all know how to sail. As a young teenager in 1970s Hawaii, it was the first real taste of doing something adventurous without my parents to protect me. Being 13 and sailing a Rhoads 19 out of the mouth of Hickam harbor by yourself is something like soloing a plane for the first time.

The same way that Americans came to be at the forefront of much of aviation between the Wright Brothers and Neil Armstrong, American competitive sailing came into its own at the same time. The absolute measure of this was the America’s Cup, which the U.S. held onto for more than 125 years, beating challengers from around the world.

Now, let’s just look at the 1960s.  Sparkman and Stevens produced a 12 meter boat named the Intrepid that was unbeatable for much of the decade. It was the first boat that had a shot of winning three America’s Cup defenses. It is a magnificent design, the finest sailboat in the world, so expensive that its construction and campaigning was financed by a syndicate of wealthy philanthropists. If you have a top down view of sailing or anything else, including aviation, you would conclude that the Intrepid was the single most important sailboat of its era, and worthy of all the praise and attention that could be given to it. In a moment I will turn this upside down and explain why this is wrong, and to solely focus on the Intrepid would have been destructive to sailing. Two other boats from the 1960s turned out to be massively more important to the long-term health of sailing.

In my previous post, my central point is that the aviation industry, particularly the journalistic side of it, spends all of its time applauding and promoting the most expensive planes and products. I hold that the net effect of this is a three-phase process: Few entrepreneurs are motivated to develop and market low-cost products; with the bottom rung on the ladder getting ever higher, working class guys are getting fewer options; an ever greater percentage of people who love planes feel that being a spectator is the role that they are economically restricted to playing. Many people think that these results are acceptable. I do not.

The two sailboats from the 1960s that were far more important than the Intrepid were the Hobie Cat and the Alcort Sunfish. Previous to these two boats, very few designs were produced in quantities over 500. Between the Hobie Cat and the Sunfish, production went over 300,000 boats. And crucially, both of these boats were inexpensive enough for regular working families to afford. Understand that without affordable boats, the Intrepid could only produce spectators. Hobie Cats and Sunfish produced Sailors. Because of the development of two inexpensive boats, sailing experienced an explosive growth in the 1960s and ’70s. At that point, the U.S. had already held the Cup for 100 years. Obviously, being in possession of cost-is-no-object world record holding craft is not the stimulus to industry growth that affordable entry-level designs are.

Here is the aviation connection: If you look at our magazines, attend our airshows and look at our Web sites, almost all of what our journalists are covering is aviation’s equivalent of the America’s Cup boats. Yes, there are exceptions, but any reasonable person can look at the crop of 912 powered imported LSAs and understand that a $120K aircraft is not an entry-level machine, and they are never going to have the effect on our industry that the Hobie Cat and the Sunfish had on sailing. I agree that there are many stories covered on reasonably affordable planes each year, but I think that most people very seriously underestimate the very strong message sent by our fixation on products that working people stand little chance of affording in their lifetimes. The lack of affordable design coverage and simultaneous adulation of things for the wealthy make any reasonable person just looking at aviation rethink the pursuit, and convince many people with modest dreams that they are going to be treated like second class flyers.

The new head of EAA publications previous job was being the editor of Flying for several decades. I only read that publication while standing at the magazine rack when I am stuck on a layover at Atlanta. It is obviously a publication that reviews products that 2% of America can afford. The other 98% of people reading it are relegated to being spectators.

I don’t care about the content of Flying, it is a commercial publication, and if they wish to entertain spectators and cater to the dwindling number of pilots that long ago got many rungs up the ladder, great. However, I do have an issue with Sport Aviation, the journal of our membership association, having the same content. Our new man got off to a false start by writing a great review of a TBM turboprop aircraft that cost a million dollars. This has no place in our publication. Many people spoke up about it, but not nearly enough. Every working class guy in the EAA needed to send a polite and clear message to headquarters that the goal of our organization is to make each member an Aviator, not a spectator, to that individual’s fullest capacity. Articles on French turboprops do not serve this goal.

The closest thing that certified aviation has ever produced to a Sunfish and a Hobie Cat are a J-3 Cub and a Cessna 150.  Between these two designs, 50,000 airframes were produced. These aircraft made a very large difference. Each of them did an incredible service to aviation by introducing countless aviators to their first solo flight. Yet today, Piper will never produce another affordable aircraft, and the 162, the “modern” 150, is incredibly expensive and produced in a totalitarian police state that also happens to hold the mortgage on our national debt. Cessna donated one of these aircraft to the EAA for educational flights. This was a task previously done by a GlasStar and an RV-6A.  I for one do not wish to have our membership driven organization giving a very valuable endorsement to an aircraft that should have been produced in Kansas instead of China.

Every J-3 and every Cessna 150 came with an engine produced by Continental Motors. For a very long time, each and every data plate on every engine had a picture of the U.S. Capitol building, emblazoned with the creed of the company “As Powerful As The Nation.”  Almost no journalist covered it, but last year, the overnment of China bought Continenal motors.  This and the fact that Cessna is having the C-162 airframe built in China are two very good examples of stories that aviation journalists are not covering. There are 1,400 people who worked for Continental in the U.S., many of them EAA members. I often wonder how they feel about nary a word on the sale of their jobs appearing in our magazines. 

I can make a good argument that any industry that doesn’t make sure that entry-level products are available is not going to last. It is plainly obvious that the affordable aircraft will not be produced by global corporations that do not value individuals. Affordable aircraft, our Sunfish and Hobie Cat, are only going to come from small business entrepreneurs operating in the world of experimental aircraft. Our journalists and membership association must preserve a place for, and welcome them. 

I arrived in aviation in 1989. It existed for me to arrive in because countless others, people long gone,who I will never meet and cannot thank, did their part to preserve our ability to learn, build and fly. As I approach 25 years In The Arena, I am a grateful beneficiary of those who came before, and I view it as my duty to do something to keep aviation from becoming a spectator sport. The concept of the privileged minority enjoying themselves while the commoners are reduced to watching may fit in other countries with class and caste systems, but it isn’t part of the country of the Wrights, Doolittle, Lindbergh and Armstrong. They did not pass it on to us so that we could squander it or drop the ball. It is an invaluable legacy that we have been entrusted with by past aviators, some who paid everything, to make sure we had the same chance…. Decide now that you will not fail them.   -ww

Friends

A few days ago, about fifty people from our airport community gathered together to take part in a lifetime achievement ceremony for our neighbor and friend Dick Phillips.  Everyone got dressed up, there were speeches and slide shows, humorous stories were told, and some very fun ones were whispered. At the end we all walked outside to stand there while a flight of homebuilts from our airport came by in a missing man formation as the bugler slowly played taps. Before that moment we were behaving just as Dick would have wanted it, an upbeat gathering of his friends, not a somber event.  As the lone plane peeled away to the west the sailor from the honor guard knelt in front of Dick’s wife, handed her the flag and said “On behalf of a grateful nation…” I stared at the neatly folded blue triangle and wiped away my tears. 

As we drove away, the gray clouds lifted and a bright blue sky showed itself. Driving back to the airport, the mood also lifted, and we returned to a remembrance of happy times shared with Dick. He truly was a larger than life guy. He made it all the way to 86, and he had one hell of a good ride. Bravo Zulu is Navy speak for “well done,” and looking at the life of Dick Phillips, this is the number one thing you could say about him. He was an enlisted man in WW II, an aircraft mechanic on the USS Bunker Hill. After the war he became an officer and stayed in naval aviation for a full 30 years. In the 1960s he joined the EAA and subsequently built a number of homebuilts. He was always in love with flying, and took great pleasure in promoting a facade of a curmudgeon while actually directly supporting anyone interested in aviation.

I only knew him the last 6 years, but it was a timely overlap. He was getting to the point in life where he was in a mood to speak of things in his life experience, reaching out to share some things that he probably was moving too fast to previously think much about, and I was at a point in life where I could take the hours to get to get to know a neighbor in a way that could teach me something of life. He was our EAA chapter’s tech counselor, a task he took very seriously. Over time he passed this to me, and I took his insights on how to get homebuilders to do better work as very valuable lessons in dealing with people. But the greatest thing that Dick offered anyone in his world was a first class example how to aggressively get the most out of every day you are alive, no matter how old you are. A particular set of events in his youth made him this way, and I don’t think he would mind if I shared them here.

Above, Dick in the 1960s. He was a tough kid from Brooklyn. He joined the Navy after his 17th birthday, at the height of WW II.

Above, Dick’s ship, the USS Bunker Hill, hit by two Kamikaze off the coast of Okinawa in the spring of 1945. It was the worst single such strike of the war. 393 men on the ship perished, one out of every seven members of the crew. The ship did not sink because the crew fought like animals to save it. Dick was on board, likely in the hangar deck when this photo was taken.

Above, this is what the topside of the ship looked like after the fires were out. The hangar deck looked much the same. Both were filled with fueled and armed planes when the ship was hit. There are photos on the Net that are far more graphic, photos that make the above two seem pleasant by comparison. If it is hard to look at such a photograph from six decades ago, it is worth remembering that there are people who saw this in person among us. Dick was 18 years old when this happened to his shipmates.

The day that Dick passed I took an hour in the morning and finished reading Ernest Gordon’s To End All Wars, a very moving story of one man’s experience as a POW from 1942-45 working on the death railway the Japanese built with POWs and slave labor, linking Bangkok to Rangoon. They killed more than 350 people per mile to build it, and it is several hundred miles long. I grew up in Thailand, and I can remember being very spooked as a child seeing all the cemeteries in the jungle on the train ride to Kanchanaburi. Gordon survived what 50% of the POWs did not, and he went on to forgive the Japanese for their crimes out of the belief that forgiveness is the highest act of humanity. The book contains chapters about how hard it was to return to England, and even though people at home had survived The Blitz, he could not relate to them, and he felt alienated. The book made me think about things that Dick had said about his own life, about his personal perspective.

Dick told me that he was determined to get into WW II. All he wanted to do was attack the Japanese and do as much damage as possible before he was killed. He hoped to live to 18 or until he could see that the tide had changed in the War. After the attack, he said that he still felt that he would not live to 20, and that his goal was simply to “Go Down Fighting.” At the end of the War, he realized that he knew much about death, but little about life. He gave it some thought and decided he would try life, and he would concede to live to 21 and see how things looked, if there really was any reason to live longer than that. He told me that by the time he was 21 he had enough good things happen his in life that he decided that he wanted to live forever.

He didn’t make it, but he got a lot closer than his 393 shipmates. When there were few people around, Dick would directly say that he just felt that it was his obligation to get everything out of life. This had many facets. Although he worked very hard honing a first class hard guy image, he was actually very kind. Example: He catches you fussing over a tiny cosmetic detail on your homebuilt. He cries out “You’re building a plane, NOT A GOD DAMNED WATCH! Leave it and get something done!” but a minute later he would patiently instruct you in some crafty thing that you thought no one on earth still knew how to do, like a 5 tuck navy splice in a control cable (because nicopresses are for sissys who are afraid of bloody fingers). At Dick’s service, it is revealed that although he lived a humble life, he had devoted a giant amount of funds to sending dozens of students through aviation schools. He has never told anyone except his wife this. A few years ago a young, but serious guy shows up in our EAA chapter. Dick takes him down to his hangar and shows him a VW powered homebuilt he made in the 1970s. It needs air in the tires, gasoline and a condition inspection to fly. Dick gives the plane to the new guy.

The stories like this go on for a long time. At the root of it all is Dick’s life as a teenager, and his determination that he was going to fill up each day with as much good as he could.  Not good in the Mr. Rogers Neighborhood sense ( unless you can picture Mr. Rogers drinking beer and telling stories about liberty in exotic ports), but in the real sense of going flying, teaching people things and enjoying the moment among friends. In a way, WW II was a portal that men like Dick and Ernst Gordon stepped through. They were very young one day, and in many ways they were vastly older a short time later. It was a one way portal, there was no going back. Dick was never a young man again. Ernest Gordon could not find his way “home”. 

Many times when something transformative happens to people, it takes a long time for them to realize that they have changed. This doesn’t seem to be the case with men of Dick’s generation. After the 50th anniversary of VJ day, I read an essay by Edward Beach, the USN sub skipper who was in WW II and went on to write Run Silent, Run Deep. Beach cited James Michener’s introduction to his 1948 novel Tales of the South Pacific. In it, Michener pointed out that most men who had just lived through the worst parts of the War were well aware that the most interesting thing that would happen in their lives had already come and gone, leaving its scars, all before they were far into their 20s. He pointed out that names like Guadalcanal were already fading from general public awareness by 1948, and these names were going to take up residence in history books beside other names like Antietam, long before the men who had seen these places had faded away.

Dick was my living connection to things I had only previously had access to through literature. He told me a hundred things you could never get out of a book, but the real value of knowing him was being able to witness a first class example of an adventurous life well lived, and I will remain grateful for this simple but uncommon gift.

-William

Friends,

My buddy Chris is working on a glider rating down in Pierson, Fla. The place is a little grass strip in central Florida known for a fair amount of glider activity. There are two clubs and about 15 gliders based there. On the weekends, it’s a busy place with the Pawnee tow plane working all day.

About a month ago Chris was down at Pierson in the middle of the week. He was surprised to find a group of very bright high school students mixed in with the regulars. After asking around, it turned out that the students were from a number of different Florida high schools, and they were getting exposed to all different aspects of the aerospace world to encourage them to seek out degrees in aerospace engineering. Chris said they were very bright and easy to be around, obviously outstanding kids. It is the kind of program that anyone who loves aviation likes to see, but we might not be the first in line if they asked for volunteers to devote a lot of time to it.

Chris struck up a conversation with one of the adults in the party, a nondescript guy wearing a polo shirt with a name tag that just said “Rich”. The guy said he really liked doing something positive if he could, and the thought of coming out to fly in the old Schweitzer 2-33 seemed like a lot of fun.

 A 2-33 is the Cessna 172 of gliders. It has absolutely no bad habits, and it is the ubiquitous trainer that almost everyone starts in. Like a 172, the plane doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Advanced glider pilots can be terrible elitist snobs about the machines they operate, and many of these guys will try to tell you how cool their European glass sailplanes are by contrasting them with rugged old 2-33s with their metal wings. All types of flying have a minority element that practices this sort of bull, and you have to learn to ignore it when you run into it.  For the most part, the people who practice it are pretty harmless, but as a Schweitzer owner, I will attest that some of the most vociferous elements of the glass glider people are refered to as “the wine and cheese crowd.”

While Chris and this guy Rich are talking and waiting for another round with the 2-33, a well-meaning and extroverted member of the glass glider people came over to welcome them to Pierson. The guy wasted little time in getting to the real public service section of his monologue, that flying any metal glider was hardly worth the tow plane’s gas, and perhaps it was a big mistake to expose the kids to the 2-33 because it was going to turn them off to sailplanes. Chris said the guy went on for a while with this angle.

At some point, this guy Rich  said that he thought that metal gliders were just fine. He had flown one from the 1980s, and it worked for him. Chris said this really set the glass guy off, and Mr. Glass said a couple of things like “When you know more about flying, you will realize….” and gave a long-winded explanation of the L/D ratio. In the middle of this, Chris leaned over and asked Rich quietly what make the glider he had flown was. Rich, who was smiling and nodding like he was listening to Mr. Glass, quietly answered Chris with one word, “Rockwell.” Evidently the glass guy never heard this and kept right on going.

When Chris got home he looked at the computer to confirm what he suspected. Turns our that Rich’s last name is Searfoss and he has some very interesting glider experience working for NASA.

Above, Astronaut Richard Searfoss, veteran of three space flights, one as shuttle pilot, one as mission commander.

Above: Chris Welsh and I in my workshop in 2008. In Chris’ hand is a photo, reproduced below. I’ve known Chris since 1990. We were roommates at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. He is an expert in heavy aircraft. His  job is  working as a structures guy for Grumman on  E-2Ds and F-5s.  Since graduating from Riddle with an A&P license and management degree in 1994, Chris has worked a number of interesting jobs as varied as DC-10 cargo conversions and instructing at Colorado Aero-Tech.

• 
  

  Blast From The Past circa Winter 1993: Look closely at the photo: It’s Chris with much longer hair. At the time, his daily driver was a ’67 Beetle. He’s holding its hood ornament in this photo. In the foreground, a corrosion damaged Corvair case roasts in a roaring fire. I shot this photo in the backyard of 1235 International Speedway Blvd., a 1907 two-story coquina stone house that a number of us rented during our five years at Embry Riddle. It was the end of a semester, and we were blowing off steam with a backyard party highlighted by a bonfire fueled by Corvair magnesium blower fans. The case and a pile of heads ended up as a little puddle by daylight. You can’t judge what people will do in aviation by the length of their hair when they are 20.

Friends,

I wrote this about a year ago. It was an explanation of how I came to the point of being vocally intolerant of foolish people in aviation, and an explanation to a new pilot of how anyone can recognize and avoid fools. I wrote it in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep after too much coffee. We live in a very rural area, and it’s dead silent in the middle of the night. It’s conducive to thinking about the things that you put out of your mind in the busy daylight hours. If you’re in a hurry, this will seem long. Leave it until you have more time, you will be closer to the mindset I was in when I wrote it.

I received some private e-mails in the past couple days. Two of these stuck out as perhaps worthy of slightly broader discussion. The first e-mail could be boiled down to the question ‘when did you become such an opinionated bastard?’ The second e-mail came from a guy who is new to experimental aviation, and had only made enough flights in general aviation aircraft to understand that he really liked it. His main point was that there was no real guidance for green guys on exactly what to do at the airport. He felt the standards for what is safe and what is not, and what might be interpreted as foolish by experienced aviators, were not spelled out nor defined. He was not so much concerned with how he looked, but whether something he might be doing unknowingly could be unsafe to himself or others. These two different letters can actually be addressed under a common theme.  I’ll address the subject of each letter separately, and work to tie together a little bit at the end.  I would like people to consider it, but in the long run use it as a starting point for developing or evolving your own values on the topic.

For a long time I have said the bitterest lesson I  have ever learned in aviation was a fairly simple one. Fools are dangerous. From the very beginning of my time at Embry Riddle this was drilled into our heads by serious men. This was not ivory tower textbook theory. It wasn’t trade magazine statistics. It was our Department Chair telling you something important he knew from more than 100 A-4 missions in Vietnam. It was our regulations instructor talking about the guy in front of him walking into a propeller of an E-2C.  It was our aerodynamics instructor explaining the right seat view from a B-52 when you’re about to have a midair collision with a tanker. It was the hydraulics instructor who was missing a finger, explaining about a guy mindlessly moving a lever in the cockpit without thinking about who was working in the nacelle.

The last story hinted at something ironic I was only later to fully understand.  Yes, idiots are dangerous, but in aviation for very odd reasons that can defy logic and are hard to explain, the fools often do their damage but walk away comparatively unscathed. None of our instructors fully explained this last part for students. To amend things that they taught me, things I would like to share with you, I would like to spell this point out. Way back then, I was not a bastard. I had a live and let live attitude. I figured I didn’t have enough experience to speak up when others were doing idiotic things. Peer pressure, and the observation that idiots who broke the rules on a weekly basis were still alive after a few decades, conspired to erode the hardest edges of my standards. These factors worked their magic to keep my mouth shut, to go along with the gang a little bit, and even do a little flying with people I shouldn’t have.  A number of events changed this.

In the early 1990s I was working at my friend Jim’s hangar at Spruce Creek. A guy from our EAA Chapter who had not flown his experimental in many years was out by the runway running it up. A part of this guy wanted to be young again, airborne, flying. The other part told him that the door had closed and the sun had set on that part of his days. A group of guys stood around him and goaded him into taking off. Jim had not been part of this but he was standing off to the side. Jim was a known aviator there and a physically big person. There were actions he could have taken.  He later told me that he wanted to step forward, tell all the spectators to shut up, and tell the pilot to go back to his hangar. He wanted to do this, but he did not.

The man took off and was never fully in control of the plane. He flew around the pattern a couple of times, did a few approaches that were agonizing to watch, and then crash landed. He lived, but he hit his face on the panel, and bled terribly. I sat with Jim in his hangar that afternoon. He was distraught over his failure to act. I got a real good look at the price of peer pressure. Jim’s own brother had been killed in a plane crash. You didn’t need to be a genius to understand that Jim had asked himself a million times what he could’ve done or said that would’ve affected his brother’s fate 25 years before.  On that day irony served him another chance, and he had not taken it. It was a hard thing to watch, perhaps uglier than the day’s accident. This was the first time I can clearly say I understood the cost of keeping your mouth shut. This was the first step to me becoming the kind of “Bastard” who publicly points out people doing dangerous things.

If you really want to understand the depth of my hatred for stupid people around airplanes you can go to YouTube and search the words “Titusville plane crash kills two” and you can join 359,970 other people, mostly ghouls, who have seen the remnants of our friends Phil Schact and Bill Hess burning to death.

I could write a lot of stories, but none of them would come very close to explaining much about what made Phil or Bill great guys. Here’s a small try: Phil was a career pilot, and airline man, an aerobatics instructor and a regional aerobatic champion. He is a relentlessly positive guy.  He was selling an antique aircraft for $25,000. He had a serious offer $24,000.  Phil hears that there’s a young woman at the airport who’s been taught to fly by old school pilots. She is thinking about buying a plane, looking at some spam cans.  Phil goes over, meets her, takes her flying and explains that she should really go after a different type of plane. He conveys to her that she has great promise as a pilot, and should keep working at it. Phil finds out that her total savings is $19,871.  In an act of kindness that was characteristic of how he lived his life, Phil forgoes the higher offer and sells the airplane to the young woman for the balance in her savings account. It is an act that changes the trajectory of her life. The aircraft is 1946 Taylorcraft. The woman he sold the airplane to was named Grace. Today, I am married to her.

On the last morning of their lives, Bill and Phil got in Bill’s RV-8 and flew 40 miles down to Titusville for a fly-in breakfast. They were consummate pilots, maybe 40,000 hours between the two of them. They landed and taxied well clear of the runway. They were sitting about 150 feet off the center line on a taxiway on the far end of the runway. Enter the idiot, flying a Velocity with an older gentleman who built it. It is later told in some detail, that this younger pilot is a first-class fool. He is from Europe, has come to the United States because flying here is cheap. He has no respect for the rules, he always flys straight in approaches. No one can understand him on the radio, and he does not listen to others, nor does he look for traffic. When spoken to about this, he is smug and does not care.  On this particular day, his straight in approach cuts off several aircraft in the pattern.

He lands the Velocity hard enough to break off the nose gear and  it sheds part of the winglet. At this point he’s over 2,000 feet from hitting the RV-8. All he has to do is pull the power off and slide to a halt.  Instead he decides he’s going to try to fly away.  This does not work, his plane crashes, slides off the runway and collides with the RV-8. I was not there that day. But I have spoken to an acquaintance who watched Bill and Phil die from 100 feet away.  After a few days in the hospital, the passenger in the Velocity died also. Upon his release from the hospital the pilot flees the country. After the accident, a number of people said that they had wished they had called the FAA on the pilot for his earlier transgressions. We are not talking about simple mistakes, we’re talking about a complete disrespect for procedures and other people’s safety that paved a highway to this accident. But most people don’t want to be called a bastard, so no one did. I can’t be mad at them for it, they were only giving in to the same peer pressure that I used to.

I have never turned anybody into the FAA, and I don’t view it is my job to do so. In aviation, my little neighborhood is Corvair engine building. I’m not concerned with the overall issues in aviation concerning the actions of fools. All I am concerned with is fools who wish to take up residence in our neighborhood. I am an individualist by nature. I think people should be allowed to do pretty much anything they want. Most people tend to add the phrase here “as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.” Often what they mean is “as long as I don’t find it offensive.” I don’t care if people are offensive, it isn’t a crime in my book. However, if you advocate things that I know from experience stand a good chance of harming somebody else,  I’m going to talk about it, even if this leads to some people thinking of me as a bastard.  I am not really smart, nor am I particularly self-aware, but I have absolutely learned in life that I am far better off having people dislike me for my tone or my approach than I am hating myself for something I should have done or said.

If you are new to the world of homebuilding, and maybe even flying, here’s something that you may not suspect: you’re actually in an excellent position to avoid the actions of fools. Compared to the general aviation pilots who are starting their flight lessons down at the local FBO mill, you have many distinct advantages. Down there, you take the first polyester clad flying prodigy they assign you as an instructor.  You’re flying a worn-out airplane, that they can hardly afford to keep going. Their mechanic is paid a wage that precludes him from living in a double wide trailer. The student enters a system that takes no consideration of who he is or what he wants out of flying. Whatever the intention of the FBO owner when starting out, a lot of these operations devolve to a poorly disguised system of draining your bank account into theirs. It’s very important to understand that such settings attract and tolerate idiots. Nobody wants to upset the system. Whatever ambitions they had of higher standards have long ago been worn away.

Homebuilding can be just as bad, but it doesn’t have to be. You can make it any way that you want to. In this case, you’re going to be the aircraft manufacturer, and the engine manufacturer also. You have time to seek out intelligent qualified people for your further learning.  Building an engine can teach you a lot about whose advice you take, and who you don’t listen to.  This phase can be done while you’re still safely on the ground. If you set your standards very high, you will attract other people who take flying seriously.

Aviation works just like life, quality people tend to gravitate towards the same setting, and dirt bags tend to collect where the standards are low enough that they don’t stick out. In homebuilding you control the entire show. After the plane is done, you’re going to be the director of maintenance, the chief of flight operations, scheduling, dispatching, and the chief financial officer.  It’s a beautiful system where you’re entirely in control of things that you normally have to resign to others. To me this is at the heart of what is captivating about homebuilding. The process is an opportunity, but not a guaranteed transformation. If there is a guy in your local EAA Chapter who doesn’t really strike you as the human personification of self-reliance and self-actualization through homebuilding, yet he has completed an airplane, it isn’t the process’ fault. If you are new to homebuilding, do not judge the potential of the experience by looking at people who merely went through the motions, ended up with the plane, learned the minimum amount, etc. The greatest dad ever and a guy who made a deposit at a sperm bank are both technically involved in fatherhood. Only the former understands the rewards of the experience.

I would be doing new guys disservice if I didn’t clearly say that Bill and Phil’s accident was the freak occurrence of an idiot harming somebody who was not in his immediate vicinity. In general it is plenty of protection to not take advice from nor fly with idiots. There are rare occurrences their range is further, but for the most part if you give them up wide berth and don’t listen to them you’ll do okay.

If you have not spent much time in airports, the basic rules are pretty simple: Pay attention to what’s going on; don’t talk on your cell phone or walk around with your head somewhere else; don’t drive your car on the runway, taxiways or parking aprons; don’t smoke around airplanes or in hangars; do not interrupt people who are pre-flighting airplanes or engaged in intensive maintenance. Introduce yourself before you ask a question, and if you do ask, make sure that you listen to the answer. If you’re addicted to looking at your smart phone, leave it in the car. Most older aviators take it as a sign of real disrespect if you glance to your phone the whole time they’re talking to you. Spend twice as much time listening as talking. If someone specifically tells you not to do something, don’t do it. This is all that it takes to blend in at 90% of the airports in America.

There are a couple of obvious character traits in people who I like to steer clear of when it comes to planes.  I only fly with people I know fairly well; I will not get in an airplane that a guy pre-flighted while he was talking on his cell phone. I stay away from people who are in a big rush at the airport. These people often don’t have the time for a preflight, a mag check or taxiing to the downwind and to the runway. I will not speak to a person who knowingly does downwind takeoffs or landings to shorten the distance to his parking spot. I have nothing to do with people who brag about having their annual inspections or biennial flight reviews pencil whipped. I don’t fly with pilots who do things that are forbidden in capital letters in the pilots operating handbook (Example: slipping a 172 with the flaps down).  I’ve never taken a flight lesson of any kind with an instructor who couldn’t tell me what condition achieves the minimum turn radius in any aircraft ( Maneuvering speed, bank angle increased until the plane reaches its positive G limit, full power.) I stay away from pilots who say things like “this plane has a bad glide ratio when it’s heavily loaded” (aircraft of the same glide ratio and gross weight glide as they do lightly loaded) I steer clear of people who offer testimonials on flight characteristics planes they never sat in (“Republic Seabees glide like bricks” ),  avoid people who are poor listeners or openly brag about things that they have gotten away with.

The above paragraph might describe 20% of the people in airports. That’s okay, I don’t need to pal around with everyone.  If you’re new to aviation, spend some time observing people and develop your own set of values. Be discriminating. If you’re new you have no track record, then you’re a thoroughbred as far as anybody’s concerned, and the only way that is changed is if you spend a lot of time with fools and idiots and let them turn you into one. If you believe this is possible, then the corollary is also possible. You can choose to spend your time with skilled, competent, aviators and let their experience and your hard work turn you into one yourself.

 -William Wynne