Happy Birthday Jetwhine

Getting old isn’t really so bad, is it?

Sure a few more lines and sags stare back at you every morning in the mirror, but the upside to aging is wisdom.

Jetwhine’s 7th birthday is just around the corner and I like to think Scott Spangler and I are a lot wiser than in 2006 when Jetwhine’s first story ran. Heck, in dog years we’re almost 50.

I figure we must be smarter to have survived an onslaught of social media competitors that surfaced and also died over the past seven years. Of course a few of those forums really are, in Bill and Ted’s own words, “Most excellent,” and opened our eyes to viewpoints we’ve come to respect.

We bloggers till around can’t help but notice that time marching on can sometimes make us a bit too cozy with the way we’ve always conducted business, perhaps no longer stretching that envelope like in 2006 when we published a piece about the value of a blog for the aviation industry, or the piece on the value of a union for air traffic controllers. Of course there was that fun piece on the Top 10 reasons the Northwest Airlines pilots flew past MSP on arrival. Bet they never lived that one down. How could I forget Scott’s story about our industry getting the flight instructors it deserves. That one grabbed over a hundred comments.

While we have no intention of changing the kind of content we deliver, we will be sprucing the place up a bit in the coming months … fresh coat of WordPress paint and perhaps a few new tools to deliver the great content you’ve come to expect. Of course we’re always open to your suggestions, except we’re not painting the place red and green or anything silly like that. No new curtains either.

Seriously though, the goals Scott and I have always kept in the back of our heads as we write is to capture your attention with stories and perspectives you’ll find no where else. That of course will never change.

So thanks to the thousands of you across the globe who have become and remain loyal Jetwhine readers. And now the pitch … if you have friends who’d enjoy Jetwhine, we’d be most grateful if you’d pass along our URL where they can subscribe via e-mail or our RSS feed.

Rob Mark, publisher