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Would You Like To Fly?

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Dear Readers: One of the high points in my life this year at Oshkosh, was meeting Jen Adams, an aviation enthusiast I’ve come to know rather well. She’s not a pilot, but rather a person who found gainful employment at an airport and realized she was and continues to be fascinated by what she found there. This is her first story for Jetwhine. Both Scott and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Rob Mark

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Would You Like To Fly?

By Jennifer Adams

As a female aviation enthusiast, I want to do my part to encourage a passion for aviation in the next generation, especially girls. To that end, I’ve taken my teenage daughter and her friends on several aviation-related excursions to museums, airports and even an air show. While they always managed to have fun, their interest in aviation remained decidedly lukewarm. I’ll admit I was a bit disappointed — I was hoping for a little more enthusiasm. But I consoled myself with the knowledge that at least I had tried.

jetwhine-comThen one day my daughter overheard me talking about a friend who had gone on a biplane ride the previous weekend. Her response surprised me: “Awww – that sounds so cool!” Wait… what did she just say? So I asked, “Would you be interested in doing a Young Eagles flight to learn more about being a pilot?” Her response was an immediate and emphatic “Yes!” No maybes or requests to think about it. No hesitation at all. I was both elated and a bit dumbfounded. So she IS interested in aviation! But… I didn’t think she was. How could I have been so wrong?

My first mistake was expecting my daughter to like aviation the same way I do. I can sit around and watch airplanes all day. She can’t. She’s not much of a watcher – she’s more of a doer. I should have realized this, but I didn’t.

My second mistake is almost embarrassing to admit because it involves stereotypes. My daughter is an artist and an actress, a dreamer who likes to write short stories. Somehow I allowed myself to believe that these qualities are incompatible with an interest in flying. This is completely wrong and I know it. I have several friends who are commercial pilots who are also involved in the arts. How on earth did I make this mistake with my daughter? Is it because she’s a girl? I’m sad to say… possibly.

My third mistake was expecting my daughter to say something. I figured that if she wanted to try flying she would tell me. But then again she IS a teenager and they aren’t always very communicative, especially with their parents.

Before I beat myself up too much I should point out that I did do at least one thing right: I didn’t give up. In the end I was able to toss aside what I thought I knew about my daughter’s level of interest and simply ask the question: Would you like to fly? It makes me wonder — how many other girls would say yes if only someone would think to ask?jen

Jennifer Adams blends her passion for aviation with her profession of accounting by working for a medium-sized airport in the Midwest. When she isn’t calculating landing fees, she’s keeping an eye on the airplanes outside the window and blogging about her adventures at talesfromtheterminal.com.

Eastwood Got It Right With Sully

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Eastwood Got It Right With Sully
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Eastwood Got It Right With Sully

640px-plane_crash_into_hudson_river_cropComplete NTSB Accident Report: US Airway 1549 

(click here)

Most pilots tend to take airplane movies with a grain of salt because they’re usually riddled with mistakes or enough exaggerations to quickly make us nuts. Remember big snoozers like Tuskeegee Airmen, Flight or Pearl Harbor? Of course, there have been a few outstanding films over the years like 12 O’Clock high and the Battle of Britain. But the good ones are few in number.

When Clint Eastwood’s “Sully” began the other night, I was hoping one of my favorite directors might get this one right. 90 minutes later, I left the theatre believing that anyone, with even the tiniest interest in aviation, would walk away feeling their money was well spent. Eastwood got it right.

Sully’s not a disaster film. It’s watches almost a bit like a documentary … a very good documentary.

That’s because Eastwood’s film dissects more than just the 208 seconds, between the takeoff of USAir flight 1549, radio callsign Cactus 1549, and its landing on the Hudson River.

The dream sequence that opens the film tells you more about where the film’s headed than anything else. Cactus 1549’s water landing, crash, arrival or whatever you call it, represents the greatest mixes of skill and luck known to aviation in a long time.

But Sully’s also about how all-155 people aboard escaped with only a few minor injuries. The film goes to great lengths to show Sully, played admirably by Tom Hanks, making it clear that he’s not the only hero responsible for all that followed the dual flame out aboard the A-320.

Sully rightfully credits his first officer Jeff Skiles, the flight attendants aboard the Airbus that afternoon, and the hundreds of first responders who arrived within minutes of the crash to help the passengers they found standing on the wing of the A-320 gently floating downstream in the Hudson River, in the frigid air that January afternoon in 2009.

What I think really what makes Sully the first great aviation film I’ve seen in a long time is the opportunity it offers us to get inside Capt. Sullenberger’s head as he wrestles with the decisions he and Skiles made in those seconds after they plowed through a huge flock of Canada Geese.

It happened in the movie, just the way it does in real life. Someone in the cockpit says “birds,” and a fraction of a second later you either hit them, or miss them. There’s seldom a chance to swerve out of the way.

Right after both of the A320s engine’s flamed out, there are some agonizingly long seconds of silence in the cockpit. Some people in the movie house actually yelled out , “Why isn’t he doing something? He’s just sitting there.” Experienced pilots of course, realize Sully was doing something, but all the analysis, like “We can’t really be seeing a dual flameout at low altitude,” was going on in his head and also showed on his face. [Read more…] about Eastwood Got It Right With Sully

Forget the Cost of Learning to Fly, Think Value

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SkyArrow AloftForget the Cost of Learning to Fly, Think Value

You’ve obviously thought of learning to fly or you wouldn’t be here right now. Spend a little time reading Richard Bach’s classic Jonathan Livingston Seagull and I guarantee you’ll be putty in the hands of any flight instructor who offers you a demo flight. You may not even need an airplane.

OK, back to reality … where everyone remembers how damned expensive it is to learn to fly. Blah, blah, blah.

Really?

Cost Vs. Value

Forget what everyone else has told you about why no one learns to fly anymore and prepare your mind for a few fresh ideas.

When you stroll around a new-car showroom or troll the Internet for a set of wheels, is cost the only thing on your mind? I doubt it. If it were, how could Toyota, GM, Honda and the rest have sold all those electric cars? They’re way more expensive than my gas-driven Mini Cooper, the one I’ve been driving for 10 years now … with no payments for the last six. If you’re outside the 1%, you probably think about buying a car in terms of the number of monthly payments before that baby’s yours.

Consider school today. The cost of our daughter’s college is enough to melt the brains of people who don’t have kids. Luckily she’ll only be 22 when she graduates which means she’ll have many years ahead to add her two cents to the entertainment world she loves based on her education.

When we talk flying though, everyone zeroes in on the cost per hour and little else.

But what if we treated learning to fly like a college education or a new car and amortized the cost … spread it out over a few years. What happens next is simply magical. The price of learning to fly begins to look affordable as the raw dollar issue slips to the back of your focus much like minimizing a tab on a browser. You know it’s still there, but it’s just not staring you in the face every moment of the day.

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AOPA’s Reimagined Cessna 152

Jim Knollenberg told me the other day that earning a private pilot certificate today, start to finish, probably runs between $10,000 to $12,000. He’s president of Pilot Finance Inc., an Illinois-based company that finances both the private pilot certificate and the instrument rating for the short of cash. [Read more…] about Forget the Cost of Learning to Fly, Think Value

Trying Something New

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TAM Final LogowithJet-01Trying Something New

Quite a few Jetwhine readers and listeners have asked what happened to The Aviation Minute, the editorial podcast series I began a couple of years ago using this neat logo.

The simple answer is we’ve evolved a bit … from the early audio-based shows to a video-centered stories.

Thanks to a new partnership between Jetwhine and Aviationpros.com, publishers of Airport Business, AMT and Ground Service and Support – we’ve also changed the name from The Aviation Minute to On the Mark adding this new logo along the way. The shows will air twice a month on both the AviationPros.com site and here at Jetwhine, but will also be delivered directly to viewers via an e-mail blast system.

OTM NBAA

OTM Logo 1

So here’s On the Mark, Networking Tips From NBAA 2015 (click to view).

As always, I’m interested in what you think of the content, as well as the production. I’m always on the lookout for some under-appreciated topic thats cries out for a little coverage, so pass along your ideas to us at rob@jetwhine.com. Thanks for watching.

Rob Mark, Publisher

Encouraging People to Replace Us

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Encouraging People to Replace Us

Finding young people to grab the reins from us old guys in aviation is a bit like the weather … everyone talks about why we need to do something, but not everyone is clear about how to actually make that happen. Certainly doing nothing is the wrong answer. So what can we do to increase our odds of connecting all the right people together?

NBAA 2015 yoproAt the recent NBAA convention, the association offered a number of us an opportunity to mingle with a hundred or so officially named Young Professionals who’d volunteered to listen to us more-experienced (secret code for older) industry folks detail how we started while also delivering a bit of unsolicited advice for job seekers.

The NBAA team was spearheaded by the association’s Sierra Grimes with Brett Ryden from Southcomm’s Aviation Pros.com leading a group of his editors who together created an hour’s worth of practical education at the show’s Innovation Zone. The panel was evenly split between ladies and gents … myself, Jo Damato from NBAA, Sarah Barnes from Paragon Aviation and Textron Aviation’s senior VP of Customer Service Brad Thress. Our moderator was writer Lowen Baumgarten.

Stage members spent a few minutes detailing their experiences, but since we were there to answer questions, I was antsy to interact with the audience. Over the course of the hour there were perhaps seven or eight good ones, but I wanted more. I probably shouldn’t have.

Reality kicked in for me about 20 minutes after we began as I realized that some of what a number of young people had told me the night before was really true … networking is not an innate skill, not even close. I’d seen this kind of thing before too. Universities apparently assume graduates automatically absorb networking skills out of thin air I guess. Luckily NBAA and AviationPros and a few other organizations have made the effort to fill those voids. [Read more…] about Encouraging People to Replace Us