Plane Conversations

This is my son, Robby. (He’s number three of four, and yes, I am extremely blessed.) He’s five, and he’s going to start kindergarten this year.

This picture was taken in the back of my dad’s Beech Baron 55. From time to time, I’ve also let him sit at the controls of a KC-135, C-17, King Air (C-12), T-38, F-16, and many others.

Robby looks at airplanes with awe and wonder.  When one flies over, he looks up and stares at it. Then he will look at me seriously and tell me it’s Southwest–even if it’s a Cessna Skyhawk–because he is trying to act like his big brother Blake (who can identify Southwest).

When Robby is flying in an airplane, he looks down at the world below–everything is so small, yet the world is so much bigger–and he is amazed.

I love to share the wonder of aviation, the joy of flying, with Robby, with each of my children.  In turn, they love to hear stories of the superhuman feats that I’ve accomplished in airplanes: Setting a world record by dropping seventy two thousand pounds of NASA solid rocket booster out the back of a C-17 or pulling 6g’s or going straight up in an F-16 at Mach 1.3.  (That’s really fast in case you were counting.) Or doing a spin in a T-6A Texan II. Or flying in formation with six other transports–that’s over two million pounds of cargo carrying airplanes–and doing a tactical descent at 20,000 feet per minute. (Okay, it was slightly less than 20,000 fpm, because that descent rate is the max limit.)  Or the story about how I greased it on the runway at the end of a twenty six hour day–from Sydney to Honolulu to Detroit–a landing so soft that the baby in the back didn’t even wake after fighting a twenty knot crosswind all the way down the ILS.

You and I know that these are the kinds of things that pilots of all kinds do every day. That doesn’t matter. To Robby, to the unfamiliar, flying is magic.

Robby doesn’t understand the “flight or fight” or “no plane no gain” slogans. He doesn’t understand the bottom line or return on investment or profitability.  (Incidentally, I like flying and aviation and those videos put me to sleep.)

He does understand superheroes.  That’s why Cessna’s poster series was genius.  

We need stories, not stats. We want to be inspired, not lectured.  You won’t convince anyone with balance sheets or P&L statements.  

But if we can tell a story…

Like that baby in the back that slept through the best landing ever. It was a medevac mission.  Mom and Dad may not remember what kind of plane it was or know how much it cost. But they know how it changed their lives when they saw the pediatric heart specialist the next day.

And that executive who was worried about the bottom line when he hopped in the Learjet early that day is probably thinking more about eating dinner with his wife and kids than his discouragement over not getting the big deal.

Or that factory in Alabama and the forty people who get to work tonight, earn a paycheck, because the supplier flew the part in on the company Bonanza.  

The lives we touch–the countless multitudes of people who haven’t flown on and don’t fly and will never fly in a business jet or an experimental aircraft or even an SR22–when we touch their lives, that’s what makes us superheroes.

If we can tell those stories about the people whose lives aviation changes…then aviation will change lives.

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Knowledge is power.  It’s not what you know, but what you do with what you know that matters. 

Enter social media, web 2.0, wikinomics, the digital age, the Google era-whatever you would like to call it.  The power of this enormous infrastructure and way of life, the power of social media is the sharing of knowledge by wise leaders. 

Let me briefly explain–Google shares information, but it certainly isn’t wisdom.  On the other hand, your friend, who has been listening to a podcast about a certain subject for a year now, knows you are looking for a new job in a related industry.  He knows that the host of the podcast is great friends with a guy in that industry.  A tweet is sent with a link to the podcast… Knowledge has been applied.  Wisdom has been shared.  Now connections have been made.

Enter video.  YouTube is probably the most widely known video social media channel, but there are many.  Here is an example:

What did you see? Probably a lot of things.  Did you see an acrobatic flight from the “bird’s eye” view of the pilot? A pilot getting his first lesson could learn a lot about the cross check…looking outside at the wingtips to maintain attitude, back and forth, now forward at airspeed.  These are the kinds of things that can only be learned in real time.  It’s challenging, even for an experienced flight instructor to explain this inverted.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is video worth?

Did you see Johnny’s house in the early frames of the video, just to the far side of the brown field off the nose? How cool would it be for Johnny to see his house from that angle?! Even more exciting would be real time streaming video integrated into the flying video game on his HD TV.

Imagine a student pilot getting ready to go on his first cross-country flight.  The weather between here and the destination is forecasted to be VFR, but there is a slight chance it could deteriorate.  So he types in the web address for a new, video-based “Sky Maps” website, and sees that another pilot has just flown along that route.  By clicking on the airplane symbol on the “Sky Map,” a video is cued.  Student Pilot can now see the weather for himself, adding some knowledge to his decision-making process, painting a picture to supplement the weather forecast.

Did you see the weather off to the east in the video? Scientists could tap into a wealth of data to update meteorological models, validate predictions, understand these complex (and still quite mysterious) phenomena even better.

Did you see the turbulent airflow off of the upper wing? I didn’t either, but it won’t be long until a high-tech lens attachment the size of a dime gives Schleren photography capability to this portable video cameras.  In fact, the future holds a camera that looks wherever the pilot points it and captures images at any bandwidth in the spectrum of light.

One last application for the test pilots among us - the pilot was moving his head, large movements, and a lot of them, in other words, high frequency and high amplitude.  This data would certainly contribute to an understanding of the workload during this phase of flight.  At this point in the evolution of the technology, we don’t need six sigma certainty that it’s high workload.  We have a definitive qualitative understanding that it is.  The technology will mature, and the way we use it to collect quantitative measures of what has been previously subjectively evaluated should mature as well.

That’s what the future looks like…in HD.

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So often we allow ourselves to get bogged down by our own thoughts and habits.  Year-end reflections remind us that there are things we should stop doing and that there are valid reasons for changing our behavior.  I think that today I’ll avoid dwelling on those thoughts that mire down my thinking and, instead, focus on a vision of the value that change can bring.

Checking the clock for the tenth time, she sees the hands creeping towards midnight.  In the nearly abandoned library, a college freshman furiously scratches out the last half-page of her calculus homework thinking, “Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”  A vibrating alert signals a message.  Opening her phone, she scrolls through a list of updates (hmm…that party is looking more inviting); but, the newest message, marked with an airplane icon, simply reads, “Thought you’d like this story.” The link is from Mike, her study partner in aero class.  She clicks on the link to discover that it’s a first-hand account of the first flight of the X-99 including a video of the landing.  She dives back into her assignment with a determined smile…Inspire.

Late one Friday afternoon, a test pilot looks at the test cards for a new commercial aircraft terrain avoidance system.  This is the third weekend in a row that he’s had to work late.  The cutbacks are wearing him down.  Something stirs in his mind, a distant memory of another test program—F-16 advanced ground collision avoidance testing.  Something in that distant memory tickles his mind.  What was it?! He opens his laptop, opens Google Reader, enters search terms; and, there it is – a blog shared by his chief test pilot detailing the test program.  Returning to the current test, he realizes that this altitude isn’t high enough. An FTT performed at that speed and dive angle will almost certainly be unrecoverable.  He knows that delaying tomorrow’s flight won’t be popular, but the test team needs to see this error and that article…Inform.

Rubbing his temples, a college provost reviews the budget…again.  Asking himself which of these programs he will have to cut, one line-item catches his eye.  “How much money does it take to fund a flight research laboratory?” he wonders.  Delaying his decision until after dinner, he goes home to be greeted by his son, excitedly telling him about the newest YouTube video.

            “Watch this dad! A spinning airplane deploys this chute and recovers safely.” The narrator said that the flight test was a joint project between that test pilot school and his university.

            “That’s your work, isn’t it dad?” An email address hyperlink next to the video catches his eye.  Maybe that aero department is worth the money after all…Invest.

Sharing what we do in flight test allows us to inspire, inform, invest, and even innovate. Social media can transform the way we share, multiplying the speed and breadth of our influence on the important people, from students to policy-makers, we want to touch with our message.  After all, one of them might just be the next Chuck Yeager.

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