IDGAF, Except When I Do
I never know what to say to friends when they get bad news like this. Who does? I’ll be working on that, and in the meantime calling up good memories of our times together.
"When I do not want to say things in real life I often say them here." — Mimi Smartypants
There I was at 30,000 feet
I never know what to say to friends when they get bad news like this. Who does? I’ll be working on that, and in the meantime calling up good memories of our times together.
Finally saw my first Kentucky Derby … actually my first horse race of any kind. Now here’s a televised sport I can endure while pretending to be as into it as everyone else in the room. I can do anything if I only have to do it for two minutes!
I believe the best person should get the job and if that person is a woman, so be it. You cannot tell me I don’t belong and women shouldn’t or can’t fly fighters if I just beat you on the range and/or at BFM.
When Sexy Sally started warning B-58 Hustler crews about engine fires in the 1960s, it was a major innovation, and using a woman’s voice was considered a brilliant stroke: human factors researchers thought a woman’s voice—rarely heard on the radio and never on the intercom—would cut through other chatter and get the crews’ attention.
This morning our volunteer coordinator sent an all-hands be-no* message about injecting politics and personal opinion into the information we share with museum guests.
“Carry a barf bag whether you think you’re prone to airsickness or not,” my instructor pilot said, “because you never know.”
Hush Kit, “the alternative aviation magazine,” has published another piece of mine, this one about how F-15 Eagle pilots trained to face the threat posed by the Soviet Union’s then-new Su-27 Flanker in the late 1980s and early 90s, when I flew F-15s at Kadena Air Base in Japan.
“Satisfying the needs of aviation interests” and “encouraging and developing civil aeronautics”? The conflict is baked in, part of the FAA’s DNA.