Air-Minded: Taildragger Tales
Like cats and their proverbial nine lives, pilots have an allotted number of close calls. Not nearly as many as cats get, though. Some of us get only one, some get three or four. Once you use them up you’re gone.
Air-Minded: PASM Photoblog XVI
For the past few months, the restoration yard at Pima Air and Space Museum has been dominated by two huge Boeing airliners, a 747 and a 777. I’d point them out to visitors on my tram tour, joking that I didn’t know where we’d find room for them once they came out of resto. Well, now I know.
Air-Minded: Call Sign Protocol (Wait, What?)
From Military.com: Navy to Change Pilot Call Sign Protocol After Minority Aviators Report Bias: “The head of naval aviation has directed the creation of a new process for approving and reviewing pilots’ call signs after two African-American aviators at an F/A-18 Hornet training squadron in Virginia filed complaints alleging racial bias in the unit, from which they […]
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.
Danger at the Door
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!
Air-Minded: Fitting In, Part II
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.
Air-Minded: Bitchin’ Betty (Updated 4/25/19)
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.
A Be-No from the Boss
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.