Page 26 - Volume 16 Number 8

24 • TWIN & TURBINE AUGUST 2012From the Flight Deck by Kevin R. DingmanSkywardFor pilots having flown for longer than a couple of decades, it turns out Mr. Disney was right: It’s a small world after all. You either know most everyone, or have heard the names bantered around. Someone knows someone who had something happen “just like it did to Sam, back in ’68”. And not just the flying stuff: marriage, kids, houses, cars, finance and health. There is little that can happen to you that hasn’t already happened to some other aviator. Wars and airlines have come and gone. Legends of what happened to pilots through battles and bankruptcies, fur- balls and furloughs, and mayhem and mergers are passed along to greenhorn aviators. What happened to Joe at Same Old Thing Airways is the same as that which happened to Bill over at Here We Go Again Express and you can anticipate the same at Thank-You Sir; May We Have Another, Inc.Vocations using a seniority system or rank structure exhibit this phenomenon most clearly. Waypoints of life are charted in both fact and folklore as you review the deeds of predecessors. By filtering events so as to align yourself with a similar individual, you can postulate your aeronautical destiny. You may think it only a prediction, but in pilot jargon it’s called interpolation. A flying career can therefore, provide an opportunityto travel in time, and not simply the time zones of the world. Such a thing, ifnot unbeliev- able, sounds intriguing. Though notSon, you’re going to have to make up your mind about growing up and becoming a pilot; you can’t do both.as exciting as authentic time travel, career interpolation functions with enough accuracy so as to be entertaining – and modestly useful. Other occupations display predictability, but none so reliably as professional aviation. When you observe the lives of more seasoned colleagues, you can see where they have been and where you may be going.A Pilot’s LifeWhat follows is a 100% factual account (not really); it’s passed along ceremoniously with barely a whisper of embellishment. Clarifications, strategically woven into the journal, increase the facade of truthfulness. It’s a pilot’s memoir of life; his true identity to be revealed only in conjecture. A humorous and sobering chronicle, riding ambivalently on eddies of fate that even Ernest Gann could admire (if he dared wade through the quagmire of hyperbole in this paragraph). May you too nowbenefit from the desperate entries in this episodic logbook of life; your fate-forecasting interpolation begins here:Five years old. Get first airplane ride. Better than Frosted Flakes and cartoons on Saturday morning. Decide to become a pilot. Airplane sounds invoke an involuntary search skyward for the next 70 years.Sixteen years old. Solo and get driver’s license on same day. Make the local paper; coolest guy in school. Girls adore you. Throw a paper airplane in class; get in trouble, have to “write sentences” as punishment.Nineteen years old. Sample something called tequila. Transport 12 cases of Coors beer from DEN to AZO (surely the statute of limitations has expired) in a Cherokee 140, camouflaged in Christmas paper – not the Cherokee, the beer.Twenty-two years old. Graduate from college. Can’t find a flying job.Twenty-three years old. Go to USAF pilot training. Become hot- shot F-16 fighter pilot. Get married.