Page 32 - Feb17TNT

30 • TWIN & TURBINE
February 2017
From the Flight Deck
by Kevin R. Dingman
The Write Stuff
Authentic AWviation Authors
ith a hot coffee at hand, the crackling fireplace provided ambience for perusing a stack of magazines and several issues of Trade-A-Plane. Not that I would ever sell the Duke, but you never know when an irresistible MU-2 may flirt with the Air Force retirement check
and seduce my better judgement. A sigh accompanied the turning of the final, big yellow page. The remaining magazines laid before me like a pile of high-school homework.
Pilot Periodicals
The stack was primarily pilot periodicals, but some were for non-pilot, common folk: world and national news, hunting, fishing and writing magazines. They had accumulated after a month of vacation and a month of post-op recovery (robotic assisted, laparoscopic inguinal hernia repair for the surgeons among us). Who knew; Percocet impairs the ability to read, remember and thusly to keep up with, well, everything. The vacation and blurry post-op weeks were followed by a fast-paced and focused month of training and check
ride on the B737-800 NG. During Guppy School, there were no brain cells for recreational reading. Once you have seven, eight or 92 dozen periodicals in a pile, it’s like mowing the lawn after having waited too long, or in my neck of the woods, waiting too long to shovel snow. After a three-month absence, even when using the force, behind the reading power curve I was.
We all have our favorite writers that motivate us to read at least a couple stories from each magazine. In fact, we keep some subscriptions active just for the articles of our favorites. You know the characters: Rod Machado, the legendary Mac McClellan, Thomas Haines and Barry Schiff. There’s Martha Lunken, Dave Matheny, Patty Wagstaff, Dick Karl and our own David Miller, just for starters. You can’t throw out unread works of these authors, so we savor their stories then f lip through the remainder of the magazine to catch up on events and new developments. We assume that the same advertisers will always be there, but we tear out ads for things we like, just in case.