Page 30 - January 15 Volume 19 Number 1

28 • TWIN & TURBINE JANUARY 2015
a close view
of the desert
floor while
supersonic.
I’ve flown
formation
with a dozen
different
fighters, a C-150, PA-28’s and a B-52. Hundreds of hours of formation flying and aerobatics allowed me to experience what it’s like to become one with the airplane. I was shown how to recognize the old buffalo watering holes from 35k, and in Alaska I’ve seen glaciers and watched a moose run from a lake as I passed over
at three hundred feet and 480 kts. I saw the fires from the LA riots and was diverted after the earthquake.
Share The Love
Providing flight instruction and Young Eagle flights, the Civil Air Patrol, volunteer flights for patients, vets and pets are excellent avenues in which to pass along our thrill of flying to newbies and the public. I’ve never really fallen in love with providing basic flight instruction – I don’t have the patience for it and become frustrated when good students run out of money. Instructing and evaluating “students” in the F-16, however, was very rewarding. As you can imagine, they were, for the most part, already very well accomplished pilots. It was simply a matter of teaching them how to use the airplane as a weapon in air-to-air and air-to-ground combat—both of these endeavors necessitated plenty of looking-out- the-window.
What are they worth to us, our airplanes? Productivity, time-saving travel and a long list of emotional gratification – how much value is that? Once we’ve figured out how to make them work, understand the presentation and filter out the useful from the irrelevant, avionics of today present so much accurate and timely information that we scarcely need to look out the window.... except to land. And at the airlines, when using autoland, we don’t need
Paul Bowen 2
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