Remembering.
Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 2:05 am
Soon the leaves will start falling again as 2016 slowly comes to a close and I got to thinking of all the years I spent in aviation and am lying here in bed thinking back to the years I yearned to be a commercial pilot and finally getting paid to fly an aircraft.
Time is difficult to understand as it is not a tangible thing such as the room I am in at the moment.
Time also can be flavored by the memory you have at the moment, and looking back at the fifty two years I flew for a living I honestly do not know if I would do it all over again given the choice of what I now remember.
Thankfully my career started and mostly progressed in an era of aviation that was truly interesting as aircraft and the means to control and navigate them improved. When I first became a commercial pilot the airways were flown by listening to the aural signals that were the Radio Range Legs of the national airway system, backed up by the ADF.
Next we had the VOR for far more accurate tracking of the airways and from there we are here now where the machine and the technology fly's the airplane in the whole three dimensional profile of the flight and the " pilot " monitors the automatics and pushes keys or twists knobs to change the aircraft's flight path and position in space.
One thing I am sure of flying the Radio Range in a big piston pounding airplane with no autopilot was really a satisfying experience and one actually felt part of the airplane......typing in a FMS and turning knobs in a big jet really has little comparison to the days we dreamed of flying and then actually worked our way up the being a pilot.
Anyhow I have been retired now since the fall of 2005 and like the year my life is slowly getting to the leaves falling point in time and I am thinking of maybe writing about what aviation was like over half a century ago, in some way I would like to think I owe it to the newer generations of pilots to record what it was like when aviation was in its earlier days.
Time is difficult to understand as it is not a tangible thing such as the room I am in at the moment.
Time also can be flavored by the memory you have at the moment, and looking back at the fifty two years I flew for a living I honestly do not know if I would do it all over again given the choice of what I now remember.
Thankfully my career started and mostly progressed in an era of aviation that was truly interesting as aircraft and the means to control and navigate them improved. When I first became a commercial pilot the airways were flown by listening to the aural signals that were the Radio Range Legs of the national airway system, backed up by the ADF.
Next we had the VOR for far more accurate tracking of the airways and from there we are here now where the machine and the technology fly's the airplane in the whole three dimensional profile of the flight and the " pilot " monitors the automatics and pushes keys or twists knobs to change the aircraft's flight path and position in space.
One thing I am sure of flying the Radio Range in a big piston pounding airplane with no autopilot was really a satisfying experience and one actually felt part of the airplane......typing in a FMS and turning knobs in a big jet really has little comparison to the days we dreamed of flying and then actually worked our way up the being a pilot.
Anyhow I have been retired now since the fall of 2005 and like the year my life is slowly getting to the leaves falling point in time and I am thinking of maybe writing about what aviation was like over half a century ago, in some way I would like to think I owe it to the newer generations of pilots to record what it was like when aviation was in its earlier days.