Cockpit View Quotes

Societies and communities change—dictionaries are rewritten; people and ideas die off. The point is for us to develop so much that when we outgrow the awareness of the community, we willfully reach back to pull others forward with our knowledge.

The airplanes slowly taxied to the beginning of the runway, humbly and calmly with flaps down, bowing with deference to the infinite sky.

I saw portraits of pain and snapshots of hope—they appeared as complex energies, softly kaleidoscopic, levitating in air with no connotations to joy or pain.

I did not want to fight. I did not want to argue. I just wanted to look into her eyes to get a sense of her soul’s motivation.

The “confusion” that straight and gay colonizers claim bisexuals experience is because there are no influential cultural templates for bisexuals/ fluid/pansexual people to cling to, nor is their experience politically validated.

The sex act is emotionally the richest and the most imaginatively charged event in our lives, comparable only to the embrace of our children as a source of affection and mystery. But no kinaesthetic language has yet been devised to describe it in detail, and without one we are in the position of an unqualified observer viewing an operation for brain surgery. Ballet, gymnastics, American football and judo are furnished with elaborate kinaesthetic languages, but it's still easier to describe the tango or the cockpit take-off procedures for a 747 than to recount in detail an act of love.

That done, we could finally relax about the baggage and start seriously to worry about the state of the plane, which was terrifying. The door to the cockpit remained open for the duration of the flight and might actually have been missing entirely. Mark told me that Air Merpati bought their planes second-hand from Air Uganda, but I think he was joking. I have a cheerfully reckless view of this kind of air travel. It rarely bothers me at all. I don’t think this is bravery, because I am frequently scared stiff in cars, particularly if I’m driving. But once you’re in an airplane, everything is completely out of your hands, so you may as well just sit back and grin manically about the grinding and rattling noises the old wreck of a plane makes as the turbulence throws it around the sky. There’s nothing you can do.

Do you know how the brain works? Do you have any idea of what we know about how the brain and consciousness work? Us humans, I mean. And I'm not talking about some new-age hocus-pocus, I'm talking about the sum of the knowledge compiled by disciplined scientists over three hundred years through arduous experiments and skeptic vetting of theories. I'm talking about the insights you gain by actually poking around inside people's heads, studying human behavior, and conducting experiments to figure out the truth, and separating that from all the bullshit about the brain and consciousness that has no basis in reality whatsoever. I'm talking about the understanding of the brain that has resulted in things like neuronic warfare, the neurographic network, and Sentre Stimulus TLEs. How much do you really know about that? I suppose you still have the typical twentieth-century view of the whole thing. The self is situated in the brain somehow, like a small pilot in a cockpit behind your eyes. You believe that it is a mix of memories and emotions and things that make you cry, and all that is probably also inside your brain, because it would be strange if that were inside your heart, which you've been taught is a muscle. But at the same time you're having trouble reconciling with the fact that all that is you, all your thoughts and experiences and knowledge and taste and opinions, should exist inside your cranium. So you tend not to dwell on such questions, thinking “There's probably more to it” and being satisfied with a fuzzy image of a gaseous, transparent Something floating around in an undefined void. Maybe you don't even put it into words, but we both know that you're thinking about an archetypical soul. You believe in an invisible ghost.

We blasted out of the crater and rocketed around the moon’s opposite side, and the fragile Earth became visible to us once again, hovering in the blackness ahead. Over the comm channel, I heard my father gasp at the sight—one he hadn’t seen with his own eyes in an entire lifetime. My lifetime. “There it is,” he said softly. “Home sweet home. Man, I really missed it.” I’d missed it, too, I realized. And I’d been gone less than a day. As our five ships moved into formation and turned homeward, toward Earth, I checked my scope and saw that the three unmanned Interceptors were heading in the opposite direction, out into space, toward whatever destination my father had programmed into them. I turned my gaze back to Earth and watched it begin to grow in size as we approached, until its blue curve completely filled the view outside of my spacecraft. My father sent a tactical map to the display screens inside our cockpits. “They’re dividing their forces in half again,” my father said over the comm. “See?

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

Shouting didn't help. Kathy keyed her landing skids down and strangled the thruster grips onto full. A flagman on the ground dove sideways. The fighter whizzed past the man's prostrate body, her skids unfolding only feet above his head. She nearly beheaded three others as she scrambled to decrease power to her belly thrusters and fight spinning into a sideways slide. Suddenly a group of people came into view at the edge of the tarmac. “Oh shit!” She killed her belly thrusters completely. The skids hit the cement like a Boeing 747 with no tires. She slammed back into the seat. Metal screeched against cement. Everything shook like a jackhammer. The big Shimeron slued sideways then slammed her into her harness as it lurched to a halt. Every part of her including her hands shook. She took a deep breath and tried to calm her tremors enough to power down. “You did it, O’Donnell,” she said as the gyros whined down in a groan of sympathy. She removed her helmet and pushed back her flight suit hood only to have a pile of sopping wet sparkling hair flop out over her face. She swiped it away and released the canopy. A blast of cool ocean air filled the cockpit. Carefully, she peered over the side of the cockpit. Bodies lay strewn about on the ground. A few prostrate forms moved. Kathy sank down into the seat with a grimace. Great, you just killed your welcoming committee, you twit.

The P-39 "Aircobra" had its big, heavy, Allison piston engine mounted behind its single-seat cockpit. The spinning propeller shaft ran between the pilot's legs up to the nose. It was one of the least successful fighter aircraft of WWII.

Maybe there will be a day where anyone who suggests they are gay or straight will be labeled archaic and extreme, or at least evoke a hearty laugh from the terms’ irrelevance to the quest for fulfillment and inner peace.

What message is implied by a masculine man’s sexual power to want women and men? Is the fear that he cannot be easily tamed, punished or rewarded?

Your bisexuality is cute, but the world I advocate for has limits that I adhere to — being bisexual, fluid, pan, sapio, no label, whatever the f*ck you are, challenges our systems, and the choices I have made personally.

We will NEVER permit healthy visibility of your circumstances. Polyamory will never trend, and projections show monogamy increasing as the cost of living goes up.

What if we taught kids that safe sex includes STD-free bodies—yes, but also the careful selection of partners as to not absorb, carry, and accumulate the spiritual debris of an unhealed person, which is more disruptive in the long term than an unwanted pregnancy.

The condition of our soul and the fitness of our mind can reveal cancer or vitality in our body.

Let’s sail these uncharted waters for sixty years and leave the BS for the philosophers.

The elixir of life, I think, starts in our mind—the willful exploration of the subconscious and choosing our experience over external factors. Perhaps the elixir originates from an internal throbbing—an ache—a voice driving us to search. Dare we DECIDE to give voice to our journey and elect to be cured by the peace and confidence in purpose it brings.

But if God-less materialist philosophies are treated as “religions” for free exercise purposes, why shouldn’t official efforts to teach them in lieu of religious beliefs be deemed an establishment of religion? Official sponsorship of a nontheistic ideology that takes the place of religion has the same effect on nonadherents as endorsing a particular theistic religion. Indeed, the Supreme Court foresaw the potential for secularism itself becoming established as a state religion. In one of the first cases abolishing school prayer, the Supreme Court acknowledged that “the State may not establish a ‘religion of secularism’ in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus ‘preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.’” We have to consider whether our public schools, as currently constituted, are doing exactly that. In my view, the increasing diversity of attitudes and beliefs among Americans in the past few decades makes the states’ continued insistence on a monopoly over publicly funded education constitutionally untenable. This arrangement can no longer finesse the challenge of neutrality, as it did when the religious attitudes of Americans were more monolithic. Nor is it capable of producing genuine religious neutrality. It has deformed and impoverished the very nature of the educational enterprise either by purging it of any moral dimension or by trying to substitute for religion a secular value system that is at war with religion. It is reducing public schools to cockpits for a vicious, winner-take-all culture war over the moral formation of our children. The point is not that we should mandate Christianity in the state’s one-size-fits-all educational monopoly. It is that the diversity of religious belief should lead us to jettison the monopoly. The rise of militant secularism in the United States

How can NTs be so powerful? There are two reasons they can do this: One is that their desensitization allows them to balance their attention without being distracted by any one overwhelming stimulus. Second, they reduce the size of the incoming data through symbolic filtering, so they only process the symbols, not the whole. Like the cockpit who is checking the airspeed dial (not actually feeling the air), they only bring in the minute essentials.

We had been in the air almost two hours when we got a visual on the ship. It was churning along, on a northerly course, at a good clip in heavy swells. One of the helicopter’s crewmen opened the sliding door on the right side so we could all get a good view of the vessel. We circled it three times, hoping to be able to pick a safe spot to lower me onto. Cables, booms, masts, stacks, and cranes were everywhere—from stem to stern. We cruised along at an altitude of 100 feet...." (Page 266)

This book is about our lives and legacy as men connected through blood and– should nature have its way– the ultimate choice we as sons face to preserve our father’s legacy or to torch it to build something new.

God has nothing to do with church business.