Jet Pilot Quotes

This is stolen? We're in a stolen jet?" "Not stolen," said Donegan Bane from the co-pilot's seat. "Almost stolen," Gracious corrected. "Semi-stolen," said Donegan. "Quasi-stolen," said Gracious. Aurora's frown did not turn upside down. "So is it stolen or not?" Donegan and Gracious hesitated. "Yes," they both said together.

Love was like piloting a jet through a mountain range, blind. It was freeing and exhilarating, but at the same time, at any second the person risking their life piloting that plane could crash and burn, shattering into nothing but dust - all for one glorious ride.

Recently a pilot was practicing high-speed maneuvers in a jet fighter. She turned the controls for what she thought was a steep ascent—and flew straight into the ground. She was unaware that she had been flying upside down. This is a parable of human existence in our times—not exactly that everyone is crashing, though there is enough of that—but most of us as individuals, and world society as a whole, live at high-speed, and often with no clue to whether we are flying upside down or right-side up. Indeed, we are haunted by a strong suspicion that there may be no difference—or at least that it is unknown or irrelevant.

I have one dream: I want to get my jet pilot license, and take my jet to 40 000 feet, look down, and realise how small we are. Not for the kick of the G's but just to get the feeling of just for once flying above humanity.

But the aircraft a year ago had been different. It was not a squat, fat-bellied cargo plane but a needle-nosed single-pilot jet.

Then he went on to bore me with a lot of details about jet engines, the venturi effect, increasing lift by increasing camber with the flaps, and how after all four engines flame out the plane will turn into a 450,000-pound glider. Then since the autopilot will have trimmed out to fly a straight line, the glider will begin what the pilot calls a controlled descent. That kind of descent, I tell him, would be nice for a change. You just don't know what I've been through this past year.

Jet lag results from our rapid motion between time zones, across the lines that we have drawn on the earth that equate light with time, and time with geography. Yet our sense of place is scrambled as easily as our body’s circadian rhythms. Because jet lag refers only to a confusion of time, to a difference measured by hours, I call this other feeling ‘place lag’: the imaginative drag that results from our jet-age displacements over every kind of distance; from the inability of our deep old sense of place to keep up with our aeroplanes.

While some of these near-death experiences are marked by a sense of helplessness and passivity, even dissociation, in others there is an intense sense of immediacy and reality, and a dramatic acceleration of thought and perception and reaction, which allow one to negotiate danger successfully. Noyes and Kletti describe a jet pilot who faced almost certain death when his plane was improperly launched from its carrier: “I vividly recalled, in a matter of about three seconds, over a dozen actions necessary to successful recovery of flight attitude. The procedures I needed were readily available. I had almost total recall and felt in complete control.

The pilot of a new jet plane was winging over the Catskills and pointed out a pleasant valley to his second in command. “See that spot?” he demanded. “When I was a barefoot kid, I used to sit in a flat-bottomed rowboat down there, fishing. Every time a plane flew by I would look up and dream I was piloting it. Now I look down and dream I am fishing.

Do you remember our conversation? Do you remember the places we went and the things we saw? The bindery was our access, the point in space that contains all other points, and that night you were a boy unbound, a tiny astronaut, taking your first leap into an infinite and unknowable universe. For the first time you could see the voices of the things you'd been hearing for so long, all that clamorous matter vying for your attention. With your supernatural ears, you were able to perceive, with absolute clarity, the sinuous shapes and contours of the sounds that matter makes as it moves through space and time and mind. Some of these sounds were so beautiful they made you laugh out loud and clap your hands with delight, and others were so sad they made tears run down your face. And, oh, the visions we had! Container ships glittering on a moonlit night off the coast of Alaska. Pyramids of sulfur, rising yellow in the mist. The plundered moon and all its craters; globes and stars and asteroids; a jet black crow with a diamond tiara; a flock of rubber duckies, spinning through the Pacific gyres. At the sound of a footstep, a young girl freezes, and Andromeda sparkles in the firmament. Fires rage as the redwoods burn; and in the deep ocean, a pilot whale carries her dead baby on her nose, while sea turtles weep briny tears onto nets of plastic.

snuck into the vacant copilot’s room next to our victim, carrying a bucket with the sea cucumber. I crept through the room, being careful not to make any noise. I removed the sea cucumber and slid it into our victim’s toilet, being careful not to splash any water. The sea cucumber looked like a world record, giant turd. It was jet black, about fourteen inches long and thick around as a coke can. Neither of our pilots was a scuba diver and I guessed they would never suspect the giant turd was really a sea creature. The humongous turd impersonator lay motionless in the bottom of the toilet bowl, leaking a faint reddish dye. When they discovered the state of the toilet the pilots began a heated argument, blaming each other for not flushing the disgusting mound of excrement. This was a serious breach of etiquette for an officer and gentleman. The hapless pilots finally tried flushing and the toilet backed up and flooded the bathroom. They had to summon a plumber who immediately recognized the turd for what it was, a sea cucumber, and said it must have somehow crawled up through the pipes. Neither pilot ever guessed they were the victims of a practical joke. The prank was flawless and I still have the picture of the cucumber in their toilet.

All these rich people with their private-jet escape routes to New Zealand—maybe it’s the operational manager in me, but all I can think about are apocalypse logistics: What zombie pilot is going to fly all those planes, and which zombie air-traffic controller is going to help land them? And who is going to do all the ongoing work of cooking and cleaning and shopping? Is the New Zealand infrastructure prepared for this? And why would people in New Zealand allow planes full of potential plague-germ carriers onto their island, no matter how much money they have? Would money have value in the new postapocalyptic economy—or would toilet paper be worth even more? Do the pilot and crew who flew you to New Zealand get saved, or do they get barred at the security gate of the bunker?

Indeed, leading Airbus engineer Bernard Ziegler – an evangelist for fly-by-wire – was reputed to have exclaimed on one occasion, ‘My cleaning lady could fly it!’ (He could be forgiven for being more cautious than others, too; as a French air force pilot he had flown his jet fighter under a cable car in the ski resort of Chamonix, severing the cable and killing the occupants of three cars which crashed 500ft to ground.) The

Herr Reichsmarschall, it is no contraption. Guaranteed your personal and material support, I am convinced that in a few years there will be few propellered aircraft to be seen in the skies!

and I have seen them all, stars such as John Wayne (Jet Pilot with Janet Leigh), or George C. Scott (Not With My Wife, You Don't with Virna Lisi), or William Holden (The Bridges at Toko-Ri with Grace Kelly) all fly with their visors up and their oxygen masks dangling loose. I assume this is to let the cameras record them acting. No real pilot flies like that. Without a visor, the high altitude glare would blind me and

Whether the army was capable of carrying out such an operation was a question never asked. The officer corps had been repeatedly purged, those ousted replaced by some 2,000 Ba’thist-indoctrinated ‘educators.’ “I worked as a teacher in the staff college,” remembered Ibrahim Isma’il Khahya who, in 1966, became commander of the 8th Infantry Brigade. “My officers were mostly teachers, too. They weren’t ready for war.” The head of intelligence for the Golan district, Col. Nash’at Habash, had been kicked out and replaced by a mere captain, brother of a high-ranking Ba’th official. Ahmad Suweidani, the former military attaché in Beijing, had been boosted from colonel to lieutenant general and chief of staff. Though Syria’s 250 tanks and 250 artillery pieces were generally of more recent vintage than Israel’s, their maintenance was minimal. Supply, too, could be erratic; deprived of food, front-line troops had been known to desert their posts. The air force was particularly substandard. An internal army report rated only 45 percent of Syria’s pilots as “good,” 32 percent as “average,”‘ and the remainder “below average.” Only thirty-four of the forty-two jets at the Dmair and Saiqal airfields were operational. Yet, within the ranks, morale had never been higher. Capt. Muhammad ‘Ammar, an infantry officer serving in the fortress of Tel Fakhr, recalled: “We thought we were stronger, that we could cling to our land, and that the Golan was impenetrable. We were especially heartened by the unity between Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.” Another captain, Marwan Hamdan al-Khuli, heard that “we were much stronger and would defeat the enemy easily.

The Egyptian air force has ceased to exist.”6 As the picture of the battlefield became clear in Israel, in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world it grew deeply obfuscated. Officers at the ravaged air bases were aware that a terrible tragedy had transpired. The pilot Hashem Mustafa Husayn, stationed at Bir al-Thamada, described the feeling: Some 30 seconds from the end of the [first] attack, a second wave of planes arrived…We ran about the desert, looking for cover, but the planes didn’t shoot. They merely circled, their pilots surprised that the base was completely destroyed and that no targets remained. We were the only targets…weak humans scurrying in the desert with handguns as our only means of self-defense. It was a sad comedy…pilots of the newest and best-equipped jets fighting with handguns. Five minutes after the beginning of the attack the [Israeli] planes disappeared and a silence prevailed that encompassed the desert and the noise of the fire that destroyed our planes and the airbase and the squadron. They completed their assignment in the best way possible, with a ratio of losses-100 percent for us, 0 percent for them.

The mandatory protocol for cockpit door opening in American airspace had been in place since the attacks on New York and Washington. One flight attendant blocked the aisle leading from the front of the passenger cabin, standing before the drawn privacy curtain. A second flight attendant was a backup, standing on the other side. The armored door to the flight deck could be opened only from the inside, or outside from a keypad. The code was changed for every flight, and was known only to the pilots. On U.S. domestic flights, a wire screen was unfurled and secured, sealing off the vestibule from the first-class cabin while the pilots moved about, one at a time, outside the cockpit. On an international flight aboard a twin-aisle jet like the Airbus 330, the guard post was a ten-foot-long vestibule in front of the flight deck door. On one side was a bathroom, on the other, a bar and coffee galley.

Similar weapons used through the ages include a huge array of sticks, arrows, and javelins. In modern times you might consider an AK-47, F-35 Jets and Javelin Missiles. Though perhaps not as respected as the Asian ways, each of these weapons can be practiced by its user to a level of skill which resembles art. (Surely piloting a multimillion dollar jet fighter at supersonic speeds is at least as respectable as mastering Aikido?)

Physical reality is a balancing trick, a performance high, an intensely concentrated speed test of complex skill sets. We’re each an F-22 pilot flying fifty feet off the deck through an impossibly narrow canyon. Finding myself in the unusual situation of having been blown up, I felt as if I were flying that jet fifty feet off the deck through the narrow canyon upside down.

Bob Hoover, a famous test pilot and frequent performer at air shows, was returning to his home in Los Angeles from an air show in San Diego. As described in the magazine Flight Operations, at three hundred feet in the air, both engines suddenly stopped. By deft maneuvering he managed to land the plane, but it was badly damaged although nobody was hurt. Hoover’s first act after the emergency landing was to inspect the airplane’s fuel. Just as he suspected, the World War II propeller plane he had been flying had been fueled with jet fuel rather than gasoline. Upon returning to the airport, he asked to see the mechanic who had serviced his airplane. The young man was sick with the agony of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face as Hoover approached. He had just caused the loss of a very expensive plane and could have caused the loss of three lives as well. You can imagine Hoover’s anger. One could anticipate the tongue-lashing that this proud and precise pilot would unleash for that carelessness. But Hoover didn’t scold the mechanic; he didn’t even criticize him. Instead, he put his big arm around the man’s shoulder and said, “To show you I’m sure that you’ll never do this again, I want you to service my F-51 tomorrow.

The mind is very powerful. Therefore, it requires firm guidance. A powerful jet plane needs a good pilot; the pilot of your mind should be the wisdom that understands its nature. In that way, you can direct your powerful mental energy to benefit your life instead of letting it run about uncontrollably like a mad elephant, destroying yourself and others.

Yet this physical life is a unique experience, and it is entrancing from the perspective of expanded awareness. It is utterly lovely, delicious and strange, challenging, and wildly exciting. The razor focus required to remain in the collective physical is intensely satisfying for the Whole Self. Physical reality is a balancing trick, a performance high, an intensely concentrated speed test of complex skill sets. We’re each an F-22 pilot flying fifty feet off the deck through an impossibly narrow canyon. Finding myself in the unusual situation of having been blown up, I felt as if I were flying that jet fifty feet off the deck through the narrow canyon upside down.

The Al-Fayoum We finally arrived at a private airfield heading towards a huge hangar. With a click of a button from the Batmobile’s dash, the hangar doors slid open as our vehicle came to a screeching halt. P honked loudly until several attendants came rushing towards the entrance; they had been rudely awakened by the bright lights and their employer’s incessant honking. The enormous hangar doors opened, revealing a fancy emerald jet, its nose pointing in our direction. P’s arrival had set off a commotion. Ground personnel, pilots and two stewards busied themselves firing up the plane for departure. We had no idea where we were heading until P dispatched his instructions to the pilots. I was fascinated by P’s commanding power and equally in awe of the glimmering flying machine. My jaw dropped as I was mesmerized by the action buzzing around me. I was at a loss for words. Andy held out his hand to me as we exited the Batmobile before proceeding towards the red carpet and into the Al-Fayoum (P’s private Jet).

Four days before the declaration of World War II, on August 27, 1939, the test pilot van Chaim flew the first jet aircraft in the world, the Heinkel 178. Only a small circle of people directly concerned knew of this event, which for that time was of great importance. Exactly a year later, on August 27, 1940, the first Italian jet plane, the Caproni-Campini made its first flight. It reached 300 mph, and the event received great propaganda.

Suppose you were crossing the ocean in a supersonic jet-liner and you wandered into the cockpit. You certainly would not know how to fly the plane, but you would not find it difficult to distract the pilot and cause a problem. In the same way, your conscious mind cannot operate your body, but it can get in the way of proper operation.

When he suddenly banked to the left, I gasped. The jerk laughed and did it again. “Would you stop?” “Jet streams are a little crazy.” “You can feel that?” “Hold the yoke.” I looked down at the steering wheel thingie and how it moved. “I’m good.” “Afraid?” “Yep. I’m good with it. A healthy fear keeps you humble.” “Would you prefer to sit on my lap?” “You keep your filthy pilot fantasies to yourself, buddy.” He tipped his head back. “Seriously. Just try it.” “My mom used to say that to me to get me to eat peas. Didn’t like them either.

This is a billiard table. An easy, flat, green billiard table. And you have hit your white ball and it is travelling easily and quietly towards the red. The pocket is alongside. Fatally, inevitably, you are going to hit the red and the red is going into that pocket. It is the law of the billiard table, the law of the billiard room. But, outside the orbit of these things, a jet pilot has fainted and his plane is diving straight at that billiard room, or a gas main is about to explode, or lightning is about to strike. And the building collapses on top of you and on top of the billiard table. Then what has happened to that white ball that could not miss the red ball, and to the red ball that could not miss the pocket? The white ball could not miss according to the laws of the billiard table. But the laws of the billiard table are not the only laws, and the laws governing the progress of this train, and of you to your destination, are also not the only laws in this particular game.

Flights out of Omaha were canceled. With thirty thousand people who had come for the Berkshire weekend missing flights and wanting to leave as soon as possible, it looked as if we would be delayed at least two days. We held a family conference and within an hour Jeff had chartered a private jet for us. The next morning we took a ten-minute ride to the local airport and boarded in minutes—no wait, no lines, no luggage hassle, no TSA body scans and searches. We had two engines, two pilots, a flight attendant, and a good lunch. Seven-year-old Ava spoke for everyone when she declared she never wanted to fly any other way again. Whereas it took ten hours to reach Omaha from Newport Beach, California, including hours of delay in Dallas due to thunderstorms, we got home in two hours.

IT WAS ALMOST December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought. Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen. Frightened was the way he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice. He had seen it both times. Squinting toward the sky, he had seen the sleek jet, almost a blur at its high speed, go past, and a second later heard the blast of sound that followed. Then one more time, a moment later, from the opposite direction, the same plane. At first, he had been only fascinated. He had never seen aircraft so close, for it was against the rules for Pilots to fly over the community. Occasionally, when supplies were delivered by cargo planes to the landing field across the river, the children rode their bicycles to the riverbank and watched, intrigued, the unloading and then the takeoff directed to the west, always away from the community. But the aircraft a year ago had been different. It was not a squat, fat-bellied cargo plane but a needle-nosed single-pilot jet. Jonas, looking around anxiously, had seen others—adults as well as children—stop what they were doing and wait, confused, for an explanation of the frightening event. Then all of the citizens had been ordered to go into the nearest building and stay there. IMMEDIATELY, the rasping voice through the speakers had said. LEAVE YOUR BICYCLES WHERE THEY ARE. Instantly, obediently, Jonas had dropped his bike on its side on the path behind his family’s dwelling. He had run indoors and stayed there, alone. His parents were both at work, and his little sister, Lily, was at the Childcare Center where she spent her after-school hours. Looking through the front window, he had seen no people: none of the busy afternoon crew of Street Cleaners, Landscape Workers, and Food Delivery people who usually populated the community at that time of day. He saw only the abandoned bikes here and there on their sides; an upturned wheel on one was still revolving slowly. He had been frightened then. The sense of his own community silent, waiting, had made his stomach churn. He had trembled. But it had been nothing. Within minutes the speakers had crackled again, and the voice, reassuring now and less urgent, had explained that a Pilot-in-Training had misread his navigational instructions and made a wrong turn. Desperately the Pilot had been trying to make his way back before his error was noticed. NEEDLESS TO SAY, HE WILL BE RELEASED, the voice had said, followed by silence. There was an ironic tone to that final message, as if the Speaker found it amusing; and Jonas had smiled a little, though he knew what a grim statement it had been. For a contributing citizen to be released from the community was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure.

One jet has all of us for the first time Time to reap what I have labored for many years Years have shown me that I was heading in the right direction Direction is in the pilot’s Head-Up Display Display indicates our destination Destination was determined by me a long time ago until now Now we live in the status of Happiness Happiness Exist

Q: Where does a sailor go when he’s sick? A: To the dock. Q: Why did the robin get a library card? A: It was hoping to find some bookworms. Q: Why did the pilot paint his jet? A: He thought it was too plane. Q: What did the girl snake say to the boy snake? A: “Will you be my boa-friend?” Q: How do artists get to work? A: They go over the drawbridge.

DARPA has funded research programs on “human-machine teaming,” envisioning, for example, a piloted fighter jet flying alongside several autonomous drones that are an additional set of eyes and ears for the human pilot.

But along with the importance of work, he also believed in the magic of flight. He was a helicopter pilot, after all, so he particularly loved seeing me steer these jets over the marshy flats at ungodly speeds.

Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and Gossamer at others, slow asthma lalasses on a Wednesday but with a gun to the head deadline on a Friday. Imagine a jet plane, the funds for which were held up by Congress, designed by poets, riveted together by Musicians, supervised by executives fresh out of business school, to be piloted by wannabes with attention Deficiencies.

Karajan’s pulse-rate while conducting Beethoven’s Overture, Leonora No. 3. Interestingly, his pulse-rate showed the greatest increase during those passages which most moved him emotionally, and not during those in which he was making the greatest physical effort. It is also worth noting that recordings of his pulse-rate whilst piloting and landing a jet aircraft showed much smaller fluctuations than when he was conducting.3 Music is said to soothe the savage breast, but it may also powerfully excite it.

This is a billiard table. An easy, flat, green billiard table. And you have hit your white ball, and it is travelling easily and quietly towards the red. The pocket is alongside. Fatally, inevitably, you are going to hit the red and the red is going into that pocket. It is the law of the billiard table, the law of the billiard room. But, outside the orbit of these things, a jet pilot has fainted, and his plane is diving straight at that billiard room, or a gas main is about to explode, or lighting is about to strike. And the building collapses on top of you and on top of the billiard table Then what has happed to that white ball that could not miss the red ball, and to the red ball that could not miss the pocket? The white ball could not miss cording to the laws of the billiard table. But the laws of the billiard table are not the only laws, and the law governing the progress of this train, and of you to your destination are also not the only laws in this particular game.

Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and gossamer at others, slow as molasses on a Wednesday but with a gun-to-the-head deadline on a Friday. Imagine a jet plane, the funds for which were held up by Congress, designed by poets, riveted together by musicians, supervised by executives fresh out of business school, to be piloted by wannabes with attention deficiencies. What are the chances that such an aeroplane is going to soar? There you have the making of a movie, at least as I saw it at the Skunk Works.

I had my pilots license. Now I wish I would have taken the time to hire someone. Maybe I wouldn’t have crashed my seven-million-dollar jet trying to get back home.

Airlines pay high salaries to pilots despite having autopilots. They do it because humans can handle unforeseen events. When a roof blows off an airliner over the Pacific or when a passenger jet loses both engines to a flock of geese over Manhattan, only a human can handle such crises. These emergencies have been reported in the press, and in each of them, experienced pilots managed to land their airliners by improvising solutions. No autopilot can do that. Betting your money on an automatic system is like betting your life on an autopilot. The first unexpected event will make your account crash and burn.

So, it was wear a cloth tie and sit in an office for forty years - or cheat death and fly fast jets. No contest, really." Pg. 31

The next aircraft to appear were a pair of Mirages which attacked the anchorage at 9.45 am. Thereafter raids seemed continuous, except for a short break for lunch. The helicopter pilots, landing-craft and Mexeflote crews bravely continued with the offload. It was uncanny to see a Sea King helicopter, with a gun or pallet of ammunition slung underneath, purposefully flying to its appointed landing site, while a pair of jets flashed by pursued by missiles and streams of tracer. The scenery and the bright sunshine, like a glorious day in the Western Islands of Scotland, added to the air of unreality.

Question #102 Imagine you're a pilot flying a Boeing 747 jumbo jet across the Atlantic.  The plane has 500 passengers on board, including the pilot.  Of the 500 passengers, only 200 are male and the rest are female.  Of the 200 male passengers, only 10 were older than 60 years old, 100 were younger than 10 years old, and the rest were between 10 and 60 years old.  What's the gender and age of the pilot?

There comes a time in every relationship when the fires of passion begin to die down as they are slowly quenched by the rains of indifference and familiarity. They cannot be allowed to go out completely though, as love without passion is like a jet without a pilot, destined to crash and burn in a spectacularly messy fashion. As a couple, you must fan the flames with the winds of lust and kinky rubber catsuits, or whatever other nastiness rocks your boat. Anything else isn’t living, it’s existing.

Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and Gossamer at others, slow as molasses on a Wednesday but with a gun to the head deadline on a Friday. Imagine a jet plane, the funds for which were held up by Congress, designed by poets, riveted together by Musicians, supervised by executives fresh out of business school, to be piloted by wannabes with attention Deficiencies.

The hassle over the word 'proof' boils down to one question: What constitutes proof? Does a UFO have to land at the River Entrance to the Pentagon, near the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices? Or is it proof when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed? Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story even under the threat of court-martial? Does this constitute proof?

Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed the U.S Air Force’s secret investigation of UFOs in the early 1950s, wrote. “The hassle over the word 'proof' boils down to one question: What constitutes proof? Does a UFO have to land at the River Entrance to the Pentagon, near the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices? Or is it proof when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed? Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story even under the threat of court-martial? Does this constitute proof?

Evidently, 500 million Euros being transferred into my pilot’s bank account wouldn't persuade him to flatten The Queen’s guards who had flanked my jet.

Crappy weather conditions moved back in while the jet jockeys were playing over Nam. Rain began to fall in sheets across the Flight Deck. We, the flight service personnel, had to stand in the downpour awaiting the recoveries. Soaked to the bone, my teeth were chattering. The A-4 Skyhawks came in first and taxied forward. I intentionally positioned myself in the exhaust path of the A-4s just to warm up. Because of the low ceiling, landing conditions were hazardous. A couple of aircraft missed the wire and had to rocket off the angle deck, circle around and try again. Lieutenant Commander Sonniksen caught the wire on his first attempt. I hate to admit it but the guy is one hell of a pilot.

On the Flight Deck this afternoon, a young plane captain, his mind obviously preoccupied with other matters, walked directly in front of an F-8 intake as the bird was turning up. He was instantly sucked off his feet and pulled down into the jet turbine tunnel. Fortunately, someone saw it happen and frantically signaled for the pilot to cut his engine. Once silenced, two squadron crew members crawled into the intake to rescue the dumb shit or what was left of him. They found his body wrapped around the generator hump directly in front of the turbine blades. He had miraculously avoided being chopped to pieces like steak in a meat grinder.

In reality, Edmond loved attention, and admitted to keeping his plane at Sabadell only to have an excuse to drive the winding roads to his home in his favorite sports car—a Tesla Model X P90D that Elon Musk had allegedly hand-delivered to him as a gift. Supposedly, Edmond had once challenged his jet pilots to a one-mile drag race on the runway—Gulfstream vs. Tesla—but his pilots had done the math and declined.

When the supersonic planes returned to base, pilots and mechanics puzzled over the tiny black dots that pitted the windshields. Test samples came back as organic material. The source: insects that had been sucked up into the stratosphere during Russian and Chinese nuclear tests and were just winging around the earth in the jet stream, seventy-five thousand feet up.

BITE tries to address many of these issues and lets the engineer focus on actual exploratory and regression testing—not the process and mechanics. Modern jet fighters have dealt with this information overload problem by building Heads Up Displays (HUDs). HUDs streamline information and put it in context, right over the pilot’s field of view. Much like moving from propeller-driven aircraft to jets, the frequency with which we ship new versions of software at Google also adds to the amount of data and the premium on the speed at which we can make decisions. We’ve taken a similar approach with BITE for regression and manual testing. We implemented BITE as a browser extension because it allows us to watch what the tester is doing (see Figure 3.35) and examine the inside of the web application (DOM). It also enables us to project a unified user experience in the toolbar for quick access to data while overlaying that data on the web application at the same time, much like a HUD.

Although the Israeli-licensed drones were not firing any missiles, piloted Russian jets working alongside them fired missiles after receiving intelligence, yet both Russia and Israel escaped international sanction. These drones did not directly kill anyone, and therefore were not legally classified as a weapon. This was a loophole being exploited by many nation-states because surveillance technology was moving much faster than laws could be written or enforced. Neither Russia nor Israel has ever faced accountability for their strange coalition in Syria. In September 2021, the United Nations estimated that more than 350,000 Syrians, including both civilians and combatants, had been killed since 2011, though the UN admitted that this number was an “under-count of the actual number of killings.