Pilot Student Quotes

At the front of the room, facing the students, will be the desk of Mr. porter. He'll be the last to receive a package with no return address. And in the middle of the room, one desk to the left, will be the desk of Hannah Baker. Empty. -pg 4

A fellow undergraduate student, majoring in history, as was I, who didn't care about the advanced aerodynamic principles of things like boundary layer separation during stalls and exactly why you might get detonation within the cylinders of the engine if the mixture was grossly improperly adjusted for a given power setting at a given altitude.

Whenever we talk about a pilot who has been killed in a flying accident, we should all keep one thing in mind. He called upon the sum of all his knowledge and made a judgment. He believed in it so strongly that he knowingly bet his life on it. That his judgment was faulty is a tragedy, not stupidity. Every instructor, supervisor, and contemporary who ever spoke to him had an opportunity to influence his judgment, so a little bit of all of us goes with every pilot we lose.

The flare is undoubtedly one place where aviation science and art frequently speak a different language. Even for the most experienced pilot, the judgement call of when to transition into the landing manoeuvre can be misjudged. It is a skill that only comes with practice and a right of passage that all students must endure along their journey. However, just as precision in parking a car improves with time and familiarity, the visual cues will begin to establish themselves in the pilot’s mind’s eye with greater exposure.

　　A former fighter pilot, teaching at an aeronautics university, discovered how this works in the classroom. One of his students had been a star in ground school but was having trouble in the air. During a training flight, she misinterpreted an instrument reading, and he yelled at her, thinking it would force her to concentrate. Instead, she started crying, and though she tried to continue reading the instruments, she couldn’t focus. He landed the plane, lesson over. What was wrong? From the brain’s perspective, nothing was wrong. The student’s mind was focusing on the source of the threat, just as it had been molded to do over the past few million years. The teacher’s anger could not direct the student to the instrument to be learned because the instrument was not the source of danger. The teacher was the source of danger. This is weapons focus, merely replacing “Saturday Night Special” with “ex-fighter pilot.” 　　The same is true if you are a parenting a child rather than teaching a student. The brain will never outgrow its preoccupation with survival.

Most people think that it is more difficult to fly a helicopter than an airplane. This is a myth. The myth survives because when a student pilot takes his or her first lesson in a small, single engine airplane, at the end of the hour of instruction the student can imagine that some day, way—way off in the future maybe, but someday—he will learn to fly the aircraft all by himself. When student pilots have their first hour of instruction in a small, single engine helicopter, they know that if they live to be one hundred they will never learn to fly it. They also believe this after their second lesson and into the third. The problem is the hover.

Men should not sleep on beds; they shall sleep wherever their tired knees gave up. We are stars! And stars produce heat! Let that never translate to a boring life. There is one object in the universe that eats up more light than any other design and that is a mattress that loves you too much. Things can kill without being crafty. The bedsheets are warm and kind and yet their comfort has killed more man than any murderous hand in history. A star that knows it is a star looks like a person who is always in transformation, figuring things out, exploring identities, and making a mess. They brush their hair back and rub their eyes. A heart in debate. A tongue that agreed on humor. Tired feet. A juggled mind. He might be a police officer turned trapeze artist turned pilot. A father who is also a volunteer, a brother, a warrior, a companion, a neighbor, a rival, and a student. We can see sweat leave our pores and so grow discouraged that we cannot see the progress of internal efforts. But do not be disheartened. Our souls do sweat. It just looks a lot like mundane life incidents that break us, such as the first step of the morning or simply walking home again.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them—if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix. Making mistakes is the key to making progress. Of course there are times when it is really important not to make any mistakes—ask any surgeon or airline pilot. But it is less widely appreciated that there are also times when making mistakes is the only way to go. Many of the students who arrive at very competitive universities pride themselves in not making mistakes—after all, that’s how they’ve come so much farther than their classmates, or so they have been led to believe. I often find that I have to encourage them to cultivate the habit of making mistakes, the best learning opportunities of all. They get “writer’s block” and waste hours forlornly wandering back and forth on the starting line. “Blurt it out!” I urge them. Then they have something on the page to work with. We philosophers are mistake specialists. (I know, it sounds like a bad joke, but hear me out.) While other disciplines specialize in getting the right answers to their defining questions, we philosophers specialize in all the ways there are of getting things so mixed up, so deeply wrong, that nobody is even sure what the right questions are, let alone the answers. Asking the wrongs questions risks setting any inquiry off on the wrong foot. Whenever that happens, this is a job for philosophers! Philosophy—in every field of inquiry—is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place. Some people hate it when that happens. They would rather take their questions off the rack, all nicely tailored and pressed and cleaned and ready to answer. Those who feel that way can do physics or mathematics or history or biology. There’s plenty of work for everybody. We philosophers have a taste for working on the questions that need to be straightened out before they can be answered. It’s not for everyone. But try it, you might like it. In

Stressed out' I wish I found some better sounds no one’s ever heard I wish I had a better voice that sang some better words I wish I found some chords in an order that is new I wish I didn't have to rhyme every time I sang I was told when I get older all my fears would shrink But now I’m insecure and I care what people think My name's Blurryface and I care what you think My name's Blurryface and I care what you think Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out We're stressed out Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young How come I’m never able to identify where it’s coming from I’d make a candle out of it if I ever found it Try to sell it, never sell out of it, I’d probably only sell one It’d be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose Same clothes homegrown a stone’s throw from a creek we used to roam But it would remind us of when nothing really mattered Out of student loans and tree-house homes we all would take the latter My name's Blurryface and I care what you think My name's Blurryface and I care what you think Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out We used to play pretend, give each other different names We would build a rocket ship and then we’d fly it far away Used to dream of outer space but now they’re laughing at our face Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money" Yeah We used to play pretend, give each other different names We would build a rocket ship and then we'd fly it far away Used to dream of outer space but now they're laughing at our face Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money" Yeah Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out Used to play pretend, used to play pretend, bunny We used to play pretend, wake up, you need the money Used to play pretend, used to play pretend, bunny We used to play pretend, wake up, you need the money We used to play pretend, give each other different names We would build a rocket ship and then we’d fly it far away Used to dream of outer space but now they’re laughing at our face Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money" Yeah

10/10/10 provides distance by forcing us to consider future emotions as much as present ones. • A 10/10/10 analysis tipped Annie toward saying “I love you” first to Karl. 4. Our decisions are often altered by two subtle short-term emotions: (1) mere exposure: we like what’s familiar to us; and (2) loss aversion: losses are more painful than gains are pleasant.     •  How many of our organizational truths are ideas that we like merely because they’ve been repeated a lot?     •  Students given a mug won’t sell it for less than $7.12, even though five minutes earlier they wouldn’t have paid more than $2.87! 5. Loss aversion + mere exposure = status-quo bias. • PayPal: Ditching the PalmPilot product was a no-brainer—but it didn’t feel that way. 6. We can attain distance by looking at our situation from an observer’s perspective. • Andy Grove asked, “What would our successors do?”     •  Adding distance highlights what is most important; it allows us to see the forest, not the trees. 7. Perhaps the most powerful question for resolving personal decisions is “What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?

Today’s equivalent is probably ‘get an engineering degree’, but it will not necessarily be as lucrative. A third of Americans who graduated in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) are in jobs that do not require any such qualification.52 They must still pay off their student debts. Up and down America there are programmers working as office temps and even fast-food servers. In the age of artificial intelligence, more and more will drift into obsolescence. On the evidence so far, this latest technological revolution is different in its dynamics from earlier ones. In contrast to earlier disruptions, which affected particular sectors of the economy, the effects of today’s revolution are general-purpose. From janitors to surgeons, virtually no jobs will be immune. Whether you are training to be an airline pilot, a retail assistant, a lawyer or a financial trader, labour-saving technology is whittling down your numbers – in some cases drastically so. In 2000, financial services employed 150,000 people in New York. By 2013 that had dropped to 100,000. Over the same period, Wall Street’s profits have soared. Up to 70 per cent of all equity trades are now executed by algorithms.53 Or take social media. In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. It had sixty-five employees, so the price amounted to $25 million per employee. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, which had thirteen employees, for $1 billion. That came to $77 million per employee. In 2014, it bought WhatsApp, with fifty-five employees, for $19 billion, at a staggering $345 million per employee.54 Such riches are little comfort to the thousands of engineers who cannot find work. Facebook’s data servers are now managed by Cyborg, a software program. It requires one human technician for every twenty thousand computers.

One school is changing the rules, giving kids a “happy meal” of a different sort. This lunch doesn’t come in a box printed with puzzles, but rather from a garden planted by the kids themselves. Alice Waters, a major proponent of the organic food movement who is credited with developing California Cuisine, piloted the Edible Schoolyard. Waters started the program in 1994 in Berkeley, an outgrowth of the Chez Panisse Foundation, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School.* Students turned the school’s parking lot into a garden, or an “edible schoolyard.” Teachers and students cleared the land and developed a garden to teach kids about the entire process of how food comes from the earth to their plates. Kids don’t just eat the food; they experience it. And they start to choose it over unhealthy food.

Would you care to share with the rest of the class what is so funny?” Madison gulped. Ms. Healy was staring hard at Madison’s PalmPilot, which was absolutely forbidden in class, along with cell phones, CD players, and any other distracting electrical equipment. Madison instantly started vamping. “Well, Ms. Healy, I was just musing on how ridiculous a scarlet would be today, and who would have to wear one--senators, actors, teachers, even a few of our presidents. In fact, there would probably be more people wearing the scarlet letter than not wearing it.” Ms. Healy’s cold blue eyes looked huge through her extra-magnified glasses. “This is funny?” Madison swallowed hard. “I guess it’s really more ironic, wouldn’t you say?” Ms. Healy, who knew Madison as a straight-A, straight-shooter kind of student, softened a little. “‘Ironic’ is indeed the perfect word for it,” she said with a brisk nod. “Now put the personal digital assistance away and pay attention, Ms. McKay.” As Ms. Healy walked back to the front of the room, Henry Cooney, Madison’s partner in chem lab, mouthed the words, “Nice save.” Madison wiped some imaginary sweat off her forehead with her hand and tried to focus once again on the lecture. She forced herself to keep her eyes glued to Ms. Healy and soon found herself wondering what had turned the teacher into such an old grump. She was clearly smart and sometimes very funny, in a droll sort of way. Take away those awful glasses, let her hair out of that tight metal barrette at her neck, and Ms. Healy could almost be considered attractive. Maybe she’d had some brush with failed love that had made her go sour. Or worse yet--what if she had never had any brush with love at all, and this dried-up old prune was what Ms. Healy had become?

The fondness of Britons for the uninhibited pilots was reciprocated by most of the Americans. Even those who had no real interest in aiding the British cause when they first enlisted in the RAF found themselves admiring the bravery and determination of the public in standing up to Hitler. “They were, without a shadow of a doubt, the most courageous people that I have ever known,” said one American. “Although their cities were in shambles, I never heard one Briton lose faith.” Another U.S. pilot declared: “To fight side by side with these people was the greatest of privileges.” After the war, Bill Geiger, who’d been a student at California’s Pasadena City College before he came to Britain, recalled the exact moment when he knew that the British cause was his as well. Leaving a London tailor’s shop, where he had just been measured for his RAF uniform, he noticed a man working at the bottom of a deep hole in the street, surrounded by barricades. “What’s he doing?” Geiger asked a policeman. “Sir,” the bobby replied, “he’s defusing a bomb.” Everyone standing there—the bobby, pedestrians, the man in the hole—was “so cool and calm and collected,” Geiger remembered. He added: “You get caught up in that kind of courage, and then pretty soon you say, ‘Now I want to be a part of this. I want to be part of these people. I want to be a part of what I see here and what I feel here.’ ” AS

It has been eight to 11 years since the pilot first walked into Embry-Riddle and he is now making less than $35,500 a year.  The assistant manager at Taco Bell makes more than he does and he does not have $200,000 in student loan debt.

His gift was instilling the "Big Picture" in his students, i.e., teaching us to not get mired down in minutiae but be aware of all that was going on around us." Pg. 35

For a scientist, the only valid question is to decide whether the phenomenon can be studied by itself, or whether it is an instance of a deeper problem. This book attempts to illustrate, and only to illustrate, the latter approach. And my conclusion is that, through the UFO phenomenon, we have the unique opportunities to observe folklore in the making and to gather scientific material at the deepest source of human imagination. We will be the object of much contempt by future students of our civilization if we allow this material to be lost, for "tradition is a meteor which, once it falls, cannot be rekindled." If we decide to avoid extreme speculation, but make certain basic observations from the existing data, five principal facts stand out rather clearly from our analysis so far: Fact 1. There has been among the public, in all countries, since the middle of 1946, an extremely active generation of colorful rumors. They center on a considerable number of observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas, the physical traces left by these machines, and their various effects on humans and animals. Fact 2. When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumors, the extraterrestrial myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of the scholars of past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological description place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts. Fact 3. The entities human witnesses report to have seen, heard, and touched fall into various biological types. Among them are beings of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged creatures, and various types of monsters. Most of the so-called pilots, however, are dwarfs and form two main groups: (1) dark, hairy beings – identical to the gnomes of medieval theory – with small, bright eyes and deep, rugged, "old" voices; and (2) beings – who answer the description of the sylphs of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy-faith – with human complexions, oversized heads, and silvery voices. All the beings have been described with and without breathing apparatus. Beings of various categories have been reported together. The overwhelming majority are humanoid. Fact 4. The entities' reported behavior is as consistently absurd as the appearance of their craft is ludicrous. In numerous instances of verbal communications with them, their assertions have been systematically misleading. This is true for all cases on record, from encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversations with airship engineers during the 1897 Midwest flap and discussions with the alleged Martians in Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere. This absurd behavior has had the effect of keeping professional scientists away from the area where that activity was taking place. It has also served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones. Fact 5. The mechanism of the apparitions, in legendary, historical, and modern times, is standard and follows the model of religious miracles. Several cases, which bear the official stamp of the Catholic Church (such as those in Fatima and Guadalupe), are in fact – if one applies the deffinitions strictly – nothing more than UFO phenomena where the entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs rather than with space or engineering.

Rules are often contrasted with standards.5 A ban on “excessive” speed on the highway is a standard; so is a requirement that pilots of airplanes be “competent,” or that student behavior in the classroom be “reasonable.” These might be compared with rules specifying a 55-mph speed limit, or a ban on pilots who are over the age of seventy, or a requirement that students sit in assigned seats.

Laurence G. Paquin Middle School, a school for pregnant girls and girls who already have babies, became the first Baltimore school to implement a pilot program to provide Norplant in its clinic. All but five of the 350 students at the school are Black. Although other contraceptives are touched on in counseling sessions, the girls are urged to try Norplant.

As a flight instructor, I found that most student pilots have no business being in or anywhere near an airplane. It’s just not for everyone, and the number who actually complete flight school is a very small percentage of those who start. Not all of my students were bad, though. There were a few good ones that showed up on time, read the materials they were assigned, and were teachable.

There were three kinds of students going through Pre Flight in Pensacola. First, there were the OIs or Officers under Instruction. They were already commissioned Naval Academy or NROTC, and lived as junior officers. Next were the AOCs or Aviation Officer Candidates. They had college degrees and were commissioned as Ensigns upon graduation from Pre Flight. During Pre Flight training they were officially cadets and treated as such. Last and probably least were the NAVCADS. At the end of Pre Flight, they received a letter of completion and stayed cadets until they completed flight training. Only then were they commissioned. Each class was made up exclusively of one type of student. That is, even in Pre Flight NAVCADS and AOCs were not mixed together in a class. There is a book titled “The Second Luckiest Pilot in the World”, an anthology of flying stories. One chapter was about a NAVCAD going through flight training in the late forties. The author nailed it when he wrote that NAVCADS were in their own world. The officers didn’t associate with them because they weren’t officers. The enlisted guys didn’t associate with them because they were going to be officers. The result was a very tight knit group.

Pia taught fourth-grade princesses, superheroes and villains found at the Kshama Sawant International Elementary School near Greenlake. That building took up the whole block and had about five hundred students. She’d been teaching for a while. It was one of the few jobs that got a little extra salary because of the special training required. That list was short and included physicians and nurses, teachers, and pilots. Teaching also included a bonus of four hundred a month extra, which Pia spent on travel, and her cat. Others had hobbies they loved, or personal projects.

Stories from Beyond the Sea – “I could not believe my good luck!” from Page 31 “Not only was she stunningly beautiful but she was also witty, flirtatious and at the same time understanding and loving, I couldn’t believe my good fortune and did all I could to convince her to stay with me in the United States. After getting married to my young wife Ursula, in a small town in upstate New York, and thinking that the US Navy would be a better option than returning to a life at sea on merchant ships, I took the navy exam to become a student pilot. As a commissioned officer with the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade (LTJR) I enjoyed many benefits that the aviation cadets didn’t get, including having basic living quarters. Having had some prior experience flying the right hand seat in a DC-3 when I was in Liberia, I took to aviation, my new endeavor, like a duck to water.