World Pilot Day Quotes

At least I want to get up early one more morning, before sunrise. Before the birds, even. I want to throw cold water on my face and be at my work table when the sky lightens and smoke begins to rise from the chimneys of the other houses. I want to see the waves break on this rocky beach, not just hear them break as I did in my sleep. I want to see again the ships that pass through the Strait from every seafaring country in the world - old, dirty freighters just barely moving along, and the swift new cargo vessels painted every color under the sun that cut the water as they pass. I want to keep an eye out for them. And for the little boat that plies the water between the ships and the pilot station near the lighthouse. I want to see them take a man off the ship and put another one up on board. I want to spend the day watching this happen and reach my own conclusions. I hate to seem greedy - I have so much to be thankful for already. But I want to get up early one more morning, at least. And go to my place with some coffee and wait. Just wait, to see what's going to happen.

What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds and cold of the Outer Banks in less than two hours time, was one of the turning points in history, the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined. With their homemade machine, Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without a doubt that man could fly and if the world did not yet know it, they did. Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started.

I hate all electronic toys: cell phones, e-mail, PalmPilots, handheld Global Positioning System equipment, and the whole raft of gadgets that intrude on solitude. When I was a kid I used to disappear into the woods all day. Now I can walk in the wilderness without wasting my valuable time. As I hike along I can call anyone in the world, schedule an appointment, take a picture of me standing next to a tree and then send the person a map so he or she can join me there. Solitude has been snuffed out.

It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and head-lands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, – for a man lost, – do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

You can curse the moon Curse the day your’re born But the pilot of your plane is you We’re all in this world, by a greater plan Look up, lift your wings, Because you can The Light Said (The First Song album)

I believe the signs we are seeing today most certainly point to the rapture of the church. These are indeed end times. I believe that one day very soon, Jesus Christ Himself will come in the clouds and millions of people will see their battles end... I believe that followers of Christ from all around the world, of every race, creed, color, age, economic standing, and religious affiliation will vanish in a single moment of time ... gone. The Word of God describes it as a 'twinkling of an eye.' In an instant, there will be boardrooms without directors, classrooms without teachers, hospitals without doctors and nurses, cars without drivers, airplanes without pilots, and loved ones disappearing mid-sentance and mid-morning coffee. I am sure that complete chaos won't even begin to describe it. I imagine a worldwide crescendo of screaming voices. When the dust clears, everone left on earth will know emptiness beyond description and a greater sense of evil than has ever been thought to exist. It will be the condition of things. Overwhelming sadness, confusion, loss, and insecurity will be worldwide. It will happen at that time, even as it did on that September morning.

the dysregulation of the body’s neurobiological system, that impairs one’s ability to pay selective attention to one’s surroundings. The world becomes a land without street signs, the individual a car in bad need of a tune-up. The vastness of the attentional system partially accounts for the variation of ADD “types.” Where one individual needs an oil change, the next needs spark plugs replaced. Where one individual is withdrawn and overwhelmed by stimuli, the next is hyperactive and can’t get enough stimuli. Where one is frequently anxious, the other is depressed. To compensate, each develops his or her own coping strategies that developmentally add to, or subtract from, the brain’s various subsystems. So Mr. A becomes a stand-up comedian, and manic. Ms. B becomes an architectural wizard with obsessive-compulsive traits. Their offspring become a sculptor and a stunt pilot. None of them can balance their checkbook. And all of them wish they had more time in the day. With such diversity in the disorder,

I’m, if possible, more convinced than ever that this is the most beautiful part of the world, but it’s an almost metallic, two-dimensional beauty with no warmth or gentleness to trick or woo you into liking it. Its great bleak loveliness is just there, hard and sharp, forever and ever.

Earl ‘Blue’ Archer, the Kalinin Bay VC-3 Avenger pilot who suffered a serious back injury amid the brambles of flak over Kurita’s fleet, went home and kept quiet about his infirmity. He soon realized that he had a choice to make: he could take an eighty or ninety percent disability benefit from Uncle Sam and begin a life of inactivity, or he could take three or four aspirin twice a day and continue flying planes in the naval reserve.

And I was also proud of living up to NASA’s belief that I was capable of commanding the world’s spaceship. On my first day at JSC, I hadn’t been an obvious candidate. I was a pilot. I didn’t have much leadership experience to speak of at all. Worse: I was a Canadian pilot without much leadership experience. Square astronaut, round hole. But somehow, I’d managed to push myself through it, and here was the truly amazing part: along the way, I’d become a good fit. It had only taken 21 years.

War is always a negative-sum outcome. It subtracts, removes, empties. No one who has witnessed combat can, with any honesty, describe it another way. “We know more about war than we know about peace,” said five-star general Omar Bradley in an Armistice Day address a few years after the end of World War II, “more about killing than we know about living.” Think of it like this. For every soldier’s grave in places such as Arlington or Anzio or Normandy, there are more forgotten burial sites for civilians—parents, children, newlyweds, and newborns—claimed in some way by the same fighting.

First Edition: January 2018 In honor of Martin Nils “Marty” Richert, my uncle and a retired Air Force colonel.  A kind and humble man, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery during the rescue of a Marine pilot in the Vietnam War.  Marty later served with distinction in Berlin, Germany before the Berlin Wall came down.  He regularly traveled into the former East Germany and has told me many fascinating tales that captivate me to this day.  I credit Marty for planting the initial seeds of my love and fascination for Germany.  He’s a great man. Never was anything great achieved without danger. ​-Niccolo Machiavelli PART ONE The Call CHAPTER

Sandbags caused the fire’s temperature to drop straight away, but radioactive particles in the air increased sharply because more and more dust and debris was kicked into the air from the heavy falling bags’ impact. After the first day, Major General Antoshkin proudly told Shcherbina that 150 tons had been dropped into the reactor. He responded, “150 tons of sand for a reactor like that is like a BB shot to an elephant.”192 The General, taken aback, arranged for far more soldiers and pilots to be brought to the Exclusion Zone. These young pilots each flew many times over the reactor, and soon took to placing lead plates underneath their cockpit seats to minimise radiation exposure. Despite their homemade preventative measures, many pilots were fatally contaminated and died.

Let me take a little second to tell you as we see a prophecy that came true You see we need to believe that He literally bled through The clothes on His back His sweat the day was just like crimson rain Crimson stains tide bounty and the devil can't wash these stains away Who's He you ask, He's a friend of me Cause my inability He was sent for me I hear birds and trees they're all telling me It's a good thing He won Gethsemane Cause this enemy is too much for me And this flesh and world is triple teaming me It seems to be the very end I scream please oh please pass this cup from me! The thing is it did pass And it passes every day He took my cup from me and gracefully He drank the grave And I don't mean to speak of blasphemy when I say But I am speaking of the day when my God passed away, Okay? No wait wait wait no that's not it no that's not all I don't wanna leave you hanging This stories banging Against my throat and against these walls It can't be contained no it won't stay in here it will thrive Cause stories just don't die when the dead come alive

The other day I was at Depford, and saw a ship launched—she slipped easily into the water; the people on board shouted; the ship looked clean and gay, she was freshly painted, and her colours flying. But I looked at her with a sort of pity, “Poor ship!” I thought, “you are now in port and in safety; but ere long you must go to sea. Who can tell what storms you may meet with hereafter, and to what hazards you may be exposed; how weather-beaten you may be before you return to port again, or whether you may return at all!” Then my thoughts turned from the ship to my child. It seemed an emblem of your present state; you are now, as it were, in a safe harbour; but by and by you must launch out into the world, which may well be compared to a tempestuous sea. I could even now almost weep at the resemblance. But I take courage; my hopes are greater than my fears. I know there is an infallible Pilot, who has the winds and the waves at his command. There is hardly a day passes, in which I do not entreat him to take charge of you. Under his care I know you will be safe. He can guide you, unhurt, amidst the storms, and rocks, and dangers, by which you might otherwise suffer; and bring you, at last, to the haven of eternal rest!

America’s last step into the Vietnam quagmire came on November 22, 1963, when Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson was no real veteran. During World War II he used his influence as a congressman to become a naval officer, and, despite an utter lack of military training, he arranged a direct commission as a lieutenant commander. Fully aware that “combat” exposure would make him more electable, the ambitious Johnson managed an appointment to an observation team that was traveling to the Pacific. Once there, he was able to get a seat on a B-26 combat mission near New Guinea. The bomber had to turn back due to mechanical problems and briefly came under attack from Japanese fighters. The pilot got the damaged plane safely back to its base and Johnson left the very next day. This nonevent, which LBJ had absolutely no active part of, turned into his war story. The engine had been “knocked out” by enemy fighters, not simply a routine malfunction; he, LBJ, had been part of a “suicide mission,” not just riding along as baggage. The fabrication grew over time, including, according to LBJ, the nickname of “Raider” Johnson given to him by the awestruck 22nd Bomber Group.

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.

Suppose Chaos was king and the order we thought we detected in the world about us a mere phantasm of the imagination; where would that lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that a ten-pound weight did fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was not so. Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the convictions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the notion to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos—by Mind! The world was flat before geographers decided to think of it otherwise. The world was flat, and the Sun, tub-size, rose in the east and set in the west. The stars were little lights, studding a pellucid dome which barely cleared the tallest mountains. Storms were the wrath of gods and had nothing to do with the calculus of air masses. A Mind-created animism dominated the world then. More recently it had been different. A prevalent convention of materialistic and invariable causation had ruled the world; on it was based the whole involved technology of a machine-served civilization. The machines worked, the way they were designed to work, because everybody believed in them. Until a few pilots, somewhat debilitated by overmuch exposure to radiation, had lost then-confidence and infected their machines with uncertainty—and thereby let magic loose in the world.

All airplanes must carry two black boxes, one of which records instructions sent to all on-board electronic systems. The other is a cockpit voice recorder, enabling investigators to get into the minds of the pilots in the moments leading up to an accident. Instead of concealing failure, or skirting around it, aviation has a system where failure is data rich. In the event of an accident, investigators, who are independent of the airlines, the pilots’ union, and the regulators, are given full rein to explore the wreckage and to interrogate all other evidence. Mistakes are not stigmatized, but regarded as learning opportunities. The interested parties are given every reason to cooperate, since the evidence compiled by the accident investigation branch is inadmissible in court proceedings. This increases the likelihood of full disclosure. In the aftermath of the investigation the report is made available to everyone. Airlines have a legal responsibility to implement the recommendations. Every pilot in the world has free access to the data. This practice enables everyone—rather than just a single crew, or a single airline, or a single nation—to learn from the mistake. This turbocharges the power of learning. As Eleanor Roosevelt put it: “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” And it is not just accidents that drive learning; so, too, do “small” errors. When pilots experience a near miss with another aircraft, or have been flying at the wrong altitude, they file a report. Providing that it is submitted within ten days, pilots enjoy immunity. Many planes are also fitted with data systems that automatically send reports when parameters have been exceeded. Once again, these reports are de-identified by the time they proceed through the report sequence.*

The Soviet Union was the only nation involved in the Second World War to put women in the sky as fighter and bomber pilots, and what women they were! Products of the Soviet aviation drive of the 1930s, these young fliers were championed by Marina Raskova, the Amelia Earhart of the USSR. The day bombers and the fighter pilots (among the latter, Lilia Litviak, seen in cameo at the Engels training camp, was killed in an aerial dogfight during the war, but became history’s first female ace) eventually integrated with male personnel . . . but the night bombers remained all-female throughout their term of service and were fiercely proud of this fact. The ladies of the Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment went to war in the outdated Polikarpov U-2, an open-cockpit cloth-and-plywood biplane, achingly slow and highly flammable, built without radio, parachute, or brakes. (It was redesignated the Po-2 after 1943; I was unable to pinpoint an exact date for the change, and continued to use the term U-2 for clarity.) The women flew winter and summer, anywhere from five to eighteen runs per night, relying on stimulants that destroyed their ability to rest once off-duty. They flew continuously under these conditions for three years, surviving on catnaps and camaraderie, developing the conveyor belt land-and-refuel routine that gave them a far more efficient record than comparable night bomber regiments. The women’s relentless efficiency waged ruthless psychological warfare on the Germans below, who thought their silent glide-down sounded like witches on broomsticks, and awarded them the nickname “die Nachthexen.” Such dedication took a toll: the regiment lost approximately 27 percent of its flying personnel to crashes and enemy fire. The Night Witches were also awarded a disproportionately higher percentage of Hero of the Soviet Union medals—the USSR’s highest decoration.

The goal was ambitious. Public interest was high. Experts were eager to contribute. Money was readily available. Armed with every ingredient for success, Samuel Pierpont Langley set out in the early 1900s to be the first man to pilot an airplane. Highly regarded, he was a senior officer at the Smithsonian Institution, a mathematics professor who had also worked at Harvard. His friends included some of the most powerful men in government and business, including Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell. Langley was given a $50,000 grant from the War Department to fund his project, a tremendous amount of money for the time. He pulled together the best minds of the day, a veritable dream team of talent and know-how. Langley and his team used the finest materials, and the press followed him everywhere. People all over the country were riveted to the story, waiting to read that he had achieved his goal. With the team he had gathered and ample resources, his success was guaranteed. Or was it? A few hundred miles away, Wilbur and Orville Wright were working on their own flying machine. Their passion to fly was so intense that it inspired the enthusiasm and commitment of a dedicated group in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. There was no funding for their venture. No government grants. No high-level connections. Not a single person on the team had an advanced degree or even a college education, not even Wilbur or Orville. But the team banded together in a humble bicycle shop and made their vision real. On December 17, 1903, a small group witnessed a man take flight for the first time in history. How did the Wright brothers succeed where a better-equipped, better-funded and better-educated team could not? It wasn’t luck. Both the Wright brothers and Langley were highly motivated. Both had a strong work ethic. Both had keen scientific minds. They were pursuing exactly the same goal, but only the Wright brothers were able to inspire those around them and truly lead their team to develop a technology that would change the world. Only the Wright brothers started with Why. 2.

Give the Audience Something to Cheer For Austin Madison is an animator and story artist for such Pixar movies as Ratatouille, WALL-E, Toy Story 3, Brave, and others. In a revealing presentation Madison outlined the 7-step process that all Pixar movies follow. 1. Once there was a ___. 3 [A protagonist/ hero with a goal is the most important element of a story.] 2. Every day he ___. [The hero’s world must be in balance in the first act.] 3. Until one day ___. [A compelling story introduces conflict. The hero’s goal faces a challenge.] 4. Because of that ___. [This step is critical and separates a blockbuster from an average story. A compelling story isn’t made up of random scenes that are loosely tied together. Each scene has one nugget of information that compels the next scene.] 5. Because of that ___. 6. Until finally ____. [The climax reveals the triumph of good over evil.] 7. Ever since then ___. [The moral of the story.] The steps are meant to immerse an audience into a hero’s journey and give the audience someone to cheer for. This process is used in all forms of storytelling: journalism, screenplays, books, presentations, speeches. Madison uses a classic hero/ villain movie to show how the process plays out—Star Wars. Here’s the story of Luke Skywalker. Once there was a farm boy who wanted to be a pilot. Every day he helped on the farm. Until one day his family is killed. Because of that he joins legendary Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi. Because of that he hires the smuggler Han Solo to take him to Alderaan. Until finally Luke reaches his goal and becomes a starfighter pilot and saves the day. Ever since then Luke’s been on the path to be a Jedi knight. Like millions of others, I was impressed with Malala’s Nobel Peace prize–winning acceptance speech. While I appreciated the beauty and power of her words, it wasn’t until I did the research for this book that I fully understood why Malala’s words inspired me. Malala’s speech perfectly follows Pixar’s 7-step storytelling process. I doubt that she did this intentionally, but it demonstrates once again the theme in this book—there’s a difference between a story, a good story, and a story that sparks movements.

Put yourself in the way of grace,' says a friend of ours, who is a monk, and a bishop; and he smiles his floating and shining smile. And truly, can there be a subject of more interest to each of us than whether or not grace exists, and the soul? And, consequent upon the existence of the soul, a whole landscape of incorruptible forces, perhaps even a source, an almost palpably suggested second universe? A world that is incomprehensible through reason? To believe in the soul---to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view---imagine the consequences! How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world! How easily I travel, about halfway, through such a scenario. I believe in the soul---in mine, and yours, and the blue-jay's, and the pilot whale's. I believe each goldfinch flying away over the coarse ragweed has a soul, and the ragweed too, plant by plant, and the tiny stones in the earth below, and the grains of earth as well. Not romantically do I believe this, nor poetically, nor emotionally, nor metaphorically except as all reality is metaphor, but steadily, lumpishly, and absolutely. The wild waste spaces of the sea, and the pale dunes with one hawk hanging in the wind, they are for me the formal spaces that, in a liturgy, are taken up by prayer, song, sermon, silence, homily, scripture, the architecture of the church itself. And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable. Now winter, the winter I am writing about, begins to ease. And what, if anything, has been determined, selected, nailed down? This is the lesson of age---events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, rises again but different. Whereas what happens when one is twenty, as I remember it, happens forever. I have not been twenty for a long time! The sun rolls toward the north and I feel, gratefully, its brightness flaming up once more. Somewhere in the world the misery we can do nothing about yet goes on. Somewhere the words I will write down next year, and the next, are drifting into the wind, out of the ornate pods of the weeds of the Provincelands. Once I went into the woods to find an almost unfindable bird, a blue grosbeak. And I found it: a rough, deep blue, almost black, with heavy beak; it was plucking one by one the humped, pale green caterpillars from the leaves of a thick green tree. Then it vanished into the shadows of the leaves and, in the same moment, from the crown of the tree flew a western bluebird---little aqua thrush of the mountains, hundreds of miles from its home. It is a moment hard to top---but, I can. Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?

grader. After the first snow fell the state road crews stopped where the national park boundaries began. But it was a wonderful park, rich in mountains, for it took in parts of the Mentasta, Nutzotin and Chugach ranges, as well as supporting the entire Quilak range. It boasted several hundred miles of coastline along Prince William Sound, site of one of the richest salmon fisheries in the world, and you could always fly in to fish, if you could fly, or could afford to pay someone who did. A shame that so few could, Park rats told each other, some even with straight faces. There were dozens of airstrips within the Park, some sworn to by FAA charts, but between the time the chart was printed and the time the pilot with a ruptured oil line looked for them they would be overgrown by a hungry forest or eroded out of existence by a change of course in the Kanuyaq.

Although it felt much longer, within a few seconds the pilot came over the loudspeaker. He spoke in German and Roxanne couldn’t discern much from the tone of his voice. Then she heard the passengers who could understand him audibly gasp. This made her even more frightened. Finally, in somewhat broken English, the pilot announced that airspace over the United States was closed and he had been ordered to land in Gander, Newfoundland. He offered no further explanation.

Our thoughts create our reality! Our thoughts cause our feelings and emotions! Thoughts are images in our mind! Under hypnosis, a person can be given suggestions to hallucinate in all five senses and they will experience whatever suggestions the hypnotist gives them to experience. Think for a second that 98% of the world lives in a subtle form of hypnosis all the time. Automatic pilot is hypnosis. Day dreaming is hypnosis. Not owning your 100% personal power all the time is a subtle form of hypnosis. Being run by the subconscious mind is a subtle form of hypnosis. Being over emotional is a subtle form of hypnosis. Being run by the inner child is hypnosis.

Here’s the scene: The three of us are by the Olympic-sized pool. The Latina with the thick waist is hovering in the shade of the veranda up by the house, her eyes on Frank in case he might want something, but so far he doesn’t and he hasn’t offered anything to me. If he did, I would ask for sunblock because standing here next to his pool is like standing on the sun side of Mercury. Gotta be ninety-six and climbing. Behind us is a pool house larger than my home, and through the sliding glass doors I can see a pool table, wet bar, and paintings of vaqueros in the Mexican highlands. It is air-conditioned in there, but apparently Frank would rather sit out here in the nuclear heat. Statues of lions dot the landscape, as motionless as Joe Pike, who has not moved once in the three minutes that I have been there. Pike is wearing a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, faded Levi’s, and flat black pilot’s glasses, which is the way he dresses every day of his life. His dark brown hair is cut short, and bright red arrows were tattooed on the outside of his deltoids long before tattoos were au courant. Watching Joe stand there, he reminds me of the world’s largest two-legged pit bull.

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 BIGGER PICTURE   During World War II, thousands in factories across the United States constructed parachutes. From the worker’s point of view, the job was tedious. It required stitching endless lengths of colorless fabric, crouched over a sewing machine eight to ten hours a day. A day’s work produced a formless, massive heap of cloth with no visible resemblance to a parachute. In order to motivate workers and keep them concerned with quality, the management in one factory held a meeting. Management informed workers each day of the approximate number of parachutes that had been strapped to the back of pilots, copilots, and other “flying” personnel the previous day. They learned just how many men had jumped to safety from disabled planes as a result of their high-quality work. The managers encouraged their workers to see the big picture on their job. As a second means of motivation, the workers were asked to form a mental picture of a husband, brother, or son who might be the one saved by the parachute they sewed. That factory held one of the highest levels of quality on record!3 Don’t let the tedium of each day’s chores and responsibilities wear you down so you only see the “stitching” in front of you. Keep your eyes on the big picture. Focus on why you do what you do and who will benefit from your work, including those you don’t know and may never meet. You may not have all the answers to the question, “Why am I here?” but you can rest assured, the Lord does! Ultimately, the Bible tells us we will be in heaven for eternity—and that is the biggest picture of all! God is preparing us for heaven, just as He is preparing heaven for us. He is creating us to be the people He wants to live with forever. Whatever mundane tasks or trivial pursuits you undertake today, see them in the light of eternity. They will take on a whole new meaning!   “I GO TO PREPARE A PLACE FOR YOU. AND IF I GO AND PREPARE A PLACE FOR YOU, I WILL COME AGAIN AND RECEIVE YOU TO MYSELF; THAT WHERE I AM, THERE YOU MAY BE ALSO.” JOHN 14:2-3 NKJV

She had a small bit of knowledge of Morse code from her early days as a pilot, but she was on the tail end of the generation that was required to have some proficiency in it.

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.

During his extensive career as an airmail pilot with Aéropostale, Antoine served as the company’s station manager in barren Villa Bens. During the Second World War, although he was older than most, Saint-Exupéry joined the Free French Air Force. On July 31, 1944, as fate would have it, he disappeared on a reconnaissance mission flying a P-38 Lightning over the Mediterranean, somewhere south of Marseille. The body of a French pilot was found a few days after Antoine’s disappearance and was buried in Carqueiranne, France. After his death he became an icon and national hero throughout France. For a fleeting moment I wondered what anyone could do to pass the time of day at such a remote location…. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry used his time to write books! Today the word Aéropostale takes on an entirely new meaning. It has become the name of an American retailer of casual apparel for young people. Go figure….

Sometimes, just to see what was happening, my father would drive to the airport…. Before my birth, during the “Roaring 20’s” Newark Airport was the first major airport to serve the greater New York area. It was opened for traffic on October 1, 1928, on 68 acres of reclaimed marshland adjacent to the Passaic River. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey later took it over from the Army Air Corps and in 1948 started a major expansion and improvement program. Driving by and seeing activity from the road, we drove to where Eastern Airlines had a shiny new DC-3 on display, and as luck would have it, it was open to the public. It was an exciting moment when I boarded this aircraft and discovered that it was first constructed in 1934, the same year I was born. An example of modern technology, it was the first modern airliner and the forerunner of commercial aviation. The DC-3 was used during World War II, when the military version was identified as the C-47. After the war it continued as the primary carrier keeping Berlin open during the Berlin Airlift. On June 24, 1948 the Soviets prevented access to Berlin to the Western Allies’. Two days after the Soviet (Russians) announcement of the blockade, the United States Air Force airlifted the first cargo into Berlin. The American nicknamed the effort, "Operation Vittles," while British pilots dubbed the operation "Plain Fare." In July 1948, the operation was renamed the Combined Airlift Taskforce. Normal daily food requirements for Berlin were 2,000 tons with coal, for heating homes, being the number one commodity and two -thirds of all the tonnage flown in. The airlift ended on May 12, 1949 when the Soviets realized that the blockade wasn’t effective against the “Allied Resolve” and reopened the roads into Berlin.

The Dining Out is a formal affair rooted in ancient history. From pre-Christian Roman legions, to marauding Vikings, to King Arthur’s knights, a banquet to celebrate military victories has long been customary among warriors. British soldiers brought the practice to colonial America, where it was adopted by George Washington’s army. Close bonds between U.S. Army Air Forces pilots and Royal Air Force (RAF) officers during World War II cemented the custom in the U.S. military.

The Sea Witch’s Lament To really see what the sea witch had to go through, you must first remember what happens when you get your heart broken for the very first time. People always minimise it, say you’ll get over it, say first loves don’t matter as much as last ones, but that first heartbreak, that’s the death of your innocence. And you’re blindly walking in the darkness that’s trying to absorb you. A darkness that you have no tools or weapons to navigate, that is what the end of first love feels like. Some of us come out of that darkness still mostly whole, and those are the lucky ones.   Because some of us never come back at all. “And this was the story with the sea witch, the incredible ample-bodied being who was larger than life as a child, living her life with laughter and magic and joy. She spent her days learning how to look after the forgotten sea creatures that the merpeople considered too ugly or terrifying to tend to. Pilot fish and barracudas and eels were her friends, for they knew it was her they could always look to. Unfortunately for the sea witch, love comes for every woman. Just when we are sure we are safe from its clutches, it moves its way inside our hearts and we give ourselves completely to it, surrender in every way possible. This is why it is said love is to women what war is to men.   Sixteen-year-old Sea Witch fell in love with the then seventeen-year-old Mer-Prince. And he fell too for this impossible, wonderful, darkly magical girl from a different tribe who he knew his family would never approve of. You would hope it would be that simple, that when two people give each other their hearts, the world falls away and lets them be, but that is rarely the case. Love is as complicated as the truth.   So when his father presented him with an ultimatum, with a choice to give up his future kingdom and Ursula, Triton chose his kingdom. A part of him was too cowardly and too haughty to live the way she did, simply and protecting everything the merpeople threw away. So the sea witch was left to wander this darkness alone. And she never ever came out of it. To save herself from destruction, she blindly grabbed at her only lifeline, that which armoured what was left of her ruined heart by choosing the destruction that her mother, the sea, had given to her in her blood. The sea witch was never born evil, she became that way because she couldn’t let loose her emotions. Instead, she buried them deep and let them fester and turn into poison. This, this is the damage not grieving properly for first love can do. It can consume and destroy and harden all the goodness inside of you.   In the sea witch’s story, she had no one to turn to. But you, my darling, have an army of all of the stars, to fill your grief-filled days with the comfort you can hold onto. You are not alone. With this endless universe above you that has given you the gift of existence. You are not alone.

After failing to come home the previous day, at last Francesca pilots their boat back from Ringrock, arriving just when Sarah and Libby have finished eating dinner.

One night, when camping at the head of one of its branches, they heard a chorus of howls emanate from the surrounding woods. “When we were all asleep,” Lawson wrote, in the Beginning of the Night, we were awaken’d with the dismall’st and most hideous Noise that ever pierc’d my Ears: This sudden Surprizal incapacitated us of guessing what this threatening Noise might proceed from; but our Indian Pilot, (who knew these parts well) acquainted us that it was customary to hear such Musick along the Swamp-Side, there being endless Numbers of Panthers, Tygers, Wolves, and other Beasts of Prey, which take this Swamp for their abode in the Day, coming in whole Droves to hunt the Deer in the Night, making their frightful Ditty ’til Day appears, then all is still in other Places.

I WOULD NEVER FORGET the day you slipped away. A small lift of your chin and our eyes met. I only saw emptiness in a place where a wistful vulnerability used to collide with wonder. Now, a hollowness of a bottomless pit. In your eyes, I’d never seen your shade of green so dim. It caused my stomach to fall into the same somber eclipse, spiraling faster and faster with no end, no walls, only darkness. And then you averted your gaze. The flesh from my bones, the blood in my veins, the oxygen in my lungs, all of it crumbled, breaking into small pieces yet still holding on by a thread—the thread was my heart. It pumped on auto-pilot as if it couldn’t associate with the rest of my body. It’s thumping sounded in my ears, and I wished it would stop, but my heart was not ready to let go. It continued with the same steady beat, refusing to give up what was right in front of me. Maybe your eyes will return to mine, I thought—well, prayed. And I waited. Two seconds passed. Then three—waiting as my body weakened from your disconnection, and my heart continued to pump. Four. And then your back was to me. Whatever we’d had no longer existed, but I remembered everything clearly, and it wasn’t fair. Could I have accepted the hollow look in your eyes over the wonder? Surely, anything you had to offer would be better than nothing. If only you had turned back around. Had you even noticed me? And then you took a step in the opposite direction. You were gone, left in obscurity and I couldn’t bring you back, but my heart still maintained a steady beat, pumping along to a rhythm of crimson hope. “Stay with me,” you had said over and over. Who would have thought you would be the one to take a step into oblivion? I’m screaming now, can you hear me?Why didn’t you stay with me? I didn’t get to kiss you goodbye. You were gone, and even though you were only twenty feet away, I missed you. It was entirely possible you’d wake up and turn back around, or I’d wake up. Either way, it was a nightmare. I forced my eyes closed. I couldn’t watch you walk away, each step drawing more distance and less of a chance of you coming back. The darkness was better, anyway, and if I held my lids closed tight, I could see stars. I focused on the yellow and orange horizon behind my eyelids, pretending it was a sunset through the bitterness. The only warmth was the water gathering in the corners of my eyes. The tears struggled for a moment, fighting the same lie as my beating heart. I wished I could switch places with you, because I didn’t deserve a world once blessed by your light, and you didn’t deserve this at all. But this is what I deserved. In the beginning, I’d thought you’d be fun, and I’d thought I could leave you effortlessly. It was me who ripped hearts out, but now mine was the one bleeding. The walls surrounding me had been durable, indestructible, before you. And with no more walls, and no more you, I was slowly suffocating. When it came down to you and me, I’d never thought you’d be the one to slip away.

Women have come a long way , since that day on September 7th 1968 , when they burnt myriad symbolic feminine products , including mops and bras , as a mark of protest . The women wanted to call world-wide attention to women's rights and women's liberation ! Today women are making headlines each and every day as the makers and creators of positive change in all walks of life . Be it as doctors , pilots , engineers , artists , writers , musicians, innovators, teachers , astronauts , researchers, managers , private or government employees , designers , scientists , dancers, singers, entrepreneurs , architects , bus-drivers , nurses , chefs , actors, athletes , politicians , or home-makers , women have been and are continuing to prove themselves that they are equal to or better than men in all walks of life ! A big 'Salute ' to all the women in the world !

Life is always at risk of slipping by unnoticed. If the days and months and years feel as if they are moving too quickly, focused attention might be one remedy. Giving something your undivided attention is a way of bringing it to life and assuring that you don’t float through time on automatic pilot.

The battle of Leyte Gulf was short, lasting only from October 23–26, 1944. But don’t let the duration fool you. The Philippine Sea, around the chain of islands where the battle was fought, was a roiling cauldron for those four days. On the morning of the 23rd, that sea held the largest assemblage of ships, in terms of tonnage, the world had ever seen. By the evening of the 26th, Leyte Gulf had taken more tonnage to its murky depths than in any other naval battle in history. The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, 12 destroyers, one destroyer escort, over 600 planes, and 10,500 sailors and pilots. The Allied forces, on the other hand, lost one light carrier, two escort carriers, two destroyers, one destroyer escort, around 200 planes, and a little more than a thousand men. As a result of this devastating blow, Japan never again launched a major naval offensive.

Franz tipped his wing and looked down on the P-38 he had wounded. It was circling downward, its engine coughing black smoke. Suddenly the hood of its canopy tumbled away in the slipstream. The pilot stood in the cockpit then dove toward the rear of the wing. The draft sucked his body under the forked tail. He free-fell from twelve thousand feet, passing through the clouds. “Pull it!” Franz shouted at the American, urging him to open his chute. When the pilot’s parachute finally popped full of air, Franz felt relief. The pilot drifted lazily downward while his P-38 splashed into the sea. Franz flew lower and saw the P-38 pilot climb into a tiny yellow raft against the whitecaps. Franz radioed Olympus to tell them to relay the American’s position to the Italians. He guessed they were seventy kilometers west of Marettimo and asked if the island could send a boat to pick up the man. For a second, Franz considered hovering over the man in the raft like an aerial beacon to steer a boat to the spot, but he shook the thought from his mind. It would put him at risk. If a prowling flight of enemy fighters found him, Franz knew he, too, could be shot into the sea. Franz and Willi departed the scene, leaving the pilot in his raft to fate. As they flew away, Franz wished the man a strong westerly wind. The American who looked up from the raft was Second Lieutenant Conrad Bentzlin, a young man from a large Swedish-American family in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He was quiet and hardworking, having taught himself English in high school. He had paid his way through the University of Minnesota by working for the government’s Civilian Conservation Corps program, cutting firebreaks in the forests of northern Minnesota. Among his buddies of the 82nd Fighter Group, Bentzlin was known as “the smartest guy in the unit.” Far from shore Bentzlin floated alone. A day later, another flight of P-38s flew over him and, through a hole in the clouds, saw him waving his arms from a raft. But he was in the middle of the sea and they could do nothing. Bentzlin would never be seen again.*

bring some curiosity to each moment you have with the people in your life, especially those you know well and perhaps take for granted. This takes practice, but it’s not hard to get better at it. “How was your day?”—“Fine” needn’t be the end of a conversation. It is your sincere interest that will motivate folks to respond. You might follow up with something a little more playful like, “What was the most fun thing that happened today?” Or, “Did anything surprising happen today?” And when someone makes a casual reply you can dig deeper: “Can I ask you more about that… I’m so curious and not sure I really understand it fully…” Try to put yourself in this person’s place and imagine what they have experienced. Engaging conversations often come from this perspective-taking alone, and curiosity can be contagious. You might find that the more interested you are in others, the more interested they become in you, and you might also be surprised how fun this process can be. Life is always at risk of slipping by unnoticed. If the days and months and years feel as if they are moving too quickly, focused attention might be one remedy. Giving something your undivided attention is a way of bringing it to life and assuring that you don’t float through time on automatic pilot. Noticing someone is a way of respecting them, paying tribute to the person they are in that exact moment. And noticing yourself, checking in about how you move through the world, about where you are now and where you would like to be, can help you identify which people and pursuits most need your attention. Attention is your most precious asset, and deciding how to invest it is one of the most important decisions you can make. The good news is you can make that decision now, in this moment, and in each moment of your life.

You feel like you're the king of creation in an A-10. You're up front and the plane itself--wings, engines, rudders--is way back. You sit at the end of the long snout in a fishbowl wide and bright to the world and the only thing in your head-up display is a little rubbery smudge of nose. It's really just you, slung out there. That's why pilots like Leo Pell loved the ship; you really fly her, you're really airborne, on the wind. It's World War II stuff, Jugs and Bostons lowlevel over the hedgerows of occupied Europe.

Avalanche As if they weren’t suffering enough, on the morning of 29 October an avalanche suddenly cascaded down the steep rocky slopes above them and engulfed the fuselage as the survivors slept. They remained entombed in the tiny space for three days until they managed to poke a hole in the roof of the fuselage with a metal pole. By the time they got out, eight more people had died under the snow. Three more were to die in the following weeks. Hiking out After they had heard the radio news about the search being called off, many passengers knew that they would have to get themselves out of the mountains if they were to survive. The avalanche expressed that fact even more plainly. During the flight they had heard the co-pilot announce that they had passed Curicó. That meant that the Chilean countryside ought to be just a few kilometres away to the west. Probably just over the high peak they were on. Several survivors made brief scouting missions, but their weakened state and the altitude combined to make it gruelling work. There was no way that all of them would be able to walk over and out of the mountains.

It was 7 a.m. on 19 February 1979 and sunny in Santa Monica. The three passengers who followed their pilot into the little Cessna 172 were in high spirits, and not just because of the weather. The day before, Norman Ollestad, just eleven years old, had won Southern California Slalom Skiing Championship. His father, Norman Senior, 43, was an incredibly driven and charismatic man who encouraged his son to go right to the edge in life – and then see what was on the other side. Ollestad Senior had driven his son back home to the coast for hockey practice the same evening as his slalom triumph. And now, the day after, he had chartered the plane and pilot to return to the resort of Big Bear so his son could collect his trophy and get in a little extra ski training. The pilot climbed into his seat and put on his headphones. Norman Jnr was stepping into the back seat when his dad pointed up front. Norman couldn’t believe it – he was going to sit next to the pilot! His dad slipped into the back

Twenty-seven years later It wasn’t until 2006 that Norman had the courage to look up the National Transportation Safety Board’s Accident Report for the crash and read the transcription of the pilot’s radio conversation with air traffic control. They had been doomed almost from takeoff. The pilot was using an underpowered plane with insufficient instruments on a rough day. He didn’t get a weather briefing or file a flight plan. He shouldn’t have taken off let alone headed into the storm. Thirty seconds into the flight he seemed lost and he was warned three times by air traffic control not to continue flying as he was. Big Bear airport was at an altitude of 2,100 m (7,000 ft) and was unmanned. Even with the right instruments and a modern plane it would have been all but impossible to land that day. Norman also went back up to the mountain to where Sandra had fallen. He paid his respects and continued up to the site of the crash. He was surprised, but even from that high vantage point he couldn’t see the meadow where he had been rescued. The big ridge blocked it out. So how had he known where to head for that day? Had he sensed the most likely place to find another human being? Was he lucky? Or maybe, just maybe, someone was looking out for him. This story is a brief retelling of the events in Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad, published by HarperPress. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 2009 Norman Ollestad.

In the handheld world, however, simplicity ruled. Pressing one button on the Palm III instantly showed the day's schedule-processor power had nothing to do with it. Windows CE, they pointed out, just meant "the complexity of Windows in the palm of your hand.

Sorry if I seem a bit blasé about it. My sister says I’m not allowing myself to grieve, but the reality is that there’s nothing I can do about it, and I’ve never been the type to fixate on the things I can’t change in the world. She’s a lawyer, so that concept is entirely foreign to her. In her opinion, everything is negotiable, even terminal cancer.” “Is it painful?” Darger asked, not thinking. Her mouth was running on auto-pilot while her brain wrestled with the idea of Fowles being at death’s door.

I realised that day that when the animation of the person we were is stripped out of the vessel we have used to pilot our way through life, it leaves little more than an echo or a shadow in the physical world.

Enterprise deals or “how to lose your freedom in 5 minutes” Being able to use our product for sales prospecting, I decided to go after some big names at the enterprise level. After one week I had booked meetings with companies like Uber, Facebook, etc. This is where the fun begins…or not… I spent 3 months doing between 4 to 9 meetings for each enterprise company I had booked meetings with. Every meeting leads to the next one as you go up the chain of command. And then comes the pilot phase. Awesome you might think! Well, not really… Working with enterprise-level clients requires a lot of custom work and paperwork. And when I say “a lot” I mean a sh*t ton of work. You need an entire department to handle the legal aspect, and hire another 10 people to entirely change your tech department to meet their requirements. During 4 months I went from being super excited to work with the most famous companies in the world to “this deal will transform our company entirely and we’ll have to start doing custom everything”. Losing my freedom and flexibility quickly became a no-go. The issue here is, with all these meetings I thought that they would adapt to our standards. That they understood from the start that we were a startup and that we couldn’t comply with all their needs. But it doesn’t work like this. It’s actually the other way around even though the people you meet working at these companies tell you otherwise. The bottleneck often comes from the legal department. It doesn’t matter if everyone is excited to use your product, if you don’t comply with their legal requirements or try to negotiate it will never work out. To give you an example, we had enterprise companies asking us to specifically have all our employee’s computers locked down in the office after they end their day. Knowing that we’re a remote company, it’s impossible to comply with that... If you want to target enterprise accounts, do it. But make sure to know that you need a lot of time and effort to make things work. It won’t be quick. I was attracted to the BIG names thinking that it would be an amazing way to grow faster, but instead, I should have been 100% focused on our target market (startups, SMBs).

Setting propaganda and postwar myopia aside, the Luftwaffe pilots were not only brave men defending their country from obliteration; they were men of honor who still fought by and believed in a code of chivalry, reminiscent of the First World War, when enemy pilots often saluted each other in battle, and wounded enemies were allowed to escape to fight another day.

what are we to say about the Catholic military chaplain who administered mass to the Catholic bomber pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945? Father George Zabelka, chaplain for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb squadrons, later came to repent of his complicity in the bombing of civilians, but his account of that time is a stunning judgment on the church’s acquiescence in violence. To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest as 1 see it…. I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best—at worst it was religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who did them…. Catholics dropped the A-bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan. One would have thought that I, as a Catholic priest, would have spoken out against the atomic bombing of nuns. (Three orders of Catholic sisters were destroyed in Nagasaki that day.) One would have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn’t bomb Catholic children. I didn’t. I, like the Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plane, “The Great Artiste,” was heir to a Christianity that had for seventeen hundred years engaged in revenge, murder, torture, the pursuit of power, and prerogative violence, all in the name of our Lord. I walked through the ruins of Nagasaki right after the war and visited the place where once stood the Urakami Cathedral. I picked up a piece of censer from the rubble. When I look at it today I pray God forgives us for how we have distorted Christ’s teaching and destroyed his world by the distortion of that teaching. I was the Catholic chaplain who was there when this grotesque process that began with Constantine reached its lowest point—so far.4 It is difficult to read such accounts without recalling the story of Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem, because “the things that make for peace” were hidden from their eyes (Luke 19:41

I was captivated by the description of the Navy test pilots, young hotshots catapulting off aircraft carriers, testing unstable airplanes, drinking hard, and generally moving through the world like exceptional badasses. The idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite—and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God.

I don’t know how long I sat there staring at the flimsy sheet of airmail paper. Having grown up as an only child, I was shocked to discover in one day that I might have two brothers in other parts of the world. If this one had survived, I thought. Perhaps he had been hidden with a kind family in the hills, to be reunited with his mother when hostilities ceased. That is what I tried to believe. But now I was dying to know more. My father never spoke of his wartime experiences, but I knew from my mother that he had been a pilot with the RAF and terribly brave, flying missions over occupied Europe until he was shot down and nearly died. I hadn’t even known this happened over Italy. One didn’t tend to think of Italy as a scene of bombing missions.

Eisenhower knew that keeping the U-2 pilots from wearing military uniforms was a contrivance, but he knew that one day, the program would be revealed: that the fliers were civilians would carry weight with world opinion. A nonmilitary President might not have been so sensitive to the distinction. As

He explained that six pilot hospitals were already being computerised. If that worked, the system would be rolled out to the rest of the NHS. ‘By when?’ Mrs Thatcher demanded. ‘By 1992,’ he replied on a February day in 1988. ‘But that’s longer than it took to win the Second World War,’ the Prime Minister exploded.

It was early spring of 1997, about five years into my career as a journalist, a day of dark skies and cold rain. Peter Diamandis and I had gotten together for the very first time at a rundown diner on the outskirts of Chinatown, San Francisco. The diner was long and narrow, and we were seated toward the rear of the room. I was sitting with my back to the building’s far corner, Peter with his back to the rest of the restaurant. And the rest of the restaurant was staring at him. For twenty minutes, Peter had been getting more and more excited while telling me about his newly launched endeavor: the XPRIZE, a ten-million-dollar competition for the first team to build a private spaceship capable of taking three people into space twice in two weeks. Already, the Sharpie had come out. There were charts on napkins, graphs on placemats, a healthy rearrangement of condiments — the ketchup marking the end of the troposphere, the mustard the beginning of the mesosphere. About the time he got loud about how some maverick innovator working out of a garage somewhere was going to “take down NASA,” people began to stare. Peter couldn’t see them; I could. Twenty folks in the restaurant, all looking at him like he was stark raving mad. And I remember this: I remember thinking they were wrong. It’s hard to put my finger on why. Part of it was a strange hunch. Journalists tend to be cynical by nature and disbelieving by necessity. The job requires a fairly healthy bullshit detector, and that was the thing — mine wasn’t going off. More of it was that I had just come from a month in the Black Rock Desert, outside of Gerlach, Nevada, watching Craig Breedlove try to drive a car through the sound barrier. Breedlove’s effort was terrestrial-bound rocket science, for sure. The Spirit of America, his vehicle, was pretty much a miniature Saturn V — 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, 6 feet high, and powered by a turbojet engine that burned, well, rocket fuel. During those long days in the desert, I spent a lot of time talking to aerospace engineers. They all made one thing clear: Driving a car through the sound barrier was a lot harder than sending a rocket ship into low-earth orbit. In fact, when I asked Breedlove’s crew chief, former Air Force pilot turned aerospace engineer Dezso Molnar — who we’ll meet again later as the inventor of the world’s first flying motorcycle — what he was going to work on when all this was over, he said, “I want to do something easy, something relaxing. I think I’m going to build a spaceship.