I have a GPS that will provide me navigation support and let me access almost anything I need to know to continue on a safe flight. All these things are nice and helpful, and I would not enjoy flying as much if I did not have them. But there are two essential elements I can’t do without, and if they are not working, I’m not flying: SA and ADM.
We all seem to have challenges in managing all we want or need to get done in life, and as pilots we have many things to manage in order to be safe and have a good flight. Time management guru Peter Drucker said there are three rules for effective time management. They work well for pilots. These are also concepts I teach to my high school aviation students.
It was a Saturday morning and former NASA astronaut Story Musgrave was leaning over drilling holes in his AirCam kit being built with my high school aviation class students. We connected with Story when he was a speaker at one of our EAA Chapter 1240 fundraising dinners supporting our youth aviation efforts.
The day was clear and the winds were calm—a perfect day for Mike and me to go flying in my Cessna 152. There was one problem: I forgot the booster seat for then 8-year-old Mike. So there he was in the right seat, not able to see over the control panel and barely able to see out his window. It didn’t seem to matter much to him; he was just enjoying a Saturday morning with his dad at 2,500 feet.
It all started with a pounding on the front door at 5:00 AM. We were living in a house inside Mount Rainier National Park. I was directing youth programs in the park and at the time coordinating helicopter support from the US Army Reserve 92nd “Hooker” squadron out of the Seattle area in Washington State. For the better part of the summer, we had access to 10 or more of the very big, twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook helicopters to fly materials and supplies into the back country for our youth projects.
It started with a phone call from a fellow teacher at one our middle schools. She had a student, Kayla, who was interested in aviation, and since I taught aviation at one of our county high schools, could I arrange a flight for Kayla?