You talk to the Mooney folks at Sun n Fun about it? Everyone I talked to, they knew the guy, and were still really shaken up by it. Like, they had to spend what seemed like an unbearable stretch of time not knowing whether this guy they’ve worked with for ages had died.

I’m an aircraft mechanic and an aspiring commercial pilot. At airshows, I’ve been asked if I’m married to one of the pilots, even with oil up to my elbows and a wrench in my pocket. If I’m wearing an airplane pin or shirt, I get asked if I’m a stewardess (or if they’re really progressive, flight attendant).

Once I was…

We did this with our old B-25 at Skydive Dallas. Except we took off the tail and popped them out the back. It's a laugh riot.

Basil! He's so awesome!
I was there in Dallas for the Collings visit too. Rode on Witchcraft on Sunday.

I love/hate that video. Love it because it's such a perfect example of how pants-soilingly scary hypoxia can be. Hate it because, well, it terrifies me.

I don't think any domestic regionals fly ATRs anymore. All cargo now in the continental 48.

Spent just $6000 to get mine, and that was paying full price for a rental. Own your own plane? Easy peasy.

Ahhhhhhhh, the chemtrails, I mean, wingtip vortices in the snow at 2:40.

Beautiful.

So. Much. Debt. I got my A&P first and I'm using that to fund my flight training, because I cannot even imagine holding 6 figures in debt, especially not for such a pittance of a salary.

"The people behind this stuff are putting in every known situation that has ever arisen, I assure you. There will still be situations beyond those, but I don't expect any pilot to get me out of a never-seen, never-conceived-of situation either."

Exactly, automated systems are only as good as the input they're given, and if the input goes away or is completely wrong, you're screwed.

"The aviation industry has been looking at the potential for single-pilot operations for quite some time to address concerns about future pilot shortages..."

Ohmigosh I really hope so.

The military contracts out *a lot* of flights these days. This 747 belonged to National Air Cargo and was transporting military vehicles out of Bagram. The footage was from a dashcam, just pure dumb luck that he happened to be there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_…

....if that bronco were bucking inside a small compartment filled with lots of sharp/hard objects, sure, I guess it would be just like that.
Plus there's the airsickness factor. I fly small planes in areas that are often ridiculously windy, and even I start getting queasy after a while.

Yeah, that is by far the worst interior I've ever seen.

Astronette, thankyouverymuch.

And smells like rotting tacos when it does, don't you think?

Right when this was all unfolding, I heard a local news station interviewing a man who seems to be their go-to guy for aviation stuff. The guy was clearly shaken and kept saying that if the plane was in fact bound for Mena, AR, that he knew who the pilot was. He also mentioned that the aircraft had recently had heavy…

Ok, again, the tower's not going to call emergency services on the tower frequency, so it wouldn't be on this recording, and maybe the pilot was too busy struggling with the impossible turn to make another radio call. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for that timeline.

And yeah, they're going to keep clearing…