"Somewhere in their training, some yayhoo had told them that they should put the airplane in a landing attitude and keep it there until touchdown. I guess altitude is controlled by power. Here comes my grandfather. They are just plain WRONG!"
"Montaine and I shared something that day at the Sussex, New Jersey airshow. We were both wrong."
"...Odds are that you already have an excess of speed, so use that instead of power in order to control the bounce and turn it into another touchdown without the landing-lengthening use of power that they taught you at Acme (and if you ever wondered why I place so much importance on the dead-stick landing… think about it)."
The words were hardly out of my mouth when I began to think about how often I quote other pilots. “Holy Cow”, I thought. “I’m just a flippin’ tape recorder!”
"That propeller which graces the front end of most of our aircraft is perhaps the greatest danger that we wield, sometimes unknowingly."
" If you’d like to be like all the other flying Whuffos, never use your brakes. They will last a lot longer. You’ll save a few bucks. And you will remain a Whuffo."
"In a Tailwheeler’s Journal article called “Late Night Meetings”, I accused all of my students of attending such candlelit meetings in a darkened hangar late at night. Their purpose, I claimed, was to conspire against me and do all the things that students routinely do to drive their flight instructors nuts."
" The young pilot’s eyes widened as he watched ol’ Bob Bob perform a slow roll in the Shrike Commander while pouring a glass of iced tea… backhanded."
"Eventually, places which teach pilots to carefully fly closer to those extremes... won’t exist anymore either. They’ll be driven from town by a government agency and its dupes with their pitchforks and torches."
In the last few years, the Acme Flying School has continued to encourage the squelching of pilot improvement by coming up with “The Sterile Cockpit”. Naturally, this concept began with the…
