Not long ago I was talking to a Navy pilot who had retired and he went to go work for the airlines. He stated to me that he hated it, and he felt as if he was driving a school bus. This is because compared to the little fighter plane he was flying in the Navy, this big airliner was not very maneuverable, not very fast, and not very much fun to fly. Nevertheless, it was a job, a good paying union job, so that's what he did. He said if he had to do it all over again he may have chosen something else, perhaps a different path in life. It turns out that he did go to pilot test school in Maryland and he was well qualified to be a test pilot.
Of course, when the U.S. Congress back then was going through its budget cuts and BRAC strategies, he was no longer needed in the U.S. Navy, and so he got out and went to work for the airline. He had considered going to work for Northrop, Boeing, Lockheed, or one of the companies which is now merged with one of those three at the time. Unfortunately, they all wanted him to move out to the desert, live in the middle of nowhere, and work for them. Those weren't really very good working conditions, and he had always been stationed near the coast in Florida, California, and other military bases around the world.
This led me to consider something else that perhaps we haven't thought of. If we want better test pilots, better engineers, and better scientists working on the next generation of aerospace, then maybe we should stop telling them that they have to live in the barren desert just to have a good job. After all, if you are a test pilot risking your life, do you really want to be flying over a barren desert? Wouldn't you rather be flying out over the water off the coast of California? What's the difference anyway? If the plane is going to break up and you are going to eject, you're going to leave that airplane anyway.
If the airplane is able to come back and land, most of these military bases have giant runways near the coast and you wouldn't have to fly over populated areas. It seems to me if we want to have the very best of breed then we need to give them some new scenery, and stop asking them to go live in such harsh conditions in the middle of the desert just so they can work on a black project, or fly the latest and coolest aerospace innovation; just a thought. Please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on Future Aircraft Concepts. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net
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