Flight Lessons 3: Experience

How Eddie Learned to Understand the Lessons of Experience

This is volume three of a five volume collection that chronicles the author's journey from novice pilot to professional pilot, while adding technical lessons learned along the way.  The author has a following through his website, www.code7700.com, which receives nearly 2 million hits every month.  The website is used by airline, business, corporate, and military pilots for references to pilot procedures and techniques.  The website also receives frequent visits from aviation industry, government offices, and colleges throughout the world.  One of the most requested parts of the website are for more and more of the lessons, told in story form.  The website author's web name is "Eddie," and many of the stories are told in an easy to read style, in Eddie's first person voice.

While this book can stand alone, it takes up after volume two.  After a year at an Air Force leadership school Eddie returns to the cockpit at the 89th Military Airlift Wing to fly brand new Gulfstream IIIs. Eddie fully embraces a new philosophy of flight, based on knowing everything you can and maintaining a very high level of proficiency. Along the way he discovers the dangers of thinking you know it all by falling for it, hook, line, and sinker. But he soon discovers this way of thinking doesn't agree with his ideas of humility and the need to always learn. In the end he becomes a better pilot (stick and rudder and instrument flying) and a better aviator (judgment). Each chapter relates a series of flight experiences and is followed by a lesson that either reinforces the experiences or provides a counter-point to those experiences.