“Only a cautious person, man or woman, should fly. I never mount my machine until every wire and screw has been tested.” Harriet Quimby. First woman to gain a pilot’s license in the United States and first woman to fly across the English Channel. Good Housekeeping Magazine, September 1912. SaveSave SaveSaveSaveSave SaveSaveSaveSave SaveSave
Paul Bonhomme was Red Bull Air Race World Champion. Three times. He still flys aerobatics, and the 747 as a British Airways captain. Quote from How to Win the Red Bull Air Race in the British GQ magazine. SaveSave
“At last I understood what true professionalism is. Being a pilot isn’t all seat-of-the-pants flying and glory. It’s self-discipline, practice, study, analysis and preparation. It’s precision. If you can’t keep the gauges where you want them with everything free and easy, how can you keep them there when everything goes wrong?” Charles D. Svoboda Flying magazine, November 1976. Old editions of Flying magazine are archived by Google books. This amazing article is online for free in the November 1976 edition, and certainly deserves a new audience. It’s about making a foggy zero/zero landing in a huge prop plane. Lots of good … Continue reading Zero/Zero, Charles D. Svovoda
Checklists save lives! A major new study in the journal Annals of Surgery shows a 22% reduction in post-surgical deaths when a simple WHO 19-item checklist was used. It wasn’t a true random experiment, but the clear results are still impressive. “Safety checklists are not a piece of paper that somehow magically protect patients, but rather they are a tool to help change practice, to foster a specific type of behavior in communication, to change implicit communication to explicit in order to create a culture where speaking up is permitted and encouraged and to create an environment where information is shared between all … Continue reading Surgical checklists
“You must set yourself on fire.” It’s not easy, it’s not fun, and it will hurt at times. But fuel the fire. It’s worth it.
