perpetual pursuit

Olé Olé Olé!

By Dave English

An electrifying movie about the Rolling Stones recent South American tour has awesome concert footage, and some reflective thoughts from all the band members after 55+ years of working towards excellence and mastery: “At the start of a tour, it’s like being on a tightrope, that once you’ve set foot on it, that rope widens and becomes a bridge that you can run across.” ~ Ronnie Wood. “I felt I’d been given a very complicated puzzle to solve. And that I could just figure a little bit more out every time, then there was another big of the puzzle solved. … Continue reading Olé Olé Olé!

The Impossible Climb

By Dave English

I was lucky enough to get an advance review copy of a new book coming out in March 2019: The Impossible Climb: A Personal History of Alex Honnolds’s Free Solo of El Capitan and a Climbing Life, by Mark Synnott. It’s pretty dang awesome. Highly recomended. Alex Honnold, the world’s greatest climber, went 3000 feet up shear mountain face, alone with no ropes. An achievement so incredible that the New York Times called it “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.” And since free solo climbing involves personal high-stakes risk-management at altitude, as pilots we can both … Continue reading The Impossible Climb

I can’t get no

By Dave English

“I was never satisfied with simply doing well. Even after getting a good result in a test or a flight, if I’d made a mistake I would want to fix that mistake and ensure I got it perfect for the next time. Back in our quarters I would run my own debrief. I’d go through a flight over and over, thinking through what I should’ve done and reinforcing in my mind what I would do in the future. I was very big into visualising — replaying a sight picture over and over the way it should unfold — and inevitably … Continue reading I can’t get no

Magnifying and analyzing

By Dave English

Do you fly and say ‘not bad, pretty good‘, or do you fly and then honestly debrief yourself on every action, every decision? Commander Victor Glover became a fighter pilot, test pilot, astronaut by not accepting ‘pretty good’ and going home. (Original photo NASA, at the Houston neutral bounancy tank, 2015. Quote from Mens Health magazine, March 2018)