One of my first customers, a kid I’ll call Joey, was my youngest so far but also the most troubling. Maybe ten years old, he acted more like thirty-five, with a sneering confidence and an air of having already seen it all. In my cynical imagination, I figured I’d be hearing about Joey again—maybe later that month—when he’d make headlines for stealing the family car and driving it to Taco Bell propped up on sofa cushions.
When I first read Stick and Rudder, I had just started flying lessons. The lessons were going well, and my curiosity about aviation had turned into full-blown infatuation. I wanted to know everything, so I was consuming everything—magazines old and new, Reddit posts, YouTube videos. Somewhere in a best-of list, I found Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying, by Wolfgang Langewiesche.
The typical mid-lifers are accomplished overachievers. The way they see it, they could easily learn the Rubik’s cube of a paper nav log if they were made to do it. But why require them to spend hours mastering a process that in the real world of EFBs, they’ll never have to use again? For a mid-life pilot, this seems like a criminal waste of time.