It’s been a while since I’ve written, which is as much a statement about the turmoil of my inner life as the outer one. This is nothing new, of course. The churn that happens behind the scenes always seems to dwarf what’s on the outside, like some kind of mental iceberg.
In my time as a Naval Aviator, I flew one jet with a crappy autopilot, one jet with an exceptional autopilot, and one jet with no autopilot at all. As a Landing Signal Officer (LSO) I enjoyed the agony and ecstasy of waving more than 25,000 carrier landings, many of which used some sort of autopilot assistance. Most passes were safe, some were ugly, and a few were downright scary. What follows are some of my thoughts on that experience and its implications for enhanced cruise control and self-driving cars.
While randomly browsing through Flickr Commons the other day, I stumbled across this beautiful poster for New Zealand National Airways Corporation.
We hear about it all the time, from those physically near us and (perhaps ironically) through the din of mass-media: We’re too distracted. We aren’t aware of our surroundings. We spend too much time staring into our shiny black rectangles, and not enough time focusing on what’s really important.
Walking the dog while listening to podcasts is about as close to singletasking as I get these days, so I particularly enjoyed a recent talk by Gil Fronsdal of Audio Dharma entitled Doing One Thing at a Time.
It’s already well into a beautiful late-summer afternoon as Fetus and I taxi Ripper 211 onto Runway 5 Right at Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia. Only a low scattered layer of puffy white clouds and a high crisscross of contrails interrupt the transparent blue sky.
