After Oshkosh

I have taken a bit of a vacation from doing regular posts since my week in Oshkosh this summer. There isn’t any specific reason for that, I just had other things to do and was still sort of absorbing the experiences of Oshkosh. I also began to feel that I may have told enough ATA stories: the stories could go on for a long time, but the important ones—the ones with, what seem to me anyway, important lessons—I think have been told.

One of my first thoughts in starting this blog was that I hoped some of the articles and stories would make their way into a book. I had an idea that I might write a book in which each chapter started with a story that would set the tone and background for the subject that followed. But I found that the stories took on a life of their own and were too long to serve as introductions to chapters; I also didn’t think they warranted a book of their own. I still wanted to do a book, but I couldn’t get a good idea of what I wanted to do or how to structure it.

Then, as usually happens, a book idea came to me once I had let go of the previous idea and after the experience of Oshkosh, a part of aviation I had been away from for many years. It was centered on the idea of adapting professional aviation standards to general aviation. I sort of touched on the issue in the post “Pro-Am,” where I talked about the differences between general aviation and professional aviation, and, in a way, it is something I have been thinking about since my very first book, written back in 1983 and now out of print, Fly Like a Pro.

I‘ve got a starting outline, and how that happened is an interesting story in itself. I had tried, back before going to Oshkosh and before I had a clear idea of where I wanted to go with the book, to make up an outline, or at least a list of topics, and had really struggled with it: no coherence, just a bunch of different ideas, some that could become chapters, others that were just thoughts, and I couldn’t even get a consistent writing style in listing them. I put it away, thinking it was a start and could be improved on later after I had thought about it more.

When the idea did click in my head to specifically focus on professional standards and general aviation, I didn’t even go back to that first outline. I just sat down with a notepad and a pencil, and within 30 minutes had a pretty good outline. A good start anyway, consistent in style with each idea for a chapter of about equal importance, and fairly complete. I have thought about a few additional ideas and it still needs a lot of fleshing out before I can submit it as a proposal to my publisher, but the hard part is done. (That experience of struggling when trying to make a dead end idea work versus everything falling into place once on the right path, is so common, it is kind of a lesson in itself: When it’s right, it works, when it isn’t, it doesn’t. And you can’t force it, you have to step back and hope you can get back on a path that makes sense.)

I also quit doing regular posts partly because I think I finally got down, shortly before leaving for Oshkosh, what I think the most important lessons were from my flying career, and I have, in fact, listed those three posts on the right hand side in a section titled “Credo.” So I have a sense that I have done what I wanted to do with this blog, and probably won’t be doing any more posts on a regular basis.

If you’re used to checking here to see if I there is anything new, I thank you and I apologize for not having done anything lately to justify your interest. It’s probably not going to get any better. If my proposal is accepted, I will be tied up writing on a daily basis for six to nine months and probably won’t do any posts. The next thing I need to think about is whether I really want to do that. But I probably will.