Happy holidays to all of you. Welcome to another episode of the Cloud-Based Mayhem. This is a super thrilling show. This one kind of fell into my lap. Often I have these mapped out pretty well in advance and I know what we're going to be talking about and most of the time I've heard of the person we're going to have on the show. This one, out of the blue in March, I got an email from a guy named Mark Stuckey. He goes by Forger. He doesn't like being called Mark, which I didn't learn until the end of the show, so we'll call him Forger for now. But he sent me this email and he said, hey, I've been listening to your podcast and I'm really enjoying it. I'm kind of late to this thing, but I'm a paraglider and I dig paragliding and here's a little bit about me. Maybe we should talk. And then I started reading and this guy's got a resume that was just like...
This has got to be bullshit. There's no way anybody could have done all this stuff. And I immediately reached back out and said, I'm going to read you the resume here in a second. But I immediately reached back out and said, yes, absolutely, we have to do this. And then for various reasons, I just haven't been able to connect with Forger. And then about three weeks ago, I sent him an email. I said, let's do this. We've got to do this. Your history is unbelievable. We've got to get you on the show. And he said... And I'm a little busy this week. In a few days, you're going to find out why.
And then a couple of days later, I was reading Flipboard and going through the news and Virgin Galactic had launched their first truly successful flight to the edge of space. 51 miles up, weightless, that's 275,000 feet. Branson and Musk and Bezos are all in this. It's kind of a space race with SpaceX and Blue Horizon, I think, is Bezos' and Branson's is Virgin Galactic. But he's trying to take people like you and me that happen to have $250,000 to spare sitting around, which I certainly don't. But he's after something different than Musk and Bezos are, but he's trying to make a commercial way to take people up into space so they can see the Earth from...
From the aspect of space. And it's pretty exciting. They've been working on it for years. Well, their lead test pilot is my guest today. Mark Forger-Stuckey piloted that aircraft. But that is just one of the tiny, tiny things. And that's not so tiny, but it's not often I get to talk to an astronaut. I can tell I'm nervous already, but this was super exciting. And I think you're going to find it really exciting as well. Before we get to Forger... And before we get to the... All the amazing things he's done. Just a quick bit of housekeeping. Many of you know that Paul Guschlbauer came through town back in August on his way down his overland expedition. He's flying a Super Cub with his wife, Magdalena, from the northern tip of Alaska to the southern tip of South America.
They just made it. They just got down to Chile. So that's almost done. It's been an unbelievable trip, which I feel kind of honored to have been a part of because I was the one that introduced him to Kenny up in Alaska. Right before I was doing my North Unknown project. And that's what got him into Super Cubs and flying and the whole thing. And anyway, it's been really exciting to watch him do his whole expedition all the way down through the Americas. And they just got here. But when he stopped here in Idaho in August, he got his personal best. We had a really big, big, big triangle day. And he was pretty blown away flying around at nearly 18,000 feet that day. And then he gave this amazing... We had a long talk about his 2017 X-Alps campaign and X-Alps in general.
But it was about an hour-long talk down at a friend of mine's house. And we recorded it with the thinking that we would put this out to all of you. But it has been a nightmare to edit because when you're recording somebody sitting at a house and you get the whole flicker because he's got his screen. And anyway, it's been really hard. So a huge shout-out to Miles, our editor, for pulling this off. It has taken a couple months. Literally, to put it together. But instead of showing what was on his screen, we found all the original videos that he used. And so I really love how it came together. And you can learn a lot from this. This is a bonus episode. It's a video episode to our Patreon supporters. But it's also...
By now, you all, those of you who support the show, should have gotten a newsletter with a link for that as well if you support the show. So one of these little bonus things we do. On the side, another reason that if you can, just support the show because you'll get little nuggets like this. But if you haven't seen that one, please go check it out. It's super fun and a lot of learning there. That was his fourth X-Alps. Paul's been in third three times, three of his four campaigns, and he's doing it again this year. So some great learning there. Great stuff. So Forger, Mark Stuckey. I've got to read this because his resume. That is just unbelievable. He has flown over 10,000 hours on 200 different types of aircraft, hang gliders, paragliders, sailplanes, fighters, transports, blimps, spaceships, most recently.
And he uniquely has, I think what that means is there's no one else has this, is over 1,000 hours apiece in the F-4 Phantom, the F-16, the F-18, the T-38. He's also went through a little period that we talk about in the show, flying commercial jets, of course, B-37. He started hang gliding at the age of 15 in 74 after seeing the article that we discussed back in the hang gliding episode in National Geographic that just started the mad craze. In 80, he joined the Marines because he really wanted to be a fighter pilot, test pilot, and eventually an astronaut. In 82, he got a sailplane license. In 82, he also joined the Navy. And his first assignment was to fly the Phantom, the F-4. In 85, he was a Top Gun graduate.
And I asked him this, but he did that whole, you know, the whole scene in the movie Top Gun where Tom Cruise flies over the Russian fighter and flips upside down and flips him off and takes a picture. Well, Mark does that. So you'll hear about that. So I'm convinced that they did that scene directly because of Mark's influence. Then he becomes a United States Air Force test pilot in 89. In 92, he started flying the Phantom. He starts flying paragliders. And in 93, he becomes a test pilot for NASA and did some really crazy stuff there. Some of it I didn't even understand. But he starts flying the SR-71 before they shut that program down. And he did six arrow toes from an F-106 fighter where he was hanging like 1,000 feet off a line down below the fighter.
So we talk about that in this show. He gets to know Steve Fawcett. And a couple people. And then in 2003, he goes back to military active duty and goes over and does four deployments in Iraq. Flies, does some pretty wild stuff over there that I won't give away now, but he does much stuff there. And then, let's see, in 2004, trained to be a payload commander for the midair retrieval of the Genesis spacecraft. In 2004, he co-authored the book Paragliding, a pilot's training manual. Maybe many of you have read that or seen that with Mike. Mike Meyer, a very good manual on paragliding. And then, let's see, wrote for USHPA in 2007 to 2009.
So some of you might remember his There I Was safety articles. In 2009, he retired from the Air Force and was hired by Scaled Composites. So that's Burt Rutan, a very famous person in the whole flying world, the powered flying world. And he started test flying Spaceship Two. And those are the two ships that they just used that he piloted. He piloted Spaceship Two to the edge of space. So that just went down. There's been some tragedy on the way, as you can imagine, and an unbelievable number of crazy stories. Of course, you know, we would have needed days and days and days to get into all of them, but we did get into some pretty interesting ones here.
But that space flight, yeah, that just went down. Mark is now 59. He has lived. He has lived a thousand lives, and I feel very honored to have shared this experience with him and be able to share it with you. So without further delay, please enjoy this most insane talk with the very, very interesting forger, Stucky.
Mark,
it is really incredible to have you on the show. You know, I've been wanting to talk to you now for a couple of years since you sent me your resume, which is just ridiculous and made me feel like I have nothing. I've not done enough with my life, and I've done quite a bit. So your resume is just kind of ridiculous. But you've just had a really amazing day. Three days ago, you were the pilot in command and went to, what, 51 miles above the Earth? I guess that's kind of the boundary of space. You reached Mach 2.9, which sounds awfully fast to me. That's about three times the speed of sound, according to the article. I just, I can't. So congratulations, number one. I just can't even imagine what that's like. I know you've been working at this with that team at Virgin Galactic for many, many years.
I imagine this is impossible to put into words, but because it's so fresh, it just happened three days ago. Can you give it a shot?
Yeah, I can. But first, I want to say it's great to talk to you. And it was a little funny for me to send you my resume out of blue and say, hey, this is me. You might be interested in talking to me. And I had definite reservations about doing that. But I do just give a lot of credit to initially hang gliding and paragliding in my life. And I thought maybe I did have some lessons learned that might be of interest to the people that listen to you, just like I listen to your podcast.
Well, I appreciate you reaching out. I think we're going to have a good time here and learn a lot.
Now, if I can only remember your actual question. But as far as a couple of days ago, we finally had a reasonably long duration burn with Spaceship Two. And it was specifically targeted to be long enough to get us above 50 statute miles, which is at least a U.S. historical definition for a space flight. And, you know, it went great. We went, as you said, almost three times the speed of sound, which is funny. It's not as fast as I have gone faster, but I've never been anywhere near that high. And but looking down on the earth from 270,000 plus feet was really incredible.
You could see, you know, we're over Mojave and I could see down towards Cabo San Lucas. Well, you know, the Sea of Cortez and Baja California out there looked like I could toss a rock into LAX. And, you know, if I would have spun the vehicle. Around, I could have seen San Francisco Bay, but I was trying to save some propellant since it was our first time up to that high. But anyway, it's just an amazing experience. But and it was, you know, probably a big step for me, but really, it's a small step for the company because we want to start doing more and more of those and regular flights with passengers in the back to share that experience with them. And that's what I really look forward to doing. I
like the small steps, you know, it sounds like. And when we when he first stepped on the moon, you know, the giant one small step for man, one giant step for mankind. I mean, I think you're being humble, but it's I mean, what it just what a remarkable achievement.
It's a you know, we it's kind of a niche market and I don't want to act like what we're doing is anywhere near going to the moon or we're going into orbit. But what we're doing is a very, very, very small fraction of that price. And it's. Even though it's expensive to the everyday person, it really will allow thousands of people to have access to space, even if even if it is only for a few minutes of time, it is potentially life changing. And it is an amazing experience. Oh,
I just I can't imagine. I hope there'll be pictures and then all the other stuff from your from your cockpit window here shortly. That must have just been that must have been very special. Because what was the highest you'd been before this in the New Yorker article, which we'll get to here in a little bit. It talked. I think there was a it wasn't too long back that you went to like ninety thousand. But this is, you know, almost triple that.
Yeah, I guess I've been around one hundred and fourteen thousand, I think, in Spaceship Two. I've been above eighty thousand in the SR-71 Blackbird and significantly faster than Mach 2.9 in the Blackbird. But this is way higher for sure. And in the Blackbird, you didn't go Mach 3 straight up.
You said in your in your said in your email after you did it on Thursday and I congratulated you because I'd been watching the news wires. I figured something was going down because we'd spoken earlier in the week and you said, yeah, keep your eye on things. It's going to be a busy week. You said it was kind of like, you know, like S.I.V. and paragliding. Can you describe? But like in what way? I can't imagine 2.9 Mach 2.9 and floating along at 40K in a paraglider.
Well, I don't know how it is for you, you know, world class paraglider pilot. For me, I consider myself. I mean, I've been paragliding for years. I go I mean, I've got a year without flying. Sometimes I go a few times a year now that my son started flying a couple of years ago. I maybe go once a month, sometimes more than that. Sometimes I go a couple of months without flying, you know, and I've I've flown over 100 miles and tend to do OK. But I because I don't fly that often, I kind of consider myself a P3 and technically I am a P3. I refuse to get a P4 because I don't want to think I'm that good.
But so so I kind of have these I'm a P3 kind of guy that maybe can. You can pull off P4 flights and every once in a while look like a P1 on launch. So, you know, I'm kind of a because I don't kite enough in the desert.
So anyway, I don't know how SIV is for you. I've done a couple and I really enjoy them, but it's not like it's pure fun. You know, you're there's always some threat. I mean, the first one I went to, I watched the guy die. He was not in my course, but he certainly. You know, there is some threat to it, and that's how this is. You know, it was a hell of a lot of fun, but, you know, you're doing test flying and going really fast and really high. And aside from, you know, the overriding test pilots, creative, you know, creative, not screwing up and wanting to get all the test points as accurately as possible. You know, you also don't want to relax and do something stupid and cause things to go really, really wrong.
Yeah, we'll get to the darker side of that here in a little bit. And with one year, one of your friends. But before we do, yeah, you're flying history. You've flown hang gliders, paragliders, sailplanes. You were kind of part of the Perlan project for a while. Fighters, transports, blimps. And obviously now you're flying spaceships and I include and including, I believe, uniquely over a thousand hours apiece in the F-4, the F-16. Yeah. The F-18, the T-38. So, you know, if somebody wrote that to me, I would think, OK, well, they're obviously a pilot. But if, you know, if you and I were standing at a party and we didn't know anybody and somebody came up and said, hey, I'm Gavin, what do you do? What's your answer to that question?
It depends. Yeah, that's a tough one. Sometimes I say I'm an engineer. Sometimes I tend to say I'm a pilot or a test pilot. Because if I downplay it, you know, it's tough for me because if I say, well, I'm a test pilot for Virgin Galactic, it sounds like I'm on a big ego trip. And then if I say I'm a pilot and it takes them half a dozen questions to finally get to the fact that I am a test pilot for Virgin Galactic, then it comes across as false modesty. So I'm kind of damned if I do and damned if I don't.
Do you ever answer astronaut? No.
You should. You know. And it's funny because, you know, at NASA, when you get selected to be an astronaut, you're an astronaut. You just haven't earned your astronaut wings. And to me, that's always been a bit of a head scratch for me. It's like, you know, you're getting selected to be a pilot. You're a pilot even though you haven't flown yet. So I would never have called myself an astronaut before going into space. And honestly, I don't see myself calling myself one now. I am thrilled. I'm thrilled that I get to do what I do and I put a lot of value in it. But it's experience. It's not the title.
So this article you pointed to me, it was written back in August in The New Yorker, which is, you know, one of the best magazines and one of some of the best writing ever, in my opinion. So it was no surprise that this one was just mind-blowingly good. The title of it was Virgin Galactic's Rocket Man. Which. That's how I'd answer at a party. Yes, I'm Virgin Galactic's Rocket Man. But it's just, it's riveting. It's an amazing story. I'll have the link up to it in the show notes. And those of you who are listening, just you can almost stop right now and just go read this article. It's fantastic. But one of the things it does among many other things, it's, you know, it's a good document about your life. But it also talks about this kind of space race, I guess, if you will, this modern space race between Branson's Virgin Galactic.
Who you work for, Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX. They're kind of going after three different things as I understand it. I'm obviously no expert in this whole field. But SpaceX and Blue Origin are pursuing kind of what we've seen in the Moyes, like a vertical launch scheme, like going to the moon. And you say in the article that, you know, that that's automated. And I'm quoting you, they've got some astronauts, but I don't think they know what the hell they're going to do besides act like they're doing something. And I saw another thing in there that they're called spam in a can. So I'm not, we're obviously not dishing them. That's just how those rockets work and how those ships work. But can you explain the difference between, I think a lot of people don't know, you know, Spaceship Two, which you're piloting, and rockets that are meant to go much higher?
Yeah. So the spam in the can was amazing. It was a reference from the movie, The Right Stuff, that came out in, when was that? The late 80s. And that was, I think, Chuck Yeager was given credit for calling the early Mercury astronauts that because they were kind of along for the ride, even though they had some kind of manual backup capability and did some maneuvering in space. It's pretty much just the computer flying the trajectory and then riding along. And, you know, that was very different than... Yeah. Classical test piloting. But it also sounds like a bit of sour grapes also. I mean, if you said, hey, do you want to pilot a rocket plane on a suborbital flight or fly orbital automated, I mean, I'd think twice about that one, because I think orbital would be really, really cool.
I know it would be, but manually flying a rocket plane is amazingly cool also. I guess the way it works. What I need to do is eventually fly a rocket plane to orbital. Now, that would be the ultimate. But to talk about what you're doing or to get to your question, so, you know, Elon Musk is pure orbital. I mean, he's taking big satellites to space and, you know, his long-term goal is Mars. And I think everything he's doing is a stepping stone to get to Mars by launching big satellites and getting government contracts. It's paying the bills to fund the research and the development of the Mars spacecraft.
Bezos is kind of, well, Richard Branson is just trying to do the suborbital space tourism. So, you know, take a half a dozen well-heeled customers up into space for a few minutes and bring them back down for a quarter of a million bucks a ticket, which sounds like a lot of money. It is a lot of money. But, you know, people can spend a better part of their time. They can spend a hundred thousand dollars to be guided up Mount Everest. So if you have that kind of market out there, you obviously would have a lot of people that could have that kind of money to pay for a hour-long flight.
But, you know, that's opposed to going orbital, which will cost tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars. So even though you can poo-poo us for just doing these suborbital cannonball trajectories, it is a very small fraction of the price, and it opens up space to a lot more people instead of just a handful of people. And Bezos is kind of doing something in between. He's doing suborbital and working on orbital and ultimately wants to go to Mars, too. So I don't know if he'll always be doing suborbital, if there'll be direct competition for a long time. I think what they're doing is really cool. They do take off vertically.
And then the booster comes back and lands vertically, like Elon Musk does with his Falcon 9 here lately, although the capsule where the people are in, they've had a handful of flights now, but they haven't had people in them yet. It's all automated, but the capsule comes down under parachute, looking like the Apollo capsule did from the late 60s and 70s. So they're very different. But I think they are all available. They're all amazing in their own way. So we're going to shortly
here, we're going to rewind and go way back to how you got into all this and your beginnings in hang gliding and your military and stuff. But before we do, one of the real moving parts of the article was your friend, Mike McAlsbury, very good friend of yours in 2014, I understand you were back at Mission Control. This could have been a flight you were piloting on or co-piloting. Mike McAlpins 1 And he made a pretty critical human mistake that ended up destroying the aircraft. He was killed. The other pilot was miraculously, came down under parachute and he lived. But the experts have said that these projects that you guys are undertaking are irresponsibly risky.
Mike McAlpins 2 And you say in the article that the rocket, your flying is is one of the most fearsome things you've piloted in over 40 years and you've piloted a lot um is the is the risk worth it you know is is taking rich people up into space a worthy objective is
launching a paraglider worth it gavin yes it is yes sir you know because i i bet anybody that's been paragliding or hang gliding for a long time like like like we have has asked themselves that every once in a while when somebody we know gets badly hurt or worse and uh you know i i certainly on the on both the hang gliding paragliding side taking a step back a bit for a while then i end up missing it and uh it's a kind of flying i can't get anywhere else so no other flying fills that void you know there i'm not out to to commit suicide but by the same token um you know my father lived to be in his 90s but he sure didn't have fun for a lot of those years i'd much rather have quality of life and have fun and end up maybe dying because of it than you know you know it's a bell curve if you really want to be safe you could sit at home and be spoon-fed mush for all three meals but
yeah yeah who wants that yeah now as far as you know the talk about space flight is worth it to me it's like oh come on i mean that that's uh that that's how the human kind how the right of the human race progresses you need people that take these steps but you also need the majority to not take these steps and i think it's built into us uh you need a small percentage of people that are not satisfied with the status quo they're not satisfied staying in a box or they're not satisfied staying in a box or they're not satisfied staying in a box They're not satisfied looking within the horizon or, you know, they have to get on the they have to get on the ships and sail out beyond where they can't see and keep on going into the unknown.
And that is how the human race, you know, advances to the next thing, discovers new worlds, new trade routes, and everybody benefits from that. But it's risky. You can't have everybody doing it or else you could have, you know, there's no doubt. Voyagers have and explorers have a, you know, it's more risk than the standard person. So if everybody does that, it's probably not the best thing for the human race. They need you need the majority that stay behind. And then and then after the explorers can go out and set foot somewhere else, established things can open it up for the masses. And to me, that's what spaceflight is.
And, you know, I get tired of the arguments about it. You know, we haven't solved poverty on Earth. You know, if you look at the amount of money we spend on spaceflight, it's a token amount compared to how much money is spent on other stuff. And, you know, we we have to address poverty. We have to address other things. We have to address our environment. But we can throw all the money at all those things and and it wouldn't solve them. We just need to work at them in the it's like everything's a compromise. And so I feel. That, you know, and people will say, why are we doing suborbital tourism? It's just a flash in the pan. Well, you never know what it will open up for the next generation. It's like our two hundred and fifty thousand dollar ticket price is in modern dollars equivalent to a first class airline ticket was in the late 20s, early 30s for flying across the Atlantic.
So and obviously now that's become. Commonplace and everybody flies. So you never know what where it will take you. But I I believe that pushing a boundary is very important for mankind.
Yeah, well, I think I I I can't see me affording that price, the price of the ticket. But, you know, if the cost keeps coming down, I sure want my daughter in that ship. I mean, what what an experience. And yeah, your analogy to paragliding is is is perfect. OK, let's roll back the clock. You know, there's a great picture in the. The article of you hang gliding in nineteen seventy four. You know, we just I don't know if you caught that, but we just did this big kind of future in history of hang gliding podcast. And we interviewed a bunch of people that, you know, went all the way back before the Wright brothers and Otto Lilienthal and stuff. And but I'm assuming that you credit getting into it from a National Geographic article. I'm assuming that's the same article that, you know, just made this kind of like gold rush of hang gliding back in nineteen seventy seventy four.
Talk. Talk. Talk about those those early days, because it's you know, it sounded like, you know, from when I heard this history from that was very eloquently told by Bruce Weaver at Kitty Hawk Heights that it's you know, it was it was a real exciting time in that sport.
Yeah, so as of February nineteen seventy two issued National Geographic and yeah,
it had an article on Apollo 15, which got my attention and somewhere in there. I was flipping through it and it was a happy birthday. Otto Lilienthal article about people making bamboo bats, those and Icarus twos and and flying off small hills in California. And I was stunned by it. I'd never, never contemplated such a thing. And suddenly it was like something that, you know, hey, maybe this was something I could do. And it literally took me two years of pestering my dad and and threatening to build my own before he finally said, OK, and he went in. And then after that, I just definitely came back from a very, very, very short flight and went back into the airfield. I think it took me maybe nine to ten, 50 percent with me on my first pliable move. Eighteen foot standard Rogalo, which I started flying in May, seventy four.
And and and did you just take to it right away? Was this was this the first thing you flew or were you already in the sailplanes and some of the other forms of flight then? It
was definitely the first thing I flew. Now, we were lower middle class, and I did not – so I went out and, you know, I got an 18-foot standard Rogala, which was, you know, suited for a 180-pound pilot. And I was not – I was barely 100 pounds and just a skinny little kid, and it was way too big of a glider for me. I could barely balance the dang thing. The guy I bought it from was killed a week later by a drunk driver on his motorcycle. So I was pretty much self-taught for a number of months, and it took me a couple months of going out every weekend and getting blown backwards, you know, and cartwheeling across the slopes and never flying, just trying to figure it out.
And then it was funny because I really believe in visualizing. And one day, literally, I was just thinking about it, and suddenly I just felt like, you know what? I think I can do it. I think the next time I go out, if the winds are good, I think I can fly it. And that was exactly what happened. It was a smooth wind, went out and flew it, and suddenly I was a pilot. But, you know, a couple years later, I'm, you know, doing a summer job teaching for the Plowable Moose Company on weekends. And, you know, I could teach somebody in a weekend where it would take me months. I learned on my own.
You guys were all instructors back then. Yeah. A buddy of mine here, when he, his first, his first time paragliding, he was, there was a guy in a local shop that he had come in for some reason. And he's got a local shop. I'm like, hey, I'm going paragliding. Does anybody want to go? And my buddy, Nate, who's, you know, the Jedi pilot now, but this was back, I think, in the late 80s. Yeah, yeah, I'll go. And he, they went up and ran up a hill and he flew down and, and the guy that had taken him said, well, okay, now, you know, as much as I do have fun.
Yeah, I listened to that podcast. That cracked me up.
Your dad, you mentioned your dad. So I understand he was, is Mennonite. And, and while he, he really was, sounded very supportive of your, your early fascination with flight and then eventually the stars, he, he knew the only way in would be through the military. Certainly back then and really still the case now for the most part. But that doesn't work with, with being a Mennonite. So, you know, I, I think a lot of kids, especially, you know, back then, you know, after Apollo and after Armstrong, you know, a lot of kids wanted to be a pilot or be an astronaut, but you actually became one. I'm putting you on the spot here a little bit, but what do you, what do you think, you know, you joined the military, you kind of went, went, went against your dad. You just, you, you really pursued this.
You obviously stayed really persistent. What do you owe that to?
You know, there's two quotes I remember from childhood. One was a sixth grade teacher that told me I could do whatever I wanted as long as I could accept the consequences of it. And then I remember, you know, we had to get a, being Mennonite, went to church every week, which, you know, bored the crap out of me. But I remember a sermon where the pastor was talking about these people that would come to the small town and say, you know, how's this town? You know, is it a good town? And, and the old man there would say, well, what would you think of your last? And they go, oh, we really liked our last town. He goes, yeah, I think you'll like this town. But if they didn't like their last town, he'd say, yeah, this may not be a good town for you. And basically the gist of that little story was that, you know, life's kind of what you make it and you need to enjoy the journey.
So I never, ever thought I could be an astronaut, but I thought the path towards it could be fun. And, you know, I, I never. Never contemplated what's growing up that I could be a fighter pilot. I fantasized about flying fighters by never once thought I had that possibility. And it just took basically being in college and seeing and, uh, recruiters and suddenly I literally, I had a, my junior year. Uh, I had my advisor at Kansas state university said, you know, as much as you're cutting class to go hang glide, have you considered the air force? You know, so then that actually planted the seed and, uh, I went and talked to the air force.
They weren't the least bit interested in me, but the Marines were, and it kind of went from there. So I went in after college, but the point of this is I really liked flight school. I really, you know, I thought I'd hate the military, but it could be a, you know, I could fake my way through it. If I got to fly jets in the reality was I enjoyed the military. They treated me well. I liked the life. I. I actually believed in what I was doing, surprisingly. And it just, it just kept on doors, kept on opening up. I just kept on working towards them. And it's kind of a little bit like the guy that's, you know, pretty old in life. Because if I would have known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself. If I, if I would have known I was going to get this far, I would actually studied harder and maybe had gotten a real engineering degree or something.
But it's all down. So no regrets.
Okay. So I, I, I'm, I'm jumping to my own conclusion here, but I don't think this is that big of a jump, but I hope I'm not wrong. But in 1985, you graduate from the top gun school. We've all seen that movie, of course. And I don't know if it was after or before you graduated. It wasn't clear in the article, but you were flying on a patrol mission over the sea of Japan. You spot a Russian bomber. You catch up to it. You flip upside down and you snap a photograph. Uh, I think. Pretty much everybody on earth knows this scene in top gun. Did they actually take, I mean, was that something that they put in the movie because of you?
No, I, I sincerely doubt it. Uh, it is kind of funny. I went to top gun in 85 when the movie came out a year later and suddenly my family was much more impressed that I had gone to top gun. Uh, it didn't mean much before the movie came out. I'm sticking
with it, man. I think that was you.
The funny thing is, and you probably won't believe it, is that was at night. Really? Yeah.
So they had to tone it down for the movie.
You know, when we join up on these, uh, when we do intercepts on the Russian airplanes, uh, it was interesting because, you know, that. You go back. You'd slap close to the, to the, the turret where the, the tail gunner sat. And he had these big teardrops. He had these big teardrops shaped plexiglass windows and, and, you know, some of my peers, you know, would flip them off and, you know, we're at, it was cold war and we hate them. They hate us. And I never really felt that way. And I remember the, I think the first time I joined up on one of them, a guy flashed, uh, uh, would look like a playboy centerfold at me, you know? So I just kind of laughed and felt we're each kind of doing our own job, you know, kind of checking on the other guy and maybe we aren't that different.
Uh, but they would kind of give you this, you know, flip their heads upside down, like flip upside down, fly upside down for us. And, uh, you know, we had been briefed ahead of time. Do not do that because they want to take photographs of your missiles so they can really know, you know, maybe take a look at the serial numbers and, and figure out exactly what you're carrying and, and what version they are and get intelligence off of that. So I never flipped upside down during the daylight. Um, but one night it was just a, it was a cool. It was, uh, you know, it was a big, uh, Russian back, uh, bear bomber, which has, you know, four engines and they're counter-rotating props and it was just lumbering along and with this flashing lights. And now, you know, after, after a while of escorting it, I just thought I wanted a picture of it.
So I rolled upside down over the top of it and took a picture of looking down.
Do you still have that picture?
My ex-wife, I'm sure has it somewhere in the garage, but I kind of lost that in the divorce. Man, you got to get that back.
That would be a good one to get back. That's amazing. Um, and so at, at this stage, would you call yourself a test pilot or was it not till, uh, is it not till you joined NASA in the late eighties? Is that, you know, work, work with their timeline here with me a little bit.
Well, I went to, uh, Air Force test pilot school as a Marine exchange in 1989. And prior to going to test pilot school, I'd been what they call an operational test pilot where you're taking. The latest and greatest operational aircraft and really putting it through the ringer, you know, test pilots will go up there and, and make sure things fly right and they're stable and you have adequate control. And then an operational test pilot will go basically try to employ it and simulated combat missions, which is just about as much fun as you could have for three years. Um, so I guess it technically I was a test pilot then cause I was an operational test pilot, but in the sense that of most people. Think of test pilots, I'll consider it was after I went to a year long test pilot school.
What would you credit? I mean, obviously if you're, you know, you're, you, you join the military, you go through top gun school, uh, you join, you, you know, you, you, you leave the military, get into NASA. I mean, obviously people are identifying along the way that you're a really gifted pilot. Um, I, I have theories about why, you know, some people get really good at paragliding or hang gliding really fast. And obviously a bunch of that. That's talent, but obviously a lot of it is, you know, how you approach risk. Um, is that the same in, in flying airplanes? Is that, or maybe more directly, how do you, what do you credit your giftedness to?
Yeah, I don't know. Um, I do know that before I, you know, before the Marines signed me, you know, uh, they, they basically gave me a, uh, a contract that if, if you join, we will send you to flight school. And what happens there is up to you. But before I could do that, I had to take, uh, you know, whatever their equivalent of an SAT or something, but, but it was, uh, you know, it was a two part test. It took several hours and a lot of it was just kind of like the IQ stuff, like a ACT or SAT. And then there were this, this other part where you, they'd show you, uh, just, uh, basically like a stick drawing of an airplane and flight. And.
You know, caught it, whether it's coming at you, going away, the bank, whatever was very rudimentary train behind you, behind it. And then you have like a, B, C, D E choices, which were again, stick drives of the views out the cockpit, you know? And, and you're like, which, which, which of the, the five choices corresponded to that airplane, the scene that airplane was in, and they gave you, you know, way more than you're supposed to have. And, and you're like, which, which, which of the, the five choices corresponded to that airplane, the scene that airplane was in, and they gave you, you know, way more than you're supposed to have. Time to, you know, just sit there and think about it and go, okay, let me see. He's coming at me, his right wings down. Uh, so he's in the right turn, his nose is high, so he should be climbing, you know, you don't have time to do that. You just have to, you know, I guess have, have instinct.
And I finished that before the time was up and, and they were, and then they, you know, graded it and I maxed out the score and they're like, you're not a pilot. Are you? It's like, no, you know, do you have any. You should experience like, well, I've been flying hang gliders for a few years and they kind of laughed. Uh, but so, uh, you know, I don't, I, I credit hang gliding with giving me that air sense, whether I had some kind of 3d sense before. I don't know, but, um, I, I credit hang gliding with it actually. And,
and did you show, I mean, that sounds a lot like condiments, you know, like, uh, you're, you're the two, you're, you're almost like your two brains. You have the fast side and the slow side. Do you. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it sounds like the, you know, the emotional intelligence that the kind of gut instinct is what you're really strong with. Did you, but did you also do really well on the, you know, the multiple choice, the hard, where you really got to think through, you know, the ACTs, the SATs, that side of things too.
Yeah. I was always a, an above average, you know, Cause you're, you're engineering background. Well, and I'm, you know, it's more of a science background. I don't have an engineering degree, uh, but I've taken a lot of engine and took a lot of engineering courses. Well, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I mean, it's funny. I, I, I took my, uh, sophomore year in the summer, I worked for a civil engineering company. I remember sitting in the, in, in a small office, we were doing draftsman stuff, you know, making, uh, you know, mechanical drawings with pencils and, and, uh, getting in a conversation with one of the employees there, you know, that was a real engineer and it was probably in his late thirties about, I remember him saying, you know, I think I could, if I stole an F 15, I bet I could. Fly, I might not be able to land it, but, you know, just fantasizing about flying fighters, you know, and, uh,
I'm not, can't remember how I got on this. No, well, you're just, uh, yeah. So anyway, I took a lot of engineering courses, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to fly, uh, but didn't really have that path. They're never had any money to take lessons or anything. And, you know, hang gliding kind of got me into it. Huh?
Yeah. I wonder, I wonder how much of the hang gliding. Really built your instinct for that kind of thing. Isn't it fascinating? Um,
but, but what I was going to say was that I was always, uh, you know, I, I, I was a smart student. Uh, I was always like an A or B, B student, uh, mainly, uh, B, because I didn't apply myself that hard. If I applied myself, I'd get A's. Uh, so I know I have some raw mental ability, uh, and then I probably, I honestly, I can probably think fast. Yeah. I think slow, you know, it's probably a mix, right? Mm-hmm.
So, so late eighties, you, you jumped from the Marines, uh, to NASA and then, you know, we all remember this. It was headlines a lot in the nineties, you know, drones get really big, you know, funding for a lot of NASA disappears and a lot of the kind of the experimental stuff that I'm imagining was what you were working on. Uh, and in the late nineties, you, you, you have to make. You start flying commercially for United, uh, you're selling mortgages. Uh, I'm going to, I'm going to go ahead and make a wild guess that this isn't exactly where you saw your life going back then. That were those kind of dark times or am I being too dramatic?
Uh, so, you know, I'd left NASA. I mean, I, I couldn't stay there and kept on flying, but it was, uh, it wasn't rewarding. Uh, cause all the, all the cool tests I'd flown, you know, the SR-71. I'd gotten towed in an F-106 on a thousand foot rope behind a C-141, I'd done some weird stuff. I'd done a lot of, uh, thrust vectoring flights in a, in a unique F-18 and done a lot of supersonic laminar flow stuff in a very highly modified F-16 about 60,000 feet. And then suddenly all those projects went away, but it wasn't like we got rid of airplanes at the time I could still go out and fly, but I just, and my wife at the time was never satisfied. And, and, um, she really wanted to move further away from the desert.
So it's like, well, Christ, I can't, I already lived an hour away. I didn't want to spend all my life in the car commuting. So it was all of that where it kind of made me think, well, you know, if we're not really doing much test flying, maybe, maybe I should just go be an airline pilot. Cause then we can move, live where we want and maybe I can provide that way. And of course, you know, that was right before 9-11 and after 9-11, I was, didn't have much, you know, longevity. So I knew I was going to end up there. Eventually I get furloughed and I started looking at ways to, you know, bring food at the table. And that's where the, I knew somebody that was making a lot of money in the mortgage business. Of course it was at the high of the market. And so I got in, you know, about the time the bubble burst and it was, it was a dark time because I, my salary, my starting salary at United was below my mortgage payment, let alone what you have to do for, you know, a family of five after that.
So. So, you know, I was working hard on mortgages and, and was somehow then suddenly was offered that chance to go active duty in the air force, which was unique because I had been a Marine before, but it all worked out.
Yeah. And then, and then, so you go to Iraq in 2003, but dig into that a little bit. I mean, how, how do you, at that stage in your life, you're flying commercially, you're doing these mortgages. What, what is it just a buddy that, I mean, how do you do that? How did they, how did they still know you were out there? How'd you get the invite to go do that?
So I was doing military reserve duty as a air force reservist. And I was teaching at the test pilot school and flying the F8, F16 and the T38. And so it was after 9-11 where suddenly now the, the active duty guys need to go to war and, and need to go to other stuff. Where, you know, I guess if you're, you know, if you're active duty, you're, you're, it's not like you're a warmonger, but that's what you've been training for. So that's what you probably wanted to go do, support your country. And I think that left a vacuum in the schools and that's where they, you know, I was a part-timist there on the side, making ends meet and teaching.
And I obviously had a pretty good resume being a former NASA pilot. So they said they saw the opportunity. They had to recall me to active duty and send me to the test pilot school as a full-time instructor. And that's what I did. You know, the small world thing. I don't know if you ever heard of Roy Haggard. He's, you know, one of the great inventors of the first real double surface hang glider, the infamous Comet in the 1980s that totally changed hang gliding. He called me up and, and he was a VP of a company that was contracted. By NASA to do mid-air retrieval of the Genesis spacecraft when it came back from a multiple year long mission to collect, uh, basically stardust.
And, uh, it was supposed to be, you know, come back down, deploy a pair of foil and be caught in mid-air by a parent, by a helicopter. And they had two helicopters and they wanted somebody to be a mission commander that they felt had experience with national asset test programs. But it was also familiar with peripherals and somehow I came to mind. So, and the air force like agreed to that as long as, you know, it didn't cost the air force anything. So, uh, they'd pay for my money to come out and train up and, and it was fine. And then it kind of came out that they did a study and, you know, they're supposed to catch the peripheral mid-air and it's pretty funny. They're supposed to fly it to, you know, a white room, you know, a Dugway proving grounds where all the secret germ warfare is done and biological warfare.
They have that really unique facilities there and they're going to hover over this building and, you know, the trap roof trap door opens up and they lower it in and it never touches ground or human hands as, you know, priceless, uh, you know, payload. Well, anyway, it comes out that even though they've gotten very accurate, uh, as opposed to where, uh, historically that there were some wind profiles where, you know, once they did the retro rocket fire or the, the actual, the, the final burn correction, uh, while the space craft was a couple of weeks out, it was going to land at this time on this date and it could potentially be strong winds or something. They were going to do their best weather forecasting, but there was a chance that the winds are strong, that the helicopter could not actually make it back with just, you know, with this paraglider.
And payload flailing behind, it was just too much drag. So they, they had to come up with a way to reduce the drag. And it literally was a guy rappelling out of the helicopter and sliding like a big fabric condom or like a concertina bag, uh, you know, down over the paraglider over the, over the parachute while the helicopter kept on trucking at 60 miles per hour. So Haggard calls me up, he's explaining this all to me and, you know, there's. There's three people on the helicopter. There's a helicopter pilot. There's the guy that operates a winch and then there's the mission commander payload commander. So, you know, there's only one person that can repel out. He's like, do you think he can do this?
It's like, well, you know, yeah, I can do that. And then you go, oh, come on down. So, you know, two days later, I'm down there at Lake Elsinore, rappelling out of a helicopter to show I can do this.
They gotta make a movie about you.
So we're flying along 2000 feet high and I rappel out and I, and I sleeve this thing, you know, it's a dummy payload and, you know, somehow it gets back to the air force general. I was like, what, you know, we didn't sign up for this. What the hell are you doing? And so not only did they cancel my participation in the program, I was suddenly the top of the list to be sent to Iraq on a non-flying billet.
You're like, come on, man. I'm just catching stardust. Come on.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yes, I went to Iraq for a few months, but, but, but even that had the silver lining. That's funny. That all works out. Yeah.
I was going to say, so, I mean, you, you go to Iraq and you're sitting in, is this true? You're sitting in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces in 2004 and you, you flip on the TV and you watch Burt Rutan's, which, you know, everybody that knows anything about flying knows about Burt. You watch Spaceship One. So the predecessor to the one you're using now, Go 60. 62 miles above the earth. Is that true? Is that what, is that what happened? Yeah,
that is true. So, you know, I had seen them, I'd seen some of the earlier test flights that hadn't gone to space, but I'd seen two where they fired the rocket. One from my backyard at Edwards Air Force Base. Another one where I just got a little bit of intel, intelligence about it and had driven out on the road underneath the profile and watched them. So I was amazed by the program. You know, I, I'd been a finalist for NASA. I was a NASA astronaut a couple of times, but, you know, I hadn't, hadn't been picked and I, and I was okay with that. To me, it's, it's like, you know, getting picked to be Miss America. You can have 50 beautiful, talented women, but you can't expect you're going to be the one picked. And, you know, if they're only picking four pilot astronauts, I could never expect that I'd be in one of the top four. So I was, I could, I was fine with not getting picked.
But then when suddenly they unveiled Spaceship One, I was jealous as hell and very interested in the program. But yeah, so, but their actual X Prize flight where they went into space, I was sitting in a, in a former Saddam's palace, watching it on CNN. And it was amazing.
Wow. And it must've been, I mean, that really changed the trajectory of your life, right? Watching them? I was, well, I
was. You didn't know it at the time. I was very interested in it then. And, and, you know, on their winning flight, Branson was, they were already sponsoring them a little bit and they had a Virgin Galactic sticker on the side. And they were talking about commercial operations. I do want to tell you another story, though, that I think you'll enjoy was at the same time I was in Iraq, that Genesis spacecraft came back for re-entry. So, so those are the two things I watched. I watched Spaceship One go up into space. And I also, you know, dialed in and watched the Genesis come back to see how Rory Haggard would catch this thing in mid-air. And, and. And, uh, it just pummeled in the ground. The parachutes never opened. So.
Yeah, I was, I was, I had to do some research on that because I'd, I'd forgotten that. So the whole, the whole hanging out of the helicopter on the line and putting the, putting the concertina bag over it didn't work.
Well, it never happened because they had installed it. They had some accelerometers on the spaceship that was supposed to detect re-entry deceleration and they were installed backwards. So they, they never. They never felt like they had decelerated in the atmosphere, uh, so they never triggered the parachute. So the, the, the satellite that could never touch the ground smashed into it, you know, many hundreds of miles per hour. So I saw this happen and I had Rory Haggard's cell phone number and I had a satellite phone and I knew he wouldn't answer because he was on the helicopter. But I immediately called him, got his voicemail and left him a message that, you know, I was sorry. I saw what happened. But if I was on the helicopter, I would have still caught it.
Don't make that mistake again, man.
Wow. Okay. So, uh, four deployments in Iraq and, uh, you're over there till 2007, you win the Bobby Bond aviator award. Uh, so I'm assuming you're doing, uh, I mean, what, what, what are you doing in Iraq then? Are you, are you, you said in the beginning you weren't flying, but are you flying?
Yeah. So, so that first one was supposed to be. Uh, you know, here you're whatever, it's a non-flying assignment. You're doing liaison between the army and the Iraqis and the air force. And basically it's a big waste of time, but somewhere in there, the Iraqis are starting up their own air force, which we're helping them with. And I get, you know, I'm, I'm reporting on that and, and the people in charge of it is actually, uh, uh, uh, British Colonel. And, uh, or Commodore and, and he gives me shit one day over the phone and says, you know, if you really want to help, you know, come figure out how we can get this coordinated, you know, do something instead of just sitting on your ass and at, and trying to get tidbits of information to put out in a daily report.
Uh, I knew I didn't, would not have air force approval for that. So I actually did that on my way out of the country and I ended up flying with them and, uh. So then they kind of knew me, but I was on my way out of the country to go back to the States. And then, uh, they had an accident that, you know, uh, one of the airplanes went in and it's an Iraqi aircraft and you, you think that's bad enough. And then they, you know, in the wreckage, it's, you know, one Iraqi, but it's a air force, special operations command pilot, and they've got four special operators, troops in the back. And so a lot of American deaths, deaths, these were. This pilot was highly qualified. And so suddenly it's like, okay, where did these aircraft come from?
And are they airworthy? And should they be flying them? And suddenly it was like, okay, we have to send the real test pilot over there to do a real quick assessment. And he needs to be over there in two weeks. And by the way, Forger, it's you. So, and in the end, that Bobby bond award is a, it's basically the air force test pilot of the year award. And I got awarded that for that. For that kind of work. And then that opened up another job for me.
And that's when you got back.
Yeah. So I would go over there for a few weeks at a time. Um, and, you know, evaluate stuff and tell them what needs to be done. And, and then, you know, in the end, they shipped a couple of airplanes back to us. We modify them. Then we make kits to go back over there and, uh, modify the other ones. Uh, my recommendation was that they should not fly in period that they were not airworthy. But that was not the right answer. So they did that. And when they went over and modified the other ones by that time, uh, that was other people that I trained and they went over and did it. And they flew a few flights and the guy almost died. And then they shut the program down. And you're right. Yeah.
So 2007, you come back and, uh, you don't, you know, you don't, you, you, you, you've been paragliding all the way back in the nineties, but it sounds like you kind of get back into flying. You're back in the desert. Um, but you're, you know, I guess maybe cause you'd been gone a lot or for whatever reasons, uh, it sounds like your, your family life starts getting pretty, pretty rugged. Well,
I was, I was living in Vegas and, uh, I don't know. I mean, that last year I got one, I got three kids, one had graduated from college and was, you know, not living at home. Uh, another one was off to college, not living at home. And the third one was in her senior year. And, uh, I was, I was in the university of Nevada, Las Vegas. So it wasn't like they were young kids, but, uh, yeah, at that time I was, I was off working and sometimes I'd be gone for a week and back on the weekends because of the job I was doing. Um, but that didn't actually seem like a stressful thing. I mean, the stressful thing was my wife and I didn't get along and we had never really gotten along.
And, uh, then I ended up breaking my back paragliding. And that was kind of like the, that broke the camel's back with her, which is probably a good thing for me.
Yeah, literally the, uh, well, okay. Let's, let's jump to paragliding then to tell me about the accident. And, um, you, you wrote me a, uh, an interesting note about reserves. Cause that was this your third one? No, that was my second reserve deployment.
Okay. Yeah. So talk about paragliding. I'm living in Vegas. Um, not flying very, I mean, actually I was hardly flying. The first time I'd gone out and flown a gene, I saw a mid air and, and, uh, I, I thought the guy would have died. He was totally cascaded all the way down exactly out of phase with the glider was getting each oscillation was getting worse and worse until he, he smacked flat on his back into a horrible lava field. You know, I raced over there with another guy and he was just bruised. I was amazed when they let him out of the hospital that night. But I only flew a couple times. And, uh, and I tended to fly when I go other places, you know, I'd go to go to, uh, Salt Lake city and fly point of the mountain or something, but not very regularly.
So here it was, I really wanted to fly cross country, uh, along the red mountains. And I felt like summer in Vegas was too dangerous. I wanted to go, I decided, Hey, this was the last weekend I was going to try. No, I had never tried before, but, uh, I was going to try. I really wanted to fly cross country. And, uh, so I wanted to go on a Saturday and my wife really wanted me to do something else that day. So I agreed and I didn't bother checking the weather the next day, but it went and, uh, towed up. And, and it was just, I mean, before I towed up, I could see dust devils in the distance where they, they crossed, we were towing on a dry lake bed and you could see dust devils with really tight cores and, you know, they disappear once they left the lake bed, but you'd know that. They didn't stop.
You just couldn't see him. And, uh, I ended up just flying a few miles going, uh, I was flying with Tony Lang and, and, you know, we would alternate who was ahead and, and, and the other guy would get low. And then one guy would catch a thermal and get up and the other guy would run there. And now I was out in front and I started getting low and I got down to, you know, uh, 350 feet and I had this rule of thumb that, you know, below 400 feet over in hospitable terrain, you know, hard rocks and stuff. And, and I'm not going to throw. Uh, so I set up to land on the road and flew into invisible dust devil. And, you know, at first it was a pretty passive, I had the biggest collapse of my life. I mean, 70 % of the wing was gone, but it was, it did not put me in a big turn or anything.
It was just gone. And I, I pumped it out. I felt like I knew where the, the bad air was, it immediately reopened. I started to turn away and then I had a more dramatic, a smaller collapse. It was much more dramatic. And it just immediately, immediately went in an auto rotation and, uh, I'd never been in an SIV then. I mean, it made it kind of felt like a sat gliders going one way. I'm going another way. I was below a hundred meters. I just immediately threw my shoe, even though at the time I thought, you know, I'm going to recover this thing. But my rule of thumb is if you're out of control below a hundred meters for your shoot, uh, and I'd done that once before in my life and the moment, you know, when I threw the shoot, then. I remember thinking, this is unnecessary.
I would, I know I would have recovered this, but, but I, but I've got this rule of thumb and I'm going to live by it. And as I was throwing the shoot, the first time I got ground rushed. I remember thinking, damn, I'm really glad I am already in the process of this. And it opened up and I got a half a swing and landed totally fine. And it, and it really brought home that I had made the right decision. So here I am again. And, uh, uh, still thinking. It was stupid. I shouldn't be doing it. I throw the parachute and unlike the first time I threw it, it didn't open right away. And I was in this other rotation. It was just hanging limp in the middle of the rotation, but I'd already thrown it. So instead of trying to work on the glider, I got to work. I don't want the parachute opening sometime later. So I'm jerking on the bridle, trying to get it open.
And then suddenly that the glider like comes out of its spin. And, you know, when a glider comes out of its spin, it's going to want to dive. And. I was purposely not looking at the ground and, uh, up until that point in time, cause all I was trying to get the parachute open. Cause I, I didn't want to, you know, it wouldn't help matters. Uh, but suddenly, you know, I'm in a recovering from a spin. I'm at 60 feet above the ground and the hellacious dive, and I'm just barely get my hands on the brakes and start breaking when I, you know, fly into the ground, maybe a 20 degree angle at 30 miles per hour. You know, if I would've been 15 feet higher, would it just been a close call? 15 feet lower would have probably been dead. So, you know, in the end, I just piled in, you know, feet and butt first.
And, and I broke my back, not from that, you know, the vertical impact impact, but the horizontal impact. I mean, I just basically got bent over like a jack knife, you know, over my, you know, my feet and, and that's what compressed my, my spine so bad. And, you know, broke the three vertebrae.
If you, if you gleaned in all. Your history and all your years of flying, are there, are there, um, you mentioned that, you know, this was, this was like the rule and you were going to live by it. Did, did that come from your, is that, did that come from airplanes? I mean, did that come, do you, do you, do you find that they work together? Do you have kind of similar protocols that, uh, that we, that those of us who don't fly airplanes could learn from?
Yeah. And it totally came from airplanes. And that was, you know, I, I, you know, I, you know, I, you know, I, you know, I, you know, I started my military, my operational career in the F4 and, you know, F4s are not known for great handling qualities. And if you got in a spin, you know, you, there's a chance you'd never recover. And in any case, if you were out of control below 10,000 feet, you're supposed to eject and, you know, 10,000 feet above the ground is pretty dang high, especially when you have a, you have an ejection seat where you can be sitting on the runway and you could pull that handle and you get a good parachute and you walk away from it. So to say. But if you're coming down fast in a spin at 10,000 feet, you know, that seems like a lot of altitude. And, uh, but yeah, everybody knew people that, you know, blew off the 10,000, you know, something happened to them.
They tried to recover the airplane a little too long. And in the end they eject and they don't get a parachute because they're coming down so fast and they die. And, uh, so the bottom line was, you know, if you wait until you get a parachute, you're going to think, oh, I've really got to pull the handle now. And, and what, what makes people do that is this sense of ground rush. There's some altitude and speeds that, that combination, suddenly you get this sense of ground rush and you know, oh, I've got, I, I, I can't fix this. I need to eject. I need to throw a parachute. And that's where I came up with the basically a hundred meters. Um, you know, if to me, my rule of thumb was if I've been out of control for a while,
you know, like I've been trying to fix a cascade or something, this has never happened to me, but if it did, there's no reason that there's, you know, at a 400 feet, I'm going to throw the reserve no later than that. Cause you know, Hey, you tried, but if I'm out of control below that, you know, if I'm flying along and I'm less than three 50 and I go out of control, I'm going to instantly throw a parachute if it's anything other than momentary. And that's the thing where it can be embarrassing, right? Because, you know, maybe you would have flown out of it. You know, the important thing is to learn how to actively fly. So you don't have that. And the other thing I do is just don't put yourself in that situation. It's, uh, you know, I just try not to put all my eggs in one basket. You know, there's certainly, I'll go out and fly crest line or Marshall on a good day and you take off and yeah, I'll start thermaling below 300 feet on that initial climb out because it's a relatively smooth, smooth side.
I'm there on a good day or something. It's not, it's not too bumpy. I feel that's acceptable. I'm, I'm taking this small window of time, one thermal to get up. And then after that, I really try to honor that rule. Now, now if I'm not thermaling, if it's just a, you know, a glass off day, sure. I'll fly around with my butts getting off the, off the bushes. But, uh, you know, it's a risk versus reward thing and to leave yourself an out.
Yeah. And I think that whole thing of like, you know, potentially being embarrassed, you know, who cares? It's your life. I mean, it's, it's. But, but,
but going with that too is I won't, you know, I always want to leave, have two outs, you know, the parachutes one out, but if it's over an area full of power lines or it's over someplace where you all drowned or die, if you, or it's just filled with jagged rocks and, and you'll probably get seriously injured coming down over a pair in a parachute. Well, then I'll, then you probably, that's not a real out then. So I'll give myself even more altitude then. We've
done a couple. Shows to, uh, you know, a lot of paragliders, most, if you fly a long timer, we'll have reserve stories, but, um, you know, there's also the whole odds of the first one, not working, um, you know, now in competitions, you know, it's mandatory to carry two reserves. And, you know, so I think that that starts coming into play big time when you're, if you're really in a proper, like auto rotation situation, there's a pretty good chance that you're going to throw your reserve right in your wing. And, and so, you know, you've, you've either got to do it or you've got to do it. You've got to be, you know, really, really heads up or, you know, it's kind of nice to have that second one, but if you've got the second one that takes time and you're, you're, you're burning altitude. So it's, yeah, they, we, there's, you've got to be, you've got to be heads up when it comes to that.
And there's, you know, there, I guess what I'm trying to say is there's no hard rule. There's, you know, there are times where it's way more appropriate to throw it when you've got, you know, over a thousand feet of, of altitude. Yeah. I need it.
Yeah. Well, you know, there's plenty of YouTube videos where, you know, people survive and they put the GoPro video up there, but you can see they're coming down. They've, they've got something bad going on and, but you don't get the sense, you know, it, the ground's not there. They don't have, you don't have ground rush, but suddenly you get ground rush. They throw the reserve and they hit before it opens. And maybe they, maybe they don't die because there's a proper slope and they got lucky. But I think there's just tons of examples that you cannot. Rely on ground rush. If you, if you, if you do, it will be too late. Too
late. Yeah. That's a great point.
There's a, there's a sentence in the, in the, in the article that I want to explore with you. This, this comes from, let's see, another pilot. You begin flying with Peter Siebold, who was the co-pilot. I'm not sure if that's the right terminology with your buddy, Mike Alsbury, when they have their, their, their tragic accident. He's the one that miraculously. But the, the sentence that I want to explore with you is it's for aviators, confidence in an asset, wait, confidence is an asset, but arrogance is a liability. As Chuck Yeager wrote in his memoir, arrogance got more pilots in trouble than faulty equipment. Can we just stick on that for, you know, expand on that a little bit?
Yeah. So that statement is, is, you know, research done by the reporter, the author, Nick Schmidl. I don't argue with it. I agree with it. I mean, if, if arrogance, you know, it can be a bad thing. But honestly, I mean, I think, you know, to be a, you have to have some level of confidence to want to fly paragliders. If you're too timid, you're not going to pull the glider up with authority when you go to launch. You're, you know, too timid is actually more dangerous, but of course, overly confident is dangerous. So some level of confidence, confidence, I think is very important.
I guess what defines arrogance? I don't know. Honestly, I read that about Chuck Yeager. And I think that's kind of funny because I personally think he's been pretty arrogant. And I, I mean, to air dirty laundry, I, I think that the scene in the, in the right stuff where, you know, he ejects at the end in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, you know, the rocket powered, you know, NF-104. I mean, he lost that airplane because of his arrogance. They don't show that in the right stuff, but in my, in my view and, and experts that are around at the time, it was his arrogance that cost, that lost the airplane. But that doesn't mean that any of us can't goof up, but it's something that we should be aware of.
Sure. Yeah.
Okay. So, you know, the, about 10 years ago, you started doing the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, I think I'm going to start a lot of flights for scaled composites and scaled composites as i understand it is the is the company kind of manufacturing and engineering behind version galactic their versions like the client and um imagine there's there's been a harrowing flight or two there is there you know i want to be sensitive to uh what you can and can't say but the uh you know there or maybe not even a virgin flight but can you can you recount um you know a flight that was like woof that was exciting yeah
i mean we had the uh the 16th glide flight on spaceship two on the very first one that scaled built when we were doing a flight test for virgin it was supposed to be a uh the high speed dive to go the fastest speed that we planned to go it was supposed to be the last flight prior to to putting the rocket motor in it and lighten the rocket motor so we were supposed to accelerate to transonic speeds which in a stubby low l over d glider requires a very aggressive dive uh the moment you release and we had we had trained for that for a long time i knew what settings to use and what to do and uh the moment we released the aircraft the you know spaceship nose pitched down like it was supposed to but it never stopped pitching down and uh i mean that's flight test for you the the horizontal stabilizers were stalled at a negative angle of attack so it was like they weren't even there and we were already at a negative angle attack so i just wanted to keep on diving and tuck under which is what it did so within a couple seconds it tucked under and then it just immediately went into it and then inverted spin uh so that was obviously nothing that we planned for and it was pretty eye-watering and uh it's funny the the things that go through your mind i remember as it was happening i remember thinking i'm going to be the pilot in command that commands a bailout from richard branson's you know billion dollar program i'm going to be the one that crashes this thing in the desert
but you know luckily luckily we recovered from the spin and flew it back but
describe i i don't because i don't either but i think a lot of people are scratching their heads what does transonic mean and why is it the bermuda triangle of airspeed so
transonic uh you know is generally defined as between eight tenths the speed of sound and 1.2 times the speed of sound so 0.8 mach to 1.2 mach and it's just really hard stuff really changes and the effects are it's tough to it's tough to predict them you know wind tunnels and computer fluid computational fluid dynamics are great below 0.8 uh it's you know we have great flutter programs for subsonic and the same is true for supersonic above 1.2 mach uh there's great uh computational fluid dynamics for uh for for supersonic but in the transonic things happen strangely you know different parts
react differently or react at a different time in the tail and uh so both on the flutter side the aerodynamic stability and control side you know we do our best to try to predict there but um there's always some unknown there uh and anyway when and how and how that actually happens and and the intricacies of that are are tough see when it's very very tough to do that in a low l over d glider
you take spaceship you know you're either coming downhill really fast or else you're accelerating extremely fast there's no you can't you know I can go up in an f-16 and you can tell me hold 0.88 Mach plus or minus 0.02 Mach and I can do that but you can't in the spaceship I mean you you can try to do it in a really steep dive but then you're flying through wind shares and it's and just different temperature profiles will change Mach by a few hundreds so it's very tough to to do in glide flight testing and you cannot do it under powered flight testing
fascinating so like on this this flight that you just did on Thursday when you're at Mach 2.9 is that kind of like when you're like yeah man this is cool this is all good it's it's more that kind of getting to there and coming back down through there is that where you're still does still kind of get your hackles up yeah
you know I've gone through the transonic on acceleration enough that I'm I know what to expect and it's pretty good uh you know we're still you know we're always that there's little effects of trim schedules or center of gravity that can affect that transonic pitch up or even release altitude this time we released a few thousand feet lower than we've ever released before and that was specifically something that I and the flight test department was trying to push as a way to kind of get the boundaries of stability and control I don't think operational we want to release it that low but I thought it was important to do on this flight and it worked out pretty well uh so you know we're learning from it uh so uh but the once it was you know above Mach 2 and it just seemed to only be getting better and I yeah I would have loved to run the rocket motor even longer but this is a big step for us and you know we're taking the aircraft aerodynamically the speeds had never gone before and that also means we're going to significant heating that you know we we didn't want to just run full duration and see what we got we wanted to take a big step come back and see uh make sure that all the thermal protective system you know worked as as designed so that uh we didn't have any hot spots and some of that you can't tell until after flight Mark
when you when you uh you know it sounds like to me I mean these test flights don't happen every day you know it could be months and months and months in in some cases years like after after Mike was was killed um how do you stay current because it sounds like that's super important and then tie that into maybe is there a crossover with paragliding there too because we're always talking about that you know you you only fly a few times a year you're your own worst enemy yeah
we have an excellent simulator it flies like the real vehicle it's got nice visuals I think that's the most important thing that I can fly day in day out and it's it's integral you know it's integrated with control room once a week uh you know we do these integrated simulations where we have we have a a couple people that sit on the console station down the simulator behind you so you can't see what they're doing and we call them mayhem because they're they're giving you emergencies and they can be very subtle small Emergencies that you'd never notice unless you really flip through all the pages on the TV screens on the Multi-function dysfunctional displays, but you can't do that because you're too busy flying. But they can see them up in the control room, and they have to decide when to speak up and tell you to do something.
Or they can be more complex emergencies where, you know, we get a master caution or master warning light and have to deal with it. Or they can be stuff that is extremely severe, and you just, you know, don't have time to pull out a checklist. You have to react instantly and through memorized procedures. So they can give us all of that, and it's great where we are, you know, by the time I flew a couple days ago, I was as trained as I could possibly have been. But that's good for that, but it can't simulate the unbelievable feeling of having 70,000 pounds of thrust behind you when you weigh 30,000 pounds, and you're, you know, you're accelerating about three times the force of gravity.
It's a catapult shot off an aircraft. It's an aircraft carrier, but instead of stopping after a second and a half, it's going on for a minute, and you are very actively flying and doing stuff the whole time. It's a pretty bizarre feeling. To me, it's almost like, you know, I mean, I joke. It's like lassoing your feet together, you know, with a 100-foot rope to a horse and then smacking the horse in the ass and having it start galloping and having you do stuff. You know, you are seriously off. You have to go to the races, and you have to perform, and that one is really tough to train for. You know, we go to a centrifuge a couple times a year, and so we can simulate that kind of acceleration, but it's not a flight simulator where, you know, I'll have recorded displays on like a Surface Pro, and we'll practice the procedures, and we'll act like we're flying.
We'll make the calls, and that's been a really good thing for us because we've changed some of our procedures. The procedure is because of that, but nothing can truly simulate it like the real flight can, and that's kind of true for paragliding. I mean, you can't go out and simulate it that well. You just kind of have to go out and do it.
What happened to Mike? Is it, you know, in reading about the accident, it sounded like it was, you know, incredibly traumatic for you. You were in mission control, and he said something that you immediately... You were like, what? What the hell? No, stop, and it was already too late. Why? What happened to his mind there? Somebody that's that trained, that's done it that many times? I mean, I guess we're just guessing, but what's your theory? Yeah, I
think I got a pretty good idea. So, I mean, everybody can make mistakes, and yeah, that was the fourth powered flight, and I'd flown in the left seat on the first two, and I was on the right seat on the third one. I was on the right seat as an instructor pilot, so I was very familiar with them, and the thing you're doing is, you know, you're always trying to be a step ahead. What's coming next? And, you know, we have flight cards, and, you know, normal flight cards, you have one card for each maneuver, and that's kind of how it is. We have the stack of cards, but for the actual part where you drop and you release, everything, all those test points are in shorthand on the side. It's a single card, because you can't fly a spaceship and be flipping cards and casually doing stuff.
You are off to the races, and, you know, in my view, he was thinking about what came next, and, you know, he made the.8 buck call, which was a required call that I'd come up with after the first flight, and I'd come up with that because I thought it was a good way for the co-pilot to be in the loop. And to make sure the pilot knew, basically, that transonic was just about to happen, because it changes transonically for a few seconds. So by saying.8 mock, you're like, okay, everybody's ready for this, and then right after that, it does this little pitching maneuver, and then you're supersonic, and then you start trimming. So there's stuff to do, but then, in that case, on that version of the spaceship, within a few seconds after that, you were supposed to unlock the feather.
But by that time, you're doing mock 1.4, and that's.8. Perfectly safe. I mean, I actually, you know, we could unlock the feather down at 1.2. We did that on my first flight for a reason. It's flight test. But he made the.8 mock call, and his next action was supposed to be at 1.4 mock, where he unlocked the feather, and I think he just looked ahead and had a brain fart and, you know, skipped a page in the head and all.
And to me, the big, the real sad point of that is he said it. Very sad. I heard it very plainly. I heard it in the control room. I was sitting in the back of the control room. I was not the test conductor.
I heard it very plainly.
But it was not heard by Pete, you know, in the same cockpit with them, and they were kind of busy doing other stuff. And to me, that was the biggest sad point about it all is, you know, you got two people in there, so that if one person says something that isn't right, maybe the other person can stop. And Peter, Peter missed
the workout. Peter missed what you heard.
Yeah.
Yeah. And there were a couple other extent-rated circumstances, too, that I think contributed to it that, you know, I wasn't happy that they did that way. But, you know, hopefully we learn from it. And, you know, it's easy to say, hey, you should have had a, it shouldn't have been possible to do that. But, you know, it's, I would expect that when the space, if it would have been operational, we would have more safety mechanisms in place. But it's common not to do that in early flight tests because it adds complexity and in some ways can make things more dangerous. But, you know, now we do have such a thing. And it's kind of like the equivalent. I remember in the 80s and early 90s, I think it started with like a Saab 5000.
But there are other cars where people would start the ignition, put it in gear. And they'd swear that they were stepping on the brake as hard as they could, and the brake wasn't doing anything. The car was just accelerating. And, you know, a couple of seconds later, they already ran into something in the parking lot.
And, but, you know, you wouldn't see any, you know, the investigators would go in there and they wouldn't see any signs of anything wrong with the brakes and they were, the marks looked more like it was an acceleration the whole time. And, you know, nobody would ever take blame for it. But in the end, they put in brakes. And what all cars have now, you can't take the, you can't take the gear shift out of park if your foot's not on the brake. Because in the reality, they thought they had their foot on the brake and it was on the accelerator. So when things start moving, they just push harder on the brake, which is really an accelerator. And after a couple of seconds, it's over with. And we kind of did the same thing where now you cannot unlock the feather unless all the conditions for it to be, you know, there's, there's regions where it's unsafe to do that.
And you basically have to have all the conditions for safety met before it will be allowed to electronically unlock.
I think probably everybody listening who's learned how to ride a motorcycle has done that at some point. You know, when you're first learning, you always hit the, you always hit the gas when you're trying to hit the brake. Oh God. Hopefully it doesn't go too bad.
Yeah. And that's, that's unusual human factors, you know, I mean, if, if motorcycles were just being invented now. Yeah. The equivalent of the test positive would never approve that because they'd say, Hey, there was a percentage of time where somebody will mess this up and it could have really bad consequences. So they would never invent a motorcycle like that now, just like they would never invent a tail drag or airplane now. But historically people learn to do that. And you know, so you, you know, it's there. How
do we, I mean, this is maybe a reach to try to take it from flying. You know, from Mike's accident, flying a rocket ship to mock, uh, to paragliding. But, um, if you thought about it all, like how to eliminate the brain farts in, in, in this slow sport, because that's certainly one of the greatest killers for sure. You know, just, I mean, you hear that all the time after somebody has an accident, like, ah, I just, man, I just, I just skipped that step. You know what I mean? How, how often has it happened? We just saw that hang glider not get clipped in, in Switzerland. Yeah. You know, the, the tandem guy that, that video that went viral, you know, the, the tandem pilot forgot to clip them in and, you know, so how do we, if you thought about that?
So
to me, I, I, nothing comes to mind of, of brain farts up in a way I can understand the brain farts on launch. You didn't, you didn't fasten your leg straps on the paraglider. You didn't hook in and hang glider. But do you know of accidents where people are just flying and had a brain fart?
No, not really. Not really. Yeah. I think you're, yeah, you're right. I mean, I think you're kind of, you know, at that stage, you're really tuned in and it, and it, you know, and, and like we talked about, it's not, you know, it's not gear failures then. It's, you know, it's, it's like your thing, you know, you get in a dust devil and, and you either, you either act correctly or you don't.
So I think one thing that has helped me is, you know, all those years I was a Marine pilot, there was a monthly magazine called Approach Magazine. And the Navy is put up by the Navy and the Marine Corps, and there's just two Navy Marine squadrons. And there were always, there I was stories in there, you know, that for people to learn from, you know, this happened to me. And I was, I was amazed how many of them began with, here I was flying along, and I never thought this would happen to me. And then this is what happened. And my takeaway from that was, wow, how, why would you think it could never happen to you? You know, we're, we're, you know, to use a quote that's been attributed to me, we're not selling shoes at Sears, we're, we're flying fighter jets.
They crash on occasion. It can happen to you. And if you don't think it can happen to you, then you are more dangerous than the person thinks it can happen to them.
I like that. So yeah, just remember all the time, it can happen to you.
So, so what I do, I, I, you know, not to be morbid, but I, I always are, I'm thinking of things that can go wrong. And then chair flying how I will deal with it. So I have never launched on the hook, but it's like, I've never landed with my gear up on an airplane, but I'm the last person that would laugh at somebody that did that. If somebody lands with a gear up, I will try to understand what led them to do that and how I can make sure that doesn't happen to me. I don't think I'm smarter than them. I realized, wow, that happened to another person. What was the situation? How do I keep that from happening to me? So even though I've never launched on the hook, I have certainly in my mind gone over
what I would do if I launched on the hook and, um, what I would do if I launched without my leg straps now, well, the other thing I really try is, Hey, when you think you're really ready to go, it's never that important that you run off, you know, let's make sure you're really ready to go, but you can still make that mistake. So, you know, I, I, I see that, that tandem hang gliding video that you saw, and I'm kind of amazed by some of the comments, uh, like, oh, he should have turned back in the hill and landed right away. It's like, come on, he was totally out of control. He was that, that instructor is fighting for his life as he's got, you know, his equivalent weight hanging from the control bar, which will put it in a dive, you know, on the left side of the control bar, which we'll put in the left hand turn.
And he's just fighting to get the wings level and control it. He's not going to make some smooth uphill downwind landing with any chance of success. The other thing that hit me about that is it's like, kind of like when somebody in the movie, somebody walks up and sticks a gun in your ribs and says, get in the car with me. It's a busy street that the person never screams. He's got a gun and runs away because he thinks I might get shot then. But if I get in the car, you think maybe there's a chance this will get better. Even though the chances are, it will only get worse. Now you go somewhere where there will be no witnesses and they can take their time to kill you. But, but it's human nature to put out, to try to put off the danger. So you take off, things are ugly.
You're not going to go, well, let me try to crash now. It's no, let me try to fix this. This is scary. This is too scary for me right now. So I'm going to keep on going down the road, which is what that guy did. Uh, you know, I look at that. I, the, the other thing is, and I don't know what he was doing with having them grab his leg or doing all these other things is like, Hey, just his carabiner is right there. If he, if he would have just hooked it to his own harness and sure he would have drug him off on landing, but he could have flared and drug him off at 20 miles per hour instead of crashing him at 40. And, but it's tough to come up with those things. If you have never, if you think it could never happen to you and you don't go through all the. Chair flying.
Yeah. I mean, one of the most valuable things that I use over and over and over again now flying and otherwise is after I did that trip with Will Gadd, you know, he uses this thing and he gives talks about this and he talked about it on the podcast with him, but the positive power of negative thinking and, uh, that that's a good way to put that, isn't it? I mean, if you, if you're just, what could potentially go wrong and how will I deal with it if, and when it does. Yeah. Um, okay. Last question. You've been very kind with your time and this is a blast. I, I hate that we're, we even have to come to an end, but, um, I'd love to ask you just, you know, when you look back at this quite storied career that I really actually do hope they make me up someday.
Um, if you could change one thing, usually I ask this question, you know, if you go back to your 50 hour self, you know, what would you change? But I'm just going to ask just a life question here. If you, you know, when you look back at 40, if you look back at the, if you look back plus years of flight if you could change one thing what would it be i
wish i would have taken an SIV a lot earlier yeah good one
SIV is good
i know a guy that's you know an outstanding cross country pilot you know just decades of experience he's probably gone to hospital five times if not more he's never had an SIV you know and you need to do an SIV you really do before i'd ever gone i mean i taught myself how to full stall and done that a few times and you know that's not the smartest thing to do uh but every time i go to one i learn stuff although honestly every time i go to one i i hear some stuff that i disagree with um but there's still stuff to be learned and and uh it's really important i think now if i look at my career you know it's funny uh i
kind of i mean i got i'm kind of like a force gump my way through aviation well i've had a dreams it's not like i've done this great career planning and it was all all meant to be it's just every bad Denali ever had ended up to be a good deal in some way so maybe it's just power positive thinking i i don't know but i also look at things you know i you know i i say how my wife and i didn't get along if she would not have been dissatisfied living in the desert while i was working at nasa i probably would have never had quit and gone to the airlines and going to the airlines you know gave me big airplane experience so after i went back in the air force when when uh you know skeletal composites was looking for somebody that could fly white knight to the big mothership and spaceship to suddenly you know i had that experience i wouldn't you know i had experience that not a typical fighter pilot would have and and i sure didn't do that through any great career planning so i i look back i wouldn't have changed a thing i mean i wish i had an engineering degree but if i i wish i kind of would have gone to a better college at the time but if i did maybe i would have taken a different job you know but i'm very happy with how it's turned out
awesome what's
next hey uh you know i look forward to to going into space on a weekly
what's next is let's get this test program complete get the fancy interiors in move to new mexico and start flying passengers i
know you have to be careful about what you say about about virgin just in general the media side of things but how far out do you would you guess they are well
you never know what you know what's next to be discovered but the fact that i mean i'm going above 50 miles uh and you know i'm not going to be able to do that you know we don't see anything we lost some decals on the spaceship i mean big deal uh i have not seen any hint of anything wrong with anything i would have been happy to throw another rocket motor in and go right back up again and i think any subsequent step we do to full duration or any people is is very low you know low risk as opposed i'm talking programmatically i just don't think we're gonna suddenly discover oh at mach three it behaves totally different than 2.9 um so you know i i think you know hopefully we'll be in new mexico by the end of 2019 carrying people wow
amazing amazing well i hope it comes true uh mark thank you so much this has been just a total delight i appreciate it and uh thanks for your time and good luck uh just man good luck sure
and if you ever meet me on the hill call me forger i hate you mark well damn it we
should have started off with that
it's funny i just i was not raised on mark i was raised on other nicknames but i've been called forger for three years that's kind of a strange uh call sign but i should have
known better it was in all your emails i my plan was to ask you about that right off the bat yeah you think i would i'm a paraglider i'm daft all
right thanks
i look
forward to flying with you sometime absolutely i
want to fly with your son too hopefully you guys can get up here to some valley and or i'll get down there to the desert but uh yeah that would be fantastic we should spend some time cloud-based together and share some more stories sounds
good look forward to it thanks forger take care i
hope you enjoyed that if you're getting something out of the cloud-based mayhem podcast uh all we have ever asked for is a buck a show the reason we're not relying on sponsors to support the show is that i just don't believe that the advertising economy and the digital economy is a really truly honest and truthful way to uh have a conversation with you if i'm trying to hawk the latest the latest wing or the latest mattress or whatever it may be um number one the ads are annoying to me when i listen to other podcasts but there's it's you know ads are seen as free and podcasts have seen they're seen as free but they're not free um there's a cost there there's an intrinsic cost there and there's a cost uh to the relationship between me and you my listener so i rely on you to make all of this possible as you can imagine it's not just a talk and we record and we put it up there's tons and tons of editing and there's the music costs and there's the storage costs and there's the website costs and then there's just the time you know sitting down with these people uh often takes weeks sometimes months and months and months as this one did uh to put it together so um all we ask for is a buck a show if you can support us financially and not everybody can't and we don't need everybody to but if you can support us financially you can do so in a few different ways go to cloudbasedmayhem.com and you'll see the ways to do it there you can become a regular supporter through patreon and be rewarded for doing so via t-shirts and hats and books and other stuff uh and also bonus material like i talked about at the top of this show with the paul kushelbauer episode uh you can do one-time support through paypal all i ask you to do there is don't just send a buck you know wait till you've listened to 20 and send appropriately because paypal takes their little money and you can do that with paypal and you can do that with things as they have to um but you can support us in many other ways if i if i if you can't do it financially uh you can do it by rating us on itunes or stitcher or however you get your podcast you can share it with your friends on the way up to launch you can blog about it on your own blog you can post about it on social media you can share it when we put it out on facebook and instagram and other platforms um what this is all about is just sharing knowledge i'm trying to make i'm not i'm we are all on part of the show we're trying to make this uh trying to make our community safer trying to make us all better pilots and uh just trying to also bring you some entertainment so if it's valuable to you uh you can do any of those things it goes a long ways it makes all this possible and i really appreciate it thank you see you on the next show cheers