Bothering a Pilot on Final

Tina wrote in news:46ee5bc6-d0b2-4563-a1c4-
:

On May 31, 10:45 pm, Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
Margy Natalie wrote in news:4841fb1c$0$24999
:





Tina wrote:
I had a totally different kind of experience at BED that is fun to
talk about. We had an ex Navy pilot -- flew F14's -- in the left
seat
of the Mooney. He hand flew the ILS on a bumpy day under the hood,
needles rock solid in the middle, all the while carrying on a
conversation with us about an unrelated technical matter that
would
have required a normal person's full attention.

He was probably the best pilot, in terms of airplane handling
ability,
I had even witnessed. He did confess the low stall speeds in the
Mooney took some getting used to.

Other than very fit, handsome, funny, skilled and smart he was
just
like most other pilots I knew.

I wonder what it would take to distract him on final: Incoming?

Bingo, I have a friend who is a former U-2 pilot and he flew some
manuvers made the instruments look broken (never bounced the
needles)
while talking to someone in the back seat (turned around).

It's just a matter of experience. If you do it so much that it's
second
nature, it frees up a lot of capacity. Having said that, the
autopilot
does so much of it nowadays....

Bertie



I can't fully agree, Bertie. Some people just repeat the same hour of
experience a hundred or a thousand times. Some gifted ones -- Hoover
comes to mind, as does the man I mentioned, or the one Margy did --
are just superior. It takes much less training and practice for them
to get 3 or 4 standard deviations away from the rest of us in a given
field. I can probably beat most athletes who are not golfers for the
first couple of rounds, but that would not be the way to bet at the
50th round.


OK, that's true enough, but I wouldn't attribute it to training or even
the speed of learning so much. More to an insatiable curiosity...

For that matter, I can assure you on a level field I would not compete
well professionally with some of the post docs I'm training. It's nice
to be queen!

He he.

Bertie