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> As I flew, a licensed pilot sat beside me. He talked me through the flight and generally kept me in check. At one point, I turned east and twisted the joystic
by mLuby 5y ago
> As I flew, a licensed pilot sat beside me. He talked me through the flight and generally kept me in check. At one point, I turned east and twisted the joystick with a little too much confidence. He reached over, grabbed the joystick and corrected my attitude.
Sounds like the author just took a normal flying lesson but didn't call it that so they could write it up as a marketing piece for an app. Why the NYTimes ran it is beyond m… oh right money.
In my case, "with ZERO flight experience, I walked into a busy airport and within minutes I was at the controls of a full-sized airplane hurtling toward the White House!!" Translation: I signed up for a flight lesson during which my instructor let me turn the two-seater single propeller plane 360°. Both statements about that same event are technically true; one is so misleading it's basically a lie. (BTW it's called a "discovery flight" and it's super fun—highly recommend!)
- colechristensen 5y agoEveryone's first flight is with zero experience. Somehow you can get flight experience without flying the first time? In 2007 I landed a small plane with zero flight experience! I mean, that was actually the point of the exercise, but that's how it goes. Maybe if I marketed myself better I could have had an article in the new york times.
- aaron695 5y agoYou can get experience without doing an actual thing. For instance on a simulator. But yes, it's important to understand everyone has a first time. There's a good article about doctors and nurses doing this. And the hidden secret while they are practising patients suffer, but it has to happen somehow. With a plane at least meh, you crash or you don't. No harm, no foul.
- ryandrake 5y agoAs I was reading it I thought, gee, this sounds like a run-of-the-mill discovery flight, offered by every flight school out there, but this time with some iPads mounted in the cabin, and a stereotypical "30 under 30" CEO making a nebulous technology tie-in.
- 1cvmask 5y agoThis is how The Gray Lady became the paper of record. The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Misreporting-Fabrications/dp/1736703315 https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Misreporting-Fabrica... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record
- bombcar 5y agoDiscovery flights are awesome - my first time in a small plane I did everything but the actual landing (and my instructor would have had me do that too if it hadn’t been for a moderate crosswind).
- proc0 5y ago> Why the NYTimes ran it is beyond m… oh right money. It seems almost every article is just another form of advertisement. Someone pays in some way and then the article has an agenda with implied call to action, or what I call, "call to thought". I think it makes sense because we've been in with the Internet and Web 2.0 for a long time now and we don't need centralized curated content anymore, so these editorials have to now make money from selling their influence and promotional powers more so than just information.