Anyone who ever thinks about becoming an airline pilot should read " Hurry Up and Wait" (page 101), a blow-by-blow account of an average day in the life of a commuter pilot written by Peter A. Bedell, a Jetstream 41 captain with a regional airline. While there are some similarities with pilots of major carriers, the life of a regional airline pilot is vastly different. "I may be an airline captain, but at the regional level it's certainly not a glamorous job," says Bedell. "While I have one of the greatest office views in the world, there's the low pay, living out of a suitcase away from my family, and working most holidays and weekends. While pilots at the majors may fly three legs a day at most, it's normal for us to fly five or more. And while Paris, Milan, or San Francisco may be on the schedule for my colleagues in the majors, I'll be heading to Binghamton, Allentown, and Newark. Throw in the turbulent state of the airline industry with its bankruptcies, threats of furloughs, and daily pat-downs from our friends at the TSA, and you may wonder why I didn't rethink my career path." In the end, though, any job where you get to fly all day has to be better than a day at the office, right?
Are you of two minds concerning a flying trip to Mexico? Things have changed a lot for U.S. pilots flying south of the border. Writer Patrick Mathews and his son, Christian, take you along on a trip to Baja (see " Postcards: To Baja!" page 105). Mathews explores the wonders of the destination and talks with both U.S. pilots and Mexican tourism officials about the rewards of traveling to Mexico. "It's a great and easy adventure," he says. "With smart preparation and a good attitude, flying in Baja is a pilots' paradise with uncrowded skies and all the freedoms of flying in the U.S. 30 years ago."
Journalist Arthur Ruhl died in 1935. He had reported on some of the most exciting events of his day for Collier's Weekly. More than 60 years later, his great-nephew, Tom Simmons, found Ruhl's professional and personal correspondence including, Simmons says, "charming personal notes from Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, fan mail from other famous journalists, and letters of introduction to Lenin and Trotsky." An ultralight pilot, Simmons was excited to also discover correspondence between his great-uncle and the Wright brothers. Simmons tells the story of Arthur Ruhl's flight with Orville in " Centennial of Flight: Up in the Air With Orville," on page 76.
Editor at Large Tom Horne has been flying to the Outer Banks of North Carolina since the 1970s, but one of those trips served as good background for his " Wx Watch: The Wright Weather" article in this month's issue (see page 83). "An ultralight version of the Wright Flyer attempted to take off from First Flight," Horne said. "But right after liftoff the wind tossed it around and the whole works came down in a pile of tubes and Dacron." Hmmm. As Horne points out, the same fate befell the Wrights during their windy days at Kill Devil Hills. For a real-time look at Kitty Hawk's wild winds, go online ( www.digiwx-kittyhawk.com).
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