Sojourner - Traveling with the “Canman”

Want a wonderful opportunity!  I met my oldest son at the Milan airport and took him to Lake Como, where his great-grandparents immigrated from back in the 1920s.  It was a poignant experience, as we visited many of the same places I had taken my father 8 years ago before he passed. In fact, the picture above was taken right when I posed with my father. We visited Bellagio on day one and then made our way up to the lake's northern tip.   We visited the Canclini wine sellers and cemetery.   We hiked up into the mountains above Colico, for a breathtaking view. We also discovered a little church that had a fresco painted around 1490.  According to the documents, this version was done 30 years before Leonardo da Vinci painted his "Last Supper" in Milan.            Then it was on to Lago Maggiore, where I had stayed while I worked.  It was a wonderful "homecoming" seeing old friends and work colleagues and visiting so...

My first keynote speech to an august body of my flight test colleagues.  What an honor!  I flew into Milan, still working on my talk about "The Future FTE".  Took a train from Milan to Rome.  That trek from Milan to the symposium hotel near Rome was an odyssey and a learning experience on how to purchase tickets. Lots of fast walking up and down staircases with 2 suitcases to catch various trains.  Several kind Italians helped me sort out the maze and purchase various tickets. Got a workout. On the train from Milan to Rome I was "heads down" still working on finishing my talk. Barely looking outside trying to input revisions I made by hand on the flight over. A pity. But the return trip to Milan awaits.  Out of frugality, I choose to take a regional train.   That involved a 1/2 mile walk at the central Rome train station (it's a HUGE station), which after multiple stops and changing trains left me at a country station 1 mile from the hotel.  ...

A 5-hour road trip brought me to a midwestern aviation capital in Wichita, Kansas.  The annual U.S. Flight Test Safety Workshop was again an enlightening and sobering remembrance.  MIT's STPA was again presented as a tutorial,  but his many test programs will incorporate it.  Too few I'm afraid.  Distinguished retired USAF test pilot Rod Huete took us through the painful lessons of the 1990s X-31 mishap.  Painful because the Air Force Test Center had embraced all the CRM practices that should have prevented this accident.  And the X-31 program had assembled a stellar test team.  But again the ego and human frailty yeared up to bite.    Mike Contratto, Dept. of the Air Force augmented this theme with his thought-provoking presentation, "The Tao, Self Deceptive Rationalization and the Vulcan Mind Meld."  In his talk, Contratto incorporated wisdom from George Chandler's masterpiece, "The Tao of Safety" quoting the comp...