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What impressed me most was the camaraderie, what the French call the “esprit de corps”. It might hark back to the years of Saint-Exupery’s “Night Flight” (IMO required reading for any aviation buff), but if you were flying ZED fare, almost everyone would look at you as being somewhat part of the same family and try to help you. I still have many good friends from that time.
Mircea
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: What impressed me most was the camaraderie, what the French call the “esprit de corps”. It might hark back to the years of Saint-Exupery’s “Night Flight” (IMO required reading for any aviation buff), but if you were flying ZED fare, almost everyone would look at you as being somewhat part of the same family and try to help you. I still have many good friends from that time.
When my sister worked for American Airlines, I could fly standby to Dallas for the price of a cheeseburger. It was great!
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The nearest I've been to aerospace is sitting in a commercial jetliner.
Had the opportunity to once fly in an Airbus 380; and was allotted the last seat in economy in the aircraft, below the tail; all other seats in the last row were empty during the flight. Requested the crew to allow me to briefly go to the upper floor just to see, and they obliged.
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I'd like to see that. I've never been on the second floor of an aircraft.
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Several decades ago I did start doing my PPL(H) training, but my circumstances changed and I couldn't afford to complete it - it's an expensive hobby, particularly when Herself was doing much the same for fixed wing.
So we both dropped the idea (which was a pity) and never went back for a pile of reasons.
It was a huge load of fun, but as my instructor said: "Let's turn some money into noise!" 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: Several decades ago I did start doing my PPL(H) training, but my circumstances changed and I couldn't afford to complete it
If God had wanted us to fly, he would have given us bigger wallets. I want to fly, but since I haven't the financial resources to do so, I downloaded the Microsoft Flight Simulator. I tried doing this years ago on one of my older laptops. The first time I attempted to run the flight simulator, it errored out. The message of the error basically said, "Your machine does not have the minimum requirements to run this program." and when you clicked "OK", it would exit.
I went into a long period of deep despair after that. It was a very dark time in my life. All I wanted to do was run a flight SIM. I can't afford to fly right now, nor could I do so back then. What is the cost of renting a Cessna Skyhawk 172 these days? 17 years ago it was $120 per hour plus fuel. To imagine what it would cost nowadays? I don't want to know.
Eventually, I recovered. I bought an updated copy of MS Flight Simulator on the laptop I am using now. It's fairly new. Upon first running the sim two days ago, a message box popped up. It said, "Your machine does not have the minimum requirements to run this program." After that, it froze. I feel very depressed now. I need your thoughts and prayers.
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To run flight sim you need a PC with a bit of grunt and a decent graphics card such as the Nvidia RTX series that supports multiple monitors. On a flight sim I was roped in to assist on the owner had built a cockpit simulation and with all the switches and controls hooked into a USB joystick interface with simple push in wire connectors for the necessary buttons, potentiometers, sensors, rotary encoders and switches. An excellent set-up but a lot of work and all enhanced with terrific sound card and speakers to add to the realism.
I have just purchased a Meta Quest 3 to see what it is like on my son's sim, I reckon that will add an extra dimension to things.
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Here in the UK we have an aviation charity called Aerobility it's main intention is to get the disabled into the air and behind the controls of an aircraft.
My wife and I do our best to put our twin adult disabled sons into the air with them once a month. One of the son's flies a Piper "PA-28 Warrior" and the other a "Grob109B" Touring Motor Glider. The lads have almost no functionallity in their hands and forearms so the instructors (amazing folks) assist but only where necessary.
What an fantastic therapy, they land and life has been different for a while. The sparkle in their eyes says it all, muscular dystrophy and all the baggage that goes with it is forgotton about for that joyful hour. It is not as expensive as flying for the able bodied but still hurts the wallet but our philosophy is to make every day count, you can't take it with you!
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I've not heard of them, must look them up.
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For a long time I wanted to learn to fly but for many reasons (lack of funds mainly) I never managed it. I did have a sample lesson for my 70th birthday, but again, I couldn't justify the expenditure to go further.
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I could fly before I could drive. As a kid, I was able to recognize jets by their sound only. I wanted to be a fighter pilot, got the exam (not wanting to prise myself, but honestly was not a piece of cake, cleary a highlight of my life), got rejected a week later due to bad eyesight. For reasons, I had to do the medical check after the two sports-and-maths-and-psycho tests, because usually you start by checking if everything is OK and only go the hassle of the tests if you are apt. To precise, bad eyesight = I have exceptionally good eyesight, but was diagnosed with a probability to loose some of it on my right eye over the course of the 13 years training & service, which was sufficient for kicking me out of the program. The doc said "0,05% that it happens, but there are another 7000 furious waiting in the line behind you who are almost as good as you and with better condition, so why should we give you a chance ?". This was so abrupt that I completely cut with aviation from that on. But in my deep inside, I love it. And the Rafale is the best fighter in the world.  I
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I was a big fan of aviation in my teens up to my mid 30s.
I did 3 static line parachute jumps in my teens and later a glider flight as well as started flying lessons stopping when it became obvious how expensive it would be to maintain a license.
So I channeled my enthusiasm into hundreds of hours in flightsims, the 747 being my favourite aircraft to fly with the Kai Tak approach (PMDG 747).
One of the first projects I set myself in .NET back in around 2006 was to write a voice recognition application so that I could give commands to a virtual co-pilot to lower the landing gear, flaps etc.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Wordle 1,093 3/6*
⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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⬜🟩⬜🟩⬜
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In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Wordle 1,093 3/6*
⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛
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🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
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Wordle 1,093 4/6
⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛
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Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
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Wordle 1,093 3/6
⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
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Jeremy Falcon
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Quote: The so-called Dutch roll, said to have been named after an ice-skating technique attributed to the Netherlands
according to a BBC article.
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Interesting.
Because I was under the impression that ice skating is prevalent in Alpine countries. And Netherlands is not one of them.
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I even see some of the figures playing a game of curling 
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A TV report said that a Dutch Roll is a side to side motion caused by application of the pedals that cause the nose of the plane to move in a figure 8 pattern horizontally. They said the passengers might not notice this type of motion but it would freak out the pilots if they were not actively controlling the pedals.
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So what is Dutch about that? (I guess that is what the OP really was curious about.)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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