Know Thyself

This is where I pivot to a new paradigm

When I started this Substack, it was my intention to concentrate on providing tools for laypeople to understand and evaluate quantitative claims that were made in the press and social media. I’ve been working for close to 40 years in economic and public policy; I have a graduate degree in economics and have worked in non-profits, government, and private industry doing analyses of energy, labor markets, social welfare policy, and for the past 25 years health care. I know a lot about about statistical methods, data quality, research design, and programming. I thought I could bridge the gap between the pseudo-scientific babble being thrown about in public policy discussions and the ordinary onlookers being assailed with bafflegab they lacked the tools to evaluate or criticize.

Very impressive. Now label the &$%!ing axes.

But for the past 18 months the only topic I’ve actually written about is aviation.

I thought writing about statistics and data analysis would provide a service. I have long been dismayed at the general innumeracy that characterizes discourse on subjects like gun violence, education outcomes, tax policy, and income distribution. Covid just about put me over the psychotic edge with its combination of arrogant official bullying and outright lying. But as I poked around Substack I found there were other writers already doing a much better job than I could of counteracting such nonsense. El Gato Malo, Eugyppius, Mathew Crawford…they and others have that corner locked down. I want to do something different.

Flying is a late-in-life vocation. I took my first flight lesson in 2013. I was 55 years old and my youngest child had just graduated from high school. It was a whim hanging on the slightest thread; I was at the time dating a long-out-of-the-cockpit private pilot who had always struggled with task saturation and wanted a pinch-hitter to work the radios and handle some of the navigation. He bought me a discovery flight as a birthday present. Afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about the sky. Two months later I was enrolled in ground school and flying twice a week with a retired Navy aviation instructor who was more accustomed to 19-year-old Mavericks in T-4s. I soloed a few months later and passed a sport pilot checkride in October 2014.

Today I’m a private pilot with 700 hours in a dozen different makes of aircraft. I own a 1939 Luscombe 8A: a 65-hp two-seat taildragger with fabric wings, no electrical system, and a powerplant based on 1920s tractor technology. She (of course she’s a she) has taken me all over the East Coast, and one memorable summer from Maryland to Oregon and back.

NC25165, or Miss Vivian to her friends

I now also hold an advanced ground instructor certificate and teach both a formal ground school and ad hoc seminars designed to bring rusty pilots safely back into the skies. I am also a rated aircraft mechanic and do a side business providing inspection and maintenance on light sport aircraft.

Since I can’t seem to stop writing about flying, I’d at least like to make my experiences and insights accessible to a wider audience that isn’t interested in the mechanics of flight or FAA inside baseball. To that end, I’m planning a three-part series based on a pair of flights I took last week. One was a commercial flight on Southwest from Baltimore to Phoenix. The second was a five-leg private flight from Phoenix to Baltimore. The third will be a chin-stroking think piece comparing the brutally painful commercial experience with the joy of flying myself back in a small plane that was not even certificated airworthy by the FAA. And explaining why I think that despite all the forces trying to prevent that future from happening, eventually what I did over the past couple of days will be available to everyone who wants it.