1. What first interested you about flying?
My grandmother was a pilot, and when I was little, I would spend most weekends working on her farm in Springhouse. She would tell stories of flying from Wings Field in her Waco-F Biplane powered by a Warner-Scarab engine. I was attracted to flying because of all the buttons and switches and dials. My friend Fred Piasecki and I started a Flying Club while at Haverford. We were the only two members of our club, but each week, Fred would bring in old black and white films of his dad's helicopters flying around, and we would sit there with our physics teacher and watch them together. I managed to get my flying license before I left for college.
The interesting thing for me about flying an aircraft is that there is a point where the science becomes an art. The Japanese poet Matsua Basho expressed it best to his students: "Learn the rules well, and then forget them." Rules protect you when you are learning something, but if you dance within the rules, you are only a technician. It is when you learn to dance outside the rules that you become an artist. This is true for flying, and I think for many other things in life.
