What’s more American than the freedom to fly light aircraft and Hollywood? Harrison Ford, who combines the two!
Last month a bunch of us from East Coast Aero Club went down to the Aero Club of New England‘s annual Cabot Award luncheon. Recipients of this award have included Igor Sikorsky, Charles Stark Draper (MITer responsible for everything good and bad through the 1960s), General Doolittle, Chuck Yeager, Bob Hoover, and now… Harrison Ford! (see People magazine)
Harrison Ford is kind of an awkward speaker, shocking considering his profession, but he came to life during the question and answer period. Ford may be crazy successful and famous, but he was humble in front of the audience of some great pilots, e.g., Anne Baddour, a test pilot for MIT Lincoln Laboratory for 20 years, and Matt Guthmiller, who flew a Bonanza around the world at age 19.
Ford explained that he started flying at age 52, “motivated by the thought that I hadn’t learned anything in a long time.” He spoke about the blend of freedom and responsibility that aviation has brought to his life and mentioned that “flying is an earned freedom; you put in the work.” Ford noted, correctly in my opinion, that the U.S. remains the best place in the world to fly a personal aircraft (in a lot of countries, as a practical matter, aviation is restricted to airlines and oligarchs). He expressed his concern that future generations of Americans won’t be able to do what he did: “We are losing airports at a frightening rate.” (His home airport, Santa Monica, is being gradually destroyed by “Progressives”; see “China building 66 airports in the next five years; Californians work to close a busy airport“)
My favorite exchange:
- Q: were you ever scared?
- A (in front of 300 people): I’m scared right now.
Ford noted that his California friends like to point out the apparent contradiction between his environmentalism and owning nine aircraft. His response: “I only fly one at a time.”
Even in provincial Boston a Hollywood celebrity is not safe from people with screenplays. In response to a question about whether he could help get a movie made about World War II veteran pilots, Ford said “Young people like to see people of their own age in movies” and “We try to tell neat stories.” Pressed further, he said “Hey, I don’t run Hollywood. I just work there.”
Ford expressed his disapproval of the Republican plan to take the government-run 1950s air traffic control system and turn it into a privately-run 1950s air traffic control system: “What is the problem that we’re trying to solve?” (see “King Donald’s Privatized Air Traffic Control System“)
Ford has done a lot for small-scale aviation in the U.S. He was head of Young Eagles for years, a job formerly held by Chuck Yeager, and has personally flown hundreds of children in his Beaver for the program. He has also found and/or rescued a couple of lost hikers via helicopter (currently he flies a Bell 407).
I posted about the event in real-time on my Facebook page. Here was the first comment exchange:
friend (i.e., someone I don’t know): Is that the award for successfully landing on a taxiway?
me: Definitely not, since my friend Bill and I landed an SR22 on a taxiway in Lakeland, Florida back in April and we got no awards.
friend: I imagine you received special attention from the FAA, though.
Ford actually opened by being humble about his landing mistake, saying that “despite the taxiway landing, I still hope to contribute to the aviation community” (see my February 2017 post: “Harrison Ford landing on a taxiway at Orange County“). Ford learned to fly at 52 and has logged thousands of hours. What about my Facebook friend? The “Lakeland in April” response is, to a pilot, an obvious reference to the Sun n Fun festival, in which more than 1,000 aircraft may need to land on a single day and therefore a taxiway is turned into a temporary runway. So we can infer that this guy throwing rocks at Harrison Ford is himself not even a Private pilot! I’m 99% sure that he isn’t a famous movie star as well. What is it about humans that makes unsuccessful people want to throw rocks at successful people?
Ford was reasonably patient up on the dais while an endless list of names of local nobodies who’d helped out with the event were read out. He stayed for at least an hour after the event so that anyone who wanted an autograph or a selfie could get one. It would be tough to invent a nicer person, but the topic of this posting is really to remind myself and readers that aviation remains one of the most awesome things about the U.S. and today is a good day to celebrate that fact.
Happy July 4th to all readers!
[And to English readers: sorry]
@Phil,
“What is it about humans that makes unsuccessful people want to throw rocks at successful people?”
Envy and jealousy. Two of the most horrid emotions humans possess. I’ve never understood how folks don’t grasp that as they cast aspersions at others they’re (more than anything else) showing off their own glaring lack of success. Very sad.
Does anyone know many mistakes like Harrison Ford’s occur in the US each year?
Thanks for this — nice to read about someone who is talented, gracious and humble.
Neal: How many mistakes? https://ntl.bts.gov/lib/33000/33700/33730/DMI5523.pdf says that controllers themselves make at least 800 reported errors per calendar year (that doesn’t count minor stuff; I probably notice a handful of errors every hour by busy Tower controllers, e.g., telling an airplane “I’ll call your base” and then forgetting to call; slightly lower error rate for Approach controllers, e.g., forgetting to give a final vector and approach clearance to an aircraft doing a practice approach so that the aircraft blows through the final approach course).
https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/statistics/year/?fy1=2017&fy2=2016 shows 1560 runway incursions in FY2016.
Most parallel taxiway landing mistakes wouldn’t be reported because most airports don’t have control towers and it may well be perfectly legal to land on a taxiway (see https://backcountrypilot.org/forum/landing-on-taxiways-3689 for a discussion and also https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/community/threads/runway-closed-can-i-take-off-on-taxiway.91572/ ). Certainly we land helicopters on taxiways all the time at both towered and uncontrolled airports.
> but the topic of this posting is really to remind myself and readers that aviation remains one of the most awesome things about the U.S.
It’s completely true. As much as I love Australia, the extraordinary costs and outright hostile over-regulation have made this a pretty awful place for GA. If their goal was to kill it, mission accomplished.
Aviation is what will almost certainly lure me back to the US, as unthinkable as I would’ve found that a few years ago.
Happy holiday!
Parallel taxiway landings were part of my training and even part of my check ride. On the check ride the instructor wanted to see how I would react to a last few seconds change of plans. Long after I had been cleared to land on the runway and was pretty close, he said divert to the taxiway to the right, I’ll handle the radio you handle the plane. I assume he knew the controllers and had done this before and must have known clearance was virtually assured, because by the time clearance was received I was almost touching down. I got lucky and the landing was perfect.
Student pilots probably constituted 95% plus of the traffic at this airport.
Note this was in a very light plane, a Beech Sport. I don’t know how heavy a plane has to be before routine taxiway landings are ill-advised due to the less strong construction of taxiways.