What I had in mind was the detailed, 75-point checklist, 6 weather apps, FAA rule check, poster board with TRUST cert, Registration, and Country Line Dancing First Place plaque displayed.
How do any of you ever get around to flying? Oh, and the anxiety some of you must experience the entire time you're in the air.
Here's how the bad pilot flies:
- Arrive at favorite beach flying location.
- power up equipment
- wait for solid GPS
- Take off and have fun
Now, yeah, I suppose I "check the weather" but that consists of simple situational awareness 99.99999% of the time... I don't need a weather app, or a pocket anemometer! Geez, the trees have never failed me in 7 years to get everything I need to know about the wind, and a look at the sky, and I'm good to go!
I could go on and on. Honestly, I've never, ever encountered another RC pilot – helis and quads – that truly lived up to all the finger‐wagging that goes on around here.
I don't buy it. I firmly believe most of my fellows here are Bad Pilots just like me
I think I'm a Bad Pilot with Good tendencies, or a Good Pilot with Bad tendencies...
I've been a weather fanatic for over 50 years, long before I started flying. This was back in the days when the "Weather Channel" consisted of a camera that endlessly scanned back and forth across a few gauges, like temp and wind speed and the like.
The first thing I do every day, without fail, are a quick scan of the news, and a review of the Weather Channel. The weather at my house is different from the weather at the reporting station, what with me being out in the boonies up a canyon, but I've got that well calibrated now, and I don't even have to think about it anymore.
And as you suggest, my entire canyon flying area is carpeted with big, green anemometers, which give me an excellent 3D picture of the canyon winds in real time, just by looking out the window.
But to your more general observation, the
point of flying is
not to follow the rules and be safe. Doing both are necessary to some degree, but the
point of lying is to
have fun with it!
Which I've always been good at, and that's a skill that hasn't seemed to diminish with age...
About a dozen years ago I bought a used homebuilt fat ultralight after years of flying conventional factory built airplanes. It was a Challenger II Clipped Wing Special, and a delightful little bird! But there were some major differences. For example, there was no Pilot's Operating handbook, and
no checklists!
I've always been a huge believer in checklists, and this bothered me greatly. I had gotten my BFR and check out in the model without checklists, but that was with a very experienced instructor.
I scoured the web looking for checklists, and what people did covered the entire range, from just firing it up with no preflight at all, to doing what amounted to an annual inspection before each flight.
Both of those struck me as dumb, so I wrote my own checklist that looked a lot like a C-172 checklist, streamlined a bit for the simplicity of the Challenger.
In the end, every pilot gets to decide for themselves, but for me, the
point of flying is to
have fun with it. Following rules and procedures is occasionally necessary, occasionally evil, and sometimes a necessary evil.
But it's never
the point.