I don't read too often but working on it.
Just as I prefer Documentaries over "movies" I prefer autobiographies or informative books over novels or Sci-Fi books.
Currently a few pages into
12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
Somehow I manage to wheel the DC-2 around and at least aim it at the field with reasonable accuracy. My feet are actually shuddering on the rudder pedals as I ease back on the throttles and begin the descent. McCabe frequently calls off the air speed, which is, maddeningly, always too fast or too slow. When he drops the flaps, I shove the nose down so violently that our attitude becomes nearly a straight dive. McCabe moans in protest. I haul back on the control wheel. We instantly balloon upward and hang ridiculously in a half stall. I shove the nose down again and repeat the entire sequence of ugly gyrations until we swoop over some telephone wires and wobble down toward the black cinder field.
This time I am determined there will be no more bouncing. I will astonish McCabe with the featherlike touch of our wheels.
As the edge of the field slides beneath the nose, I pull back on the throttles. The engines sputter and backfire. I wait, holding the glide nicely. I do not see McCabe’s hands creep forward along his legs until they are only a few inches from the control wheel. He must allow me actually to make the landing or the whole session is meaningless—but he too has a strong sense of self-preservation.
I have not reckoned with the powerful psychological aftereffect of the previous landings. Now, suddenly, fear of repeating the debacle dominates my reactions. Earth-shy, I level off a good thirty feet above the swiftly passing cinders. Even McCabe is robbed of time to avert the crisis. The DC-2 hesitates as if bewildered by this giddy height and, abandoning all hope, stops flying instantly. Luckily I have kept the wings level, for the descent is as direct as an elevator’s. There is no energy left for bouncing. We hit on all three points with a soul-shattering thump.
I am quite defeated. The sound of the landing is still echoing in my ears as I struggle at least to keep the ship rolling in a straight line. The sound was like a very bad accident in a large hotel kitchen.
“That,” says McCabe, massaging his back, “was not a landing. It was an arrival.”
Which book on Oppenheimer?Finished Oppenheimer just in time for movie ...1980 pgs!!!
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loving it.Maybe one has to be a pilot but the language is wonderful.
Currently listening to this...not bad, but a little dry at times. Considering the topic, not too surprising.
They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pasture-land. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.