AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2021 - 22

PROFICIENT PILOT

Time flies

BY BARRY SCHIFF

Celebrating my literary birthday

BARRY SCHIFF

has been writing
for AOPA Pilot for
almost 58 years.

22 | AOPA PILOT March 2021

I REALIZED SHORTLY AFTER WRITING last month's
column that I was about to submit my 360th installment, and that I had been writing Proficient Pilot
for 30 years-certainly an excuse to reminisce, to
celebrate my literary birth in 1963. This is when I
was flabbergasted to learn that AOPA Pilot had
agreed to purchase my first magazine article for the
princely sum of $75. Mrs. MacDonald, my English
Composition teacher in high school, would have
been similarly shocked. She could have told you that
I barely squeaked by with a C and never did learn the
difference between a split infinitive and a dangling
preposition. Given access to my class yearbook, she
likely would have annotated that I was the least likely
student in her class to become a writer.
Reading some of my early material makes me
cringe and would seem to validate Mrs. MacDonald's
appraisal of my literary prospects. Writing, I have
been told, is a skill that improves with time, but that
adage did not seem to apply to me. Despite the passage of much time, I still do not consider myself a
particularly good writer. Ernest Gann and Antoine
de Saint-Exupéry arranged words to form literary
strands of pearls, and my best does not compare to
their worst. Their talent, however, continues to set
lofty goals to which I continue to aspire. I would like
to think that I have become a decent craftsman, not
so much because of innate talent-which I do not
have-but perhaps because I have a sense of what
pilots enjoy reading.
I continue writing and, hopefully, improving
because it enables me to teach in an exceptionally
large classroom. (Not everyone agrees with all that
I say, but that is another story.) Writing also gives
me an entrée deep into the industry I so love. How
else could I have arranged to fly some very exotic
aircraft-such as a high flight in an Air Force U-2
Dragon Lady? The rewards far outweigh the frustrating agony that comes from staring at a blinking cursor
while trying to develop a topic. (This is a backhanded
way of asking-begging-for subjects about which to
write in future columns.)
Most rewarding are occasional letters detailing
how something I wrote might have made someone's
flying safer. Conversely, there are readers springloaded to jump on my errors. One cannot write for the
public and be thin-skinned. Paraphrasing a printer's

axiom, " Everyone makes mistakes, but writers publish theirs. "
I created my first monthly quiz, " Test Pilot, " for
the March 1994 edition of AOPA Pilot, three years
after I had begun writing my monthly column.
Although the quiz (see p. 39) continues to gain popularity, some readers complain that it is too difficult,
that they rarely get a passing grade. But " Test Pilot's "
purpose and challenge is to teach. If the questions
were easy, they would serve little purpose other than
to assuage the egos of those who take the test each
month. Rarely do readers correctly answer all the
questions in a particular quiz. When they do, I have
failed as a teacher.
My goal each month is to carefully craft questions
that either entertain, fascinate, or educate in a useful manner. Believe it or not, the quiz is as difficult
for me to create as the questions might be for you to
answer. It helps, however, for me to have been a trivia
nut, a lifelong affliction. When I was a teenage flight
instructor, I always enjoyed discovering and sharing nuggets of information. The owner of the flight
school where I worked, Paul Bell, enjoyed telling others that I knew more [stuff ] that nobody cared about
than anyone he knew. But he was wrong; people really
do care about this stuff.
I confess to having made a few mistakes in " Test
Pilot " over the years, even though I go to great pains
to avoid them. I atone for such errors by personally
answering every corrective email that I receive.
The easiest way for me to research the answer
to a question is to simply ask the question in a quiz
and then intentionally publish an incorrect answer.
Some of you are bound to know the real answer and
then take great joy in sending it to me. This method
of research works like a charm ( just kidding).
I also enjoy researching questions submitted
by readers. One question that has remained unanswered for years asks, " A standard key-operated
magneto switch is labeled OFF R L BOTH START.
Why is the right magneto selected to the left of the
left magneto and vice-versa? " Bendix, original manufacturer of the switch, says that no one is available
who remembers why the switch was labeled so
incongruously.
Do you?
AOPA
barryschiff.com

http://www.barryschiff.com

AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2021

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