kontextmaschine:

Oh as long as I’m doing crazy badass hypothetical prep and talking about flying as one of my former lives:

If you’re crashing in trees, maybe because of takeoff issues, aim the plane between two of them wider than the fuselage but narrower than the wingspan, try to take the impact on the wings, rip them and their fuel tanks away, and get out of it with broken bones

Its impossible to find because it’s 2021 and the Internet is terrible now, but there’s this bit from The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s account of the US postwar Golden Age test pilots, and these were guys who were continually narrating their flights to base over the radio, and Wolfe was talking about the community (this was also basically where “swinging” comes from, a tight-knit community to the point of recreationally fucking each others’ wives) coming together to listen to the records of their compatriots’ fatal last flights and what the test pilot community respected most and the piloting community in the late magazine-mediated era still respected was the guys who never broke down or cried for their mothers, they were pragmatically evaluating and pursuing their outs all the way until impact