One of my indulgences lately is watching "Air Disasters" on the Smithsonian Channel. The best combination is young planes and old pilots. The air freight business has a lot of the opposite. But, even the gray-hairs sometime **** up. My favorite episodes of Air Disasters are the ones with the plot "... flirting with a flight attendant, and forgot to set the flaps for take-off."

A knucklehead friend of mine got into the Navy pilot pipeline, but failed the eye test. He got moved to the backseat (Naval Flight Officer candidate) but quit during training. They were up in a thunder storm at night, and he said "**** this ****." They then made him an air intelligence officer. A lot of NFO's end up as commercial pilots, getting flight training on their own after getting out of the Navy. The skies are a safer place because my friend was not one of them.

I was a bank courier in college. One of my jobs was meeting small aircraft at airports. Banks would exchange paper checks using small aircraft at night. They'd get their money a few days faster than routing the checks through the Federal Reserve system. One plane I met only got a stack of checks about two inches high. But, a few days interest on those checks more than paid for the trip from Norfolk to Charlotte.

Check routing provided a lot of entry-level pilot jobs back in the day. The pilots got a lot of yoke and pedal time since there was usually just one pilot onboard, and night-flying honed their skills really fast. But, that whole industry was wiped out, literally overnight, by Check21, the electronic check routing system.