Bush pilot & STOL Air Race World Champion. Flying a Carbon Cub Ghost. Building SkyVantage, XEGA si & VoltWing. Helpful pilot-nerd notes. https://nitter.cf/t.co/fWfcxWs3xS
United States
Joined March 2009
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I fly a Carbon Cub Ghost into the backcountry and build things that fly. Here I share what I'm learning: tailwheel and STOL flying, nerdy tools for pilots, and the founder journey. Follow along if that's your kind of nerd.
I didn't get into aviation rich. I got into it broke.
First, I couldn't afford an airplane at all. Then I could afford the cheapest thing in the sky — a little almost-ultralight that cost less than most used pickups, shook like a paint mixer, and made me the happiest man in Utah every single time it left the ground. I've loved every airplane I've ever flown, and that one might have taught me the most, because it taught me this:
Nobody's airplane ever took anything away from mine.
These days I'm lucky — and I know exactly how lucky — to fly a Carbon Cub. And lately I've been watching a company I love do something completely outrageous: they put a turbine on a Cub. A regenerative turboprop, burning jet fuel, spinning five blades, on a tube-and-fabric backcountry airplane. It costs more than most houses. Most of us will never own one. A handful of people will buy it, and God bless every one of them, because it is awesome.
Here's what I can't get my head around: the idea that an airplane like that somehow subtracts from the rest of us. Like aviation is a pie, and if somebody bakes a bigger slice, yours gets smaller.
Aviation is not a pie. Aviation is a campfire. Somebody throwing a bigger log on doesn't make your seat colder. It makes the light reach further.
Because here's what actually happens when people do outlandish things in aviation. A kid sees it. A kid who has never touched an airplane watches a Cub climb out behind a turbine, and something in his chest catches — and now he wants to know *how*. How does that engine work? How do you build an airplane out of tubes and fabric and make it do that? Innovation breeds imagination. Imagination breeds questions. Questions breed education. And education is how a broke kid on a fence line becomes a pilot, a builder, a mechanic, an engineer — becomes one of us.
Every single one of us got here because something outrageous caught our eye first.
You know this if you've ever stood at an airshow. Nobody stands at the fence watching a P-51 growl past — an airplane almost nobody can afford — and gets angry about it. Nobody watches a military jet worth more than some small countries and decides it makes their little two-seater less valid. We stand there with our kids on our shoulders thinking, *how do I get closer to that?* Then we go home and fly what we can afford, build what we can build, and love it completely. The P-51 and the ultralight on the same ramp are not enemies. They're the same fire at different sizes.
I've lived at both ends of that ramp. Broke. Cheap seats. And now a Carbon Cub I still walk around twice before I fly it, just because I get to. At every stage, the dream machines — the ones I couldn't afford, the ones that made no practical sense — were never obstacles. They were the reason I kept going.
So no, I don't have a scarcity bone in my body when it comes to flying. Build the turbine Cub. Build the electric one. Build the one nobody's thought of yet, the one that makes the rest of us say, "you put a *what* on a Cub?" If only a handful of people buy it, it still moved aviation. It still lit up some kid's imagination. And it still taught the whole industry things that will end up in airplanes the rest of us *can* afford — because that's what the expensive experiments have always done.
Innovation is innovation.
Awesome is fucking awesome.
Fly what you can. Love what you fly. And when somebody builds something outrageous, tip your cap — you're standing in its light, too.
Interesting. Muse (the bot) is pretty great too! @bot has a pal!
I am going to play with having Muse handle certain things while Grok Bot will handle other certain things.
I will share my uncertain findings here.
Nothing will retire the usefulness of the telephone/mobile phone faster than bot/agent access to phone calls.
One of my favorite things about AOPA is the investment in education.
The AOPA Foundation awarded more than $2.2 million in scholarships in 2026—the largest amount in the foundation's history—with an average award of $6,500.
With support from the Ray Foundation, more than $1.3 million will go to 115 high school students and teachers, who will each receive $12,000 toward training for their private pilot certificate.
In addition to the high school scholarships, the AOPA Foundation awards other scholarships that can be used toward sport, private, commercial, or flight instructor certificates; instrument or multiengine ratings; and nonflying aviation pursuits such as mechanic or flight dispatcher training.
"Every one of these scholarships starts with donors who are passionate about aviation and choose to invest in someone else's future. Their generosity is changing lives across the country," said AOPA Foundation Senior Vice President Elizabeth Tennyson.
The AOPA Foundation recently improved its application process and now offers two application periods each year instead of one. The first application period each year runs from April to June, and the second from October to December.
For the full article, see the link in the comments.
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here’s a short grok bot guide on how i create high quality bots and manage my team. ask @bot to read this post and help you improve your team!
• add dr eggbot to your team! he’s my bot designer that i use to create bots
• you don’t need a lot of bots. a few good bots can be more useful and easier to manage than a large team
• tell your bots to create skills for itself as you give it instructions on how to do tasks. this lets them do them more consistently even over long conversations. you can even ask it to create a private github repo for you to store all your skills if you want them preserved independently
• add connectors, use the vault, and give access to all the tools you use to do your work. you can also ask your bot to setup its own email and it can sign up for its own accounts for better separation
• thinking about all the work you do by hand, or steps in your workflows where you have to copy and paste information back to your bot. ask your bot how it can do that for you instead!
• imagine you hired an intern, how would you onboard them and help them do the work correctly and efficiently? introduce yourself to your bot and describe the work you do, then ask it how it can help you automate it
and my favorite tip: use voice mode or the transcription option! it’s a good way to just brain dump a lot of information. then, at the end, tell your bot to “restate this in your own words” so you can confirm it understood you
x.ai/bot/_jOdbfkB16zxu7MRcmR…
Cory Robin retweeted
Arizona‼️🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Go Vote!! Don’t let Arizona become the next California! So vote Republican🇺🇸
Cory Robin retweeted
Then quit, @JamesGunn, quit. Nobody wants your cinematic universe. It sucks. Go make your own studio, so you can create your own weird, obscure, hard-R, degenerate universe. Leave DC characters alone. Let someone else who actually cares about this ip and these characters have a go at it. Give it up. Before you completely kill the brand.
Hear me out. Elon gives haters the 🖕 and gives robots to every human on earth.
They’d still hate him.