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Why do some people tell lies about their flying?

This has been brewing for some time…

I just don’t get it.

If you can actually fly the plane, the job becomes virtually totally a huge logistics / ground support / sponsorship money collecting exercise. A friend of mine down here flew an MD500 turbine heli (which he bought specifically as it was one of the very few IFR certified single engine helis) around the world and had a guy on the ground, more or less H24, on the end of a satphone, sorting everything ahead. Russia alone cost $60k in bribes. The flying is, ahem, flying… you have to know how to read tafs, metars, etc, and make decisions.

You can criticise these publicity stunts – the usual approach is to say it is yet another self promoting person doing a load of flying and dressing it up as a fake “charity”. Or why do women get way more publicity? And therefore are much more likely to do this? Ferry pilots do this kind of stuff every day, somewhere, and they do it without the huge logistics / ground support / sponsorship money collecting exercise. Obviously it is not harder for a woman to fly a plane. It is true that not many do as a % but there are loads of reasons for that, not related to flying planes.

And usually a lot of GA names like to get involved in the project to get their name in the papers, for the usual self-promotion reasons.

And if you can’t fly the plane, the whole thing is just a big lie and will eventually come out because the ground crew will know all about it. As will the staff at every airport you go to.

But just how hard is it to fly a plane? Even a probably twitchy one like that one.

And if you can fly the plane, why have somebody else “hidden” in the cockpit on a “solo” flight?

The papers here are full of this, and it is ever so funny to read some of the GA names involved…

For sure the ground support job didn’t come cheap.

36 legs from Cape Town to Goodwood? You didn’t need to understand tafs or metars – you could almost see the next airport from circuit height

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

36 legs from Cape Town to Goodwood? You didn’t need to understand tafs or metars – you could almost see the next airport from circuit height

Actually (and I got a bit surprised too) if you add 30% overhead (being generous), you get to the same kind of distance London → Paris. Probably not that short in these biplanes, but still very far from your 7hr legs!

In that case, you decrease the flying effort (I imagine she might not even really had any time constraint, and METARs / TAFs are pretty reliable (although not sure, in africa!)), but you increase by a ton the Logistics efforts I imagine! Kind of like the drag curve if you were to consider one is induced drag and the other parasitic!

Peter wrote:

36 legs from Cape Town to Goodwood? You didn’t need to understand tafs or metars – you could almost see the next airport from circuit height

Says someone who doesn’t fly vintage open cockpit aircraft :-)

Andreas IOM

Why do so many people feel the need to join the misogynist mob who have been pursuing and dissecting to the nth degree her flying activities and private life?

Swanborough Farm (UK), Shoreham EGKA, Soysambu (Kenya), Kenya

2greens1red wrote:

Why do so many people feel the need to join the misogynist mob who have been pursuing and dissecting to the nth degree her flying activities and private life?

Because nobody likes to be cheated. It is this lady’s business model to re-enact historical flights and finance them through sponsorship and public speeches and publicity in general. A business model that only really works in the UK I guess (where they even have a “Honourable Company of Air Pilots” whose grey-bearded companions award people like her with something like a “Nobel price of airmanship” every now and then). Because everywhere else nobody really cares about re-enacted historical flights whose original no-one remembers anyway. It’s like calling one’s pleasure climb of the Mt.Evererst (or Chomolungma to use the politically correct name) a “re-enactment of Norgay’s and Hillary’s” climb. If you went seeking sponsorship for that, people would either laugh at you or give you some old piece of rope which had been forgotten in the corner of the shop. The same would happen to me if I were seeking sponsorship for re-enacting the first east-to-west crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. But maybe if I looked a bit more like the protagonist lady of this thread, getting funded might be easier…

Coming back to the topic: If someone gets paid for and accepts medals and prizes for feats like those claimed by this woman, then they need to be 100 percent honest and genuine, otherwise the whole enterprise will be completely useless. Her flights are probably genuine to some point, maybe 50 percent, maybe even 80 percent. This would be sufficient if one of us would do such a flight for our pleasure, but not if it is staged to impress the masses.

Last Edited by what_next at 25 Oct 10:03
EDDS - Stuttgart

who have been pursuing and dissecting to the nth degree her flying activities and private life?

I don’t see anybody doing that here. Maybe you are referring to other forums, but most of them are run like pubs with advertising and I don’t spent my time on them so I wouldn’t know….

Maybe you spend too much time reading them, 2greens1red, but here the discussions tend to be civilised.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Maybe you spend too much time reading them, 2greens1red, but here the discussions tend to be civilised.

It was interesting. There are now over 104 pages, over 2500 posts, on a particular forum, with the baying mob, having the scent of blood, getting even more wound up that this lady may now sue…….The usual suspects now hold court, with each egging their counterparts on, and the whole affair is now becoming somewhat unsavoury, from every angle and aspect. Peter has experienced in a previous forum life, attempting to alter the course of the favoured few’s opinion.

Frankly life is too short, and people with any savvy, have greater and better things to do with their life.Also, one should move through life treating others, as they wish to be treated themselves. That includes internet posting…

Fly safe. I want this thing to land l...
EGPF Glasgow

BeechBaby wrote:

Also, one should move through life treating others, as they wish to be treated themselves. That includes internet posting…

Yes. But it also includes not telling blatant lies in public with the intention of making money from them.

EDDS - Stuttgart

Gosh, just had a look, and yes there is a huge amount of dirt being posted out there…

Peter has experienced in a previous forum life, attempting to alter the course of the favoured few’s opinion

I am trying to work out what you mean… the grammar is too torturous for my brain. Who is this “favoured few”?

Certainly having seen the dirt written on other forums, pre-2012, is what made David and I decide to start a properly moderated forum. The disadvantage (a very tiny one) is that everybody who comes here has inevitably been to the other places and a certain % of them are looking for the same dirt they are used to, and get upset when they fail to find it, or get upset when they try posting it and can’t.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

what_next wrote:

But it also includes not telling blatant lies in public with the intention of making money from them

Without starting the whole debate again, I am not convinced that is what she did……

Peter wrote:

I am trying to work out what you mean…

Sorry, I was picking up on the old TB/Pprune threads where exactly as you mention, dirt, dirt and more dirt, and you get almost excluded when you attempt to go against the mob. What I meant by ‘’the old forum favourites’’, Mister 10000+ posts pops up, where just because he has posted so much, everyone thinks he is 100% correct.

I could name them from the other forum, but I am sure people are clever enough to recognise the names…..and the trend.

Last Edited by BeechBaby at 25 Oct 10:57
Fly safe. I want this thing to land l...
EGPF Glasgow
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