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Tell me why it's impossible, I'll tell you how I did it.

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ubx

Member
Joined
May 13, 2022
Messages
5
I don't know why, but I've always been attracted to things I'm told I can't do.
Maybe because I'm a middle child ?

I'm mildly educated in various unrelated subjects - Economics, medicine, IT...
Just one of those guys who "can't" get a diploma. Yet, I'm an engineer.

In my early twenties, I had a pretty bad motorcycle crash, involving backbone fractures.
Struggling for consciousness as my bike bled its oil on the roadside, taught me a few things :
- What's a 10 on the pain scale.
- It's not the machine's fault.
- Walking is a privilege. So is breathing. We, the living, are a minority.
- Life is short, death is forever. May I see a century, and still die young.

I breathed. I walked. I did so many other things - rebuilt myself, and the bike.
We rode up to the Arctic.
"You can't just move there on that thing !", they said. Now I live just above 65N.

I have more hobbies than I can give up. I have more plans than can fail.
The trick is not to be the genius who figures out how, but the fool who can't tell why not.

Before this introduction turns into a manifesto -- a word about airplanes.
I came here looking for Riblett airfoils - a polarizing subject, it seems.
A more uniting thing, is fascination for flight. I remember dreaming of airplanes as a child. I'd never be the Superman, a policeman, a fireman or anything-man. I would become a pilot.
Nothing but dreams.
Flight, you see, is a luxury for rich kids, they said. You can't make it to pilot school unless you're somebody's kid. "Don't be a child".
Maybe that's where I got my aversion for being told what I couldn't do : the acute, stinging feeling of injustice, from hearing grown-ups tell the child I was not to go for their dreams. Was it really so, that only the "right" wing could fly ?
But I'm not one to delve into politics, and soon I'll be the age they were then -- both too old, and too young, to dwell on mistakes past.
As time and tide wait for no man, I figured -- why wait for myself ?
A new generation has come.
I've got a kid of my own. They breathe, and soon they'll walk.
I feel like I owe it to them, as much as I do to myself, to write a better story - one where people get to do whatever the Foxtrot.
And if that's flying stuff heavier than air, then I say, whatever floats your rock.

Well...
I guess I did make it a manifesto after all ;)
Anyway, thanks for having me on board.

PS : Also, a buddy of mine bet me they'd jog around town naked if I fly a hundred yards in a machine of my own conception.
 
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