(March 2012) Weighing five pounds fewer than I had three days before we began training in the steamy heat of south Florida, I finally breathed a huge sigh of relief. Bill Conrad had just told me I’d passed the type rating and multi-ATP check ride in the Lockheed 18 Lodestar. As we took the runway at Pompano, he put his huge left arm around my sweat-soaked, T-shirted shoulders (which, today, politically correct persons would probably call “inappropriate”) and with a big grin said, “You’re a good little pilot. Just take me back to Lauderdale.”
Of course, I should have known better. One of Bill’s mantras was that every time you take off in a multiengine airplane for the rest of your flying life you’re going to lose one of the engines. You don’t know which one will fail or just where it will happen, but you’d better be thinking and planning because it will happen.
