My friend, the late Bill Kershner, who encouraged me to write my flight testing book, wrote his own book titled Logging Flight Time, published by Iowa State University Press. It’s about Bill’s humorous experiences during his flying career. In that book he had a chapter entitled “Chocks.” Bill thought that most everyone in aviation has had a humorous experience with those devices used to keep an airplane from rolling on the ground. I believe that Bill was correct; I certainly have my own.
After spending 10 years in the industry as a test pilot and having had to exit two test airplanes via ‘nylon letdowns’—also known as parachutes—I decided that academia might be a little less hazardous. So I became a professor of aviation systems at the University of Tennessee Space Institute in Tullahoma, Tennessee, where I became friends with Bill, who lived in Sewanee about 20 miles away.
