Ameriflight/Merlin

ppragman said:
Thank you. I appreciate it. But mostly, like most other adults in the world I’m mostly making it up as I go along.

Realistically, I am (and probably will always remain) a man child. I have views that are iconoclastic (and piss off my in-laws at family dinners) and I mostly chase adventure over stability and a comfortable life (much to the frustration of my wife). I’m largely a dumbass about a great many things, and at best moderately knowledgeable about very little. I have no real perspective on the world, no real insight to give, no knowledge beyond the sum total of my experience - which is decidedly limited.

The few things that I feel I can take away from my life are the things that I have consistently screwed up over the years:

1. Look after future you, but not to the detriment of present you.
2. Enjoy what you’re doing, even when it sucks there’s something to enjoy.
3. Care for people beyond yourself, but don’t put work before yourself or your family. You’ll never wish you spent more time at work.
4. Don’t tolerate or associate with fools or bullies. They’ll rub off on you if you let them.
5. When bad things happen, fly through the crash - you don’t stop fighting until you the motion stops.

with regard to amflight trying to automate their FOs, I really recommend anyone getting into this field have a backup plan for what happens if it all starts to go away. That doesn’t mean make yourself miserable with worry, but rather, I dunno, if you can learn a new skill or otherwise diversify your skill set, do it. You never know when you could be out on the street, make yourself useful, learn to manage, take advantage of every opportunity for personal growth you can handle without impacting other stuff. It’s fun and it makes you a more interesting person.

If it’s drones or robots or old age or health, one day you will lose the ability to do this; what do you want to do next? You gonna play piano in a brothel? Be an architect? Write books? Code? It doesn’t matter, have something “next.” Ideally you should be good enough at it to make money at it - at least until you’ve “made it” in aviation enough to start making real money.

I try to believe that my best years are always in front of me. I worked with a bunch of stodgy retired airline and military dudes. They were all great guys, but they were all focused on the past. Living in their memories like a John Prine song or uncle Rico throwing a football through a tire. I don’t want to be like that. I still enjoy aviation and I truly miss flying, but were it not for the fact that I spent much of my free time (inadvertently) learning other skills I would be screwed right now.

If you’re just getting into this field, know more than just flying. Specialization is for insects, learn as many different skills as you can, and enjoy it - it’s fun, but it’s not the only kind of fun. In the long run it may pay off.
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Where were you in aviation when you lost the medical? Regionals, legacy?
 
ajm757 said:
Where were you in aviation when you lost the medical? Regionals, legacy?
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I had made it to the “dream” (my dream at least) corpora gig after over a decade in 135, most of it in Alaska.

My dream corporate gig was flying a STOL twin turboprop for a company in the Arctic.
 
ppragman said:
I had made it to the “dream” (my dream at least) corpora gig after over a decade in 135, most of it in Alaska.

My dream corporate gig was flying a STOL twin turboprop for a company in the Arctic.
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Sorry to hear about your situation. Any long term disability with the company?
 
jweldon said:
as an aside Paul came to talk to the bqn crew and one of the points he mentioned was dumping the Bro in favor of another type due to part lead time and Embraers reticence to continue supporting it. That was a long time ago and as far as I can tell, no change!
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They said that about the DC-8 for about a decade before they went away.
 
Skåning said:
Sorry to hear about your situation. Any long term disability with the company?
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yeah, wasn’t there long enough to get the full “medical til age 60 treatment (I had a couple months to go or so I guess) but I’m setup for the next couple of years if the insurance company can’t figure out how to get out of it. It’s not my full salary but we’re comfortable and I’m learning a new skill and was able to start working part time a couple months ago. Zero complaints here. Thanks!

This is the first job I had where I could afford to get the disability insurance and it was actually worth paying for. So grateful.

The job was awesome, won’t say the name yet, they are very skiddish about social media and while they’re still covering my health insurance I see no reason not to do right by them. But I loved the work - was LCCish pay and a better schedule, with Legacy Captain pay in a decade or so. The schedule was week on week off to start but guys who’d been there awhile were routinely working 1 week a month here and there, or less. Also, I was (except for training) never in a different time zone. If I wanted I probably could have been home every night with a similar paycheck in a different airplane, but the schedule was not really appealing. Honestly, I loved the work, flying employees around and doing utility work in support of stuff I thought was important and meaningful… was great.

But it’s ok - all things come to an end, I flew professionally for like, 14 years or so and I started flying when I was 14ish so like 19 years ish total? I got to do a lot of cool things and fly a lot of cool airplanes. It was fun, but doing something new is fun too.
 
ppragman said:
yeah, wasn’t there long enough to get the full “medical til age 60 treatment (I had a couple months to go or so I guess) but I’m setup for the next couple of years if the insurance company can’t figure out how to get out of it. It’s not my full salary but we’re comfortable and I’m learning a new skill and was able to start working part time a couple months ago. Zero complaints here. Thanks!

This is the first job I had where I could afford to get the disability insurance and it was actually worth paying for. So grateful.

The job was awesome, won’t say the name yet, they are very skiddish about social media and while they’re still covering my health insurance I see no reason not to do right by them. But I loved the work - was LCCish pay and a better schedule, with Legacy Captain pay in a decade or so. The schedule was week on week off to start but guys who’d been there awhile were routinely working 1 week a month here and there, or less. Also, I was (except for training) never in a different time zone. If I wanted I probably could have been home every night with a similar paycheck in a different airplane, but the schedule was not really appealing. Honestly, I loved the work, flying employees around and doing utility work in support of stuff I thought was important and meaningful… was great.

But it’s ok - all things come to an end, I flew professionally for like, 14 years or so and I started flying when I was 14ish so like 19 years ish total? I got to do a lot of cool things and fly a lot of cool airplanes. It was fun, but doing something new is fun too.
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When you can, tell us more about what you are doing now. I always wanted to be a bartender. In retirement, I'm trying to spend as much time watching and learning as I can. I'll probably end up buying a bar and breaking even but having fun poring beers.
 
DE727UPS said:
When you can, tell us more about what you are doing now. I always wanted to be a bartender. In retirement, I'm trying to spend as much time watching and learning as I can. I'll probably end up buying a bar and breaking even but having fun poring beers.
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For sure! What I’m doing now is awesome!

I am a contractor for a Kiwi company that makes a piece of hardware that tracks flights and provides real time satellite based messaging for GA aircraft. I’m working for the team that is developing the hardware and working on bringing FOQA to small airplanes. We also are trying to build an analysis product, I’ve been involved in that too.

My position started as a QA guy a few months ago - I watch a video recreation of the flight from the AHRS data we’re logging, and see if it “looks right.” Picture the video reconstructed by the black box the NTSB releases - we make those on the fly for nearly every flight that has one of our trackers. But I immediately jumped into some of the other stuff we’re doing with a kind of automated FOQA product we’re building. I’ve also been working with some of the raw sensor data, stats about operators, classification, and working with various internal reports. Been kind of all over the place. Very dynamic.

I think they’re not sure what to do with me lol, but they are willing to help me learn (they’re an absolutely awesome organization). This month I’m learning more of the hardware integration aspect of stuff. Not particularly exciting, but like, “hey the logs show this unit hasn’t updated, find out why,” “oh it was a Caravan flying around Africa - it hasn’t had cell service in months.” It’s not flying in the Arctic but it’s really cool and it’s helping make aviation safer, so I really feel good about the work I’m doing. If I can’t fly I will give back to flying.

My work the last couple weeks consists of writing scripts to pull the raw data, or logs from one of a ton of different places (light programming in Python, SQL, and bash), then writing about what I find. I spend a little time writing my own tools to process what I find and more time grinding through what I haven’t figured out how to automate yet. it’s freaking cool - I feel like I’m flying a spaceship, a great many moving parts.

I’m hoping it turns into a more permanent arrangement in the spring but that’s kind of outside anyone’s control but the accounting people, my contract was only a couple of months - but then they liked me enough to extend it to April. We’ll see, either way, I’m learning a lot and I love the work. If it goes away, that will be a bummer but it’ll work out fine too, it’s basically a part time admin/writer/ stats and programming job now. Whatever they want me to do is fine by me, love the company.

If it goes away, I might go to grad school or try to get a more official coding job. I started my business back up, and maybe I could write manuals again but that was kind of soul sucking? I don’t know, I think if I can I want to stay in the tech sphere.

As for a bar, that would be awesome. My grandmother was a bar tender and I basically spent my first five or six years in one. If you have the right vibe and the right location it can be a lot of fun. Personally, my dream bar idea was a backpacker bar in Spain that I shut down for a month or two a year to go hiking. My wife absolutely refuses though - she dated a bar owner and he was always at work, good for me, but bad for him, ya know? You should do it! Where do you want to run it?
 
ppragman said:
For sure! What I’m doing now is awesome!

I am a contractor for a Kiwi company that makes a piece of hardware that tracks flights and provides real time satellite based messaging for GA aircraft. I’m working for the team that is developing the hardware and working on bringing FOQA to small airplanes. We also are trying to build an analysis product, I’ve been involved in that too.

My position started as a QA guy a few months ago - I watch a video recreation of the flight from the AHRS data we’re logging, and see if it “looks right.” Picture the video reconstructed by the black box the NTSB releases - we make those on the fly for nearly every flight that has one of our trackers. But I immediately jumped into some of the other stuff we’re doing with a kind of automated FOQA product we’re building. I’ve also been working with some of the raw sensor data, stats about operators, classification, and working with various internal reports. Been kind of all over the place. Very dynamic.

I think they’re not sure what to do with me lol, but they are willing to help me learn (they’re an absolutely awesome organization). This month I’m learning more of the hardware integration aspect of stuff. Not particularly exciting, but like, “hey the logs show this unit hasn’t updated, find out why,” “oh it was a Caravan flying around Africa - it hasn’t had cell service in months.” It’s not flying in the Arctic but it’s really cool and it’s helping make aviation safer, so I really feel good about the work I’m doing. If I can’t fly I will give back to flying.

My work the last couple weeks consists of writing scripts to pull the raw data, or logs from one of a ton of different places (light programming in Python, SQL, and bash), then writing about what I find. I spend a little time writing my own tools to process what I find and more time grinding through what I haven’t figured out how to automate yet. it’s freaking cool - I feel like I’m flying a spaceship, a great many moving parts.

I’m hoping it turns into a more permanent arrangement in the spring but that’s kind of outside anyone’s control but the accounting people, my contract was only a couple of months - but then they liked me enough to extend it to April. We’ll see, either way, I’m learning a lot and I love the work. If it goes away, that will be a bummer but it’ll work out fine too, it’s basically a part time admin/writer/ stats and programming job now. Whatever they want me to do is fine by me, love the company.

If it goes away, I might go to grad school or try to get a more official coding job. I started my business back up, and maybe I could write manuals again but that was kind of soul sucking? I don’t know, I think if I can I want to stay in the tech sphere.

As for a bar, that would be awesome. My grandmother was a bar tender and I basically spent my first five or six years in one. If you have the right vibe and the right location it can be a lot of fun. Personally, my dream bar idea was a backpacker bar in Spain that I shut down for a month or two a year to go hiking. My wife absolutely refuses though - she dated a bar owner and he was always at work, good for me, but bad for him, ya know? You should do it! Where do you want to run it?
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Glad you landed on your feet! That sounds awesome.
 
ppragman said:
For sure! What I’m doing now is awesome!

I am a contractor for a Kiwi company that makes a piece of hardware that tracks flights and provides real time satellite based messaging for GA aircraft. I’m working for the team that is developing the hardware and working on bringing FOQA to small airplanes. We also are trying to build an analysis product, I’ve been involved in that too.

My position started as a QA guy a few months ago - I watch a video recreation of the flight from the AHRS data we’re logging, and see if it “looks right.” Picture the video reconstructed by the black box the NTSB releases - we make those on the fly for nearly every flight that has one of our trackers. But I immediately jumped into some of the other stuff we’re doing with a kind of automated FOQA product we’re building. I’ve also been working with some of the raw sensor data, stats about operators, classification, and working with various internal reports. Been kind of all over the place. Very dynamic.

I think they’re not sure what to do with me lol, but they are willing to help me learn (they’re an absolutely awesome organization). This month I’m learning more of the hardware integration aspect of stuff. Not particularly exciting, but like, “hey the logs show this unit hasn’t updated, find out why,” “oh it was a Caravan flying around Africa - it hasn’t had cell service in months.” It’s not flying in the Arctic but it’s really cool and it’s helping make aviation safer, so I really feel good about the work I’m doing. If I can’t fly I will give back to flying.

My work the last couple weeks consists of writing scripts to pull the raw data, or logs from one of a ton of different places (light programming in Python, SQL, and bash), then writing about what I find. I spend a little time writing my own tools to process what I find and more time grinding through what I haven’t figured out how to automate yet. it’s freaking cool - I feel like I’m flying a spaceship, a great many moving parts.

I’m hoping it turns into a more permanent arrangement in the spring but that’s kind of outside anyone’s control but the accounting people, my contract was only a couple of months - but then they liked me enough to extend it to April. We’ll see, either way, I’m learning a lot and I love the work. If it goes away, that will be a bummer but it’ll work out fine too, it’s basically a part time admin/writer/ stats and programming job now. Whatever they want me to do is fine by me, love the company.

If it goes away, I might go to grad school or try to get a more official coding job. I started my business back up, and maybe I could write manuals again but that was kind of soul sucking? I don’t know, I think if I can I want to stay in the tech sphere.

As for a bar, that would be awesome. My grandmother was a bar tender and I basically spent my first five or six years in one. If you have the right vibe and the right location it can be a lot of fun. Personally, my dream bar idea was a backpacker bar in Spain that I shut down for a month or two a year to go hiking. My wife absolutely refuses though - she dated a bar owner and he was always at work, good for me, but bad for him, ya know? You should do it! Where do you want to run it?
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Hope you gig lasts a while. It sounds like a non-aviation company trying to do an aviation thing and you're the "pilot guy". I'm trying to find an old building that has a residential component and a small restaurant or bar, or whatever, in the building. Something that's income producing and I could stay there part of the time or Airbnb it. I'm pretty specific right now on location cause it's the area I want to move to (between Spokane and Pullman, to include nearby Idaho) but as I explore other areas in retirement, might consider something else. I may regret passing on a 100 year old building in Palouse, WA a couple months ago. It was listed at 380 and had a small cafe/bar that had closed, a yoga studio space, and a 2 bedroom apartment above. I just didn't want to complicate my life at that point in time and was hoping it would be around in the spring for a closer look. It's pending now. Maybe it will fall through. Or maybe I'll find something else. No hurry.
 
I always kind of figured if they were going to do the automated "replace a pilot" thing it would have been in Ag flying. That was always my hunch.
 
KLB said:
So...former AMF'er here. Let me clue you all on some things. 1. No two planes at AMF fly the same. Planes have names and personalities. It will be interesting to see automation work out the difference between them.
2. How will it handle the mountain of MEL's and deferrals.
3. Expect AOG's to be high...which won't make their customers happy. One thing with automation and modern aircraft. You can't just "slide" with things not working properly by getting by with good ole' piloting. There are metroliners in the fleet that had autopilots that were worthless. They were constantly up and down 200ft. So unless they are getting a fleet of new planes....

Autonomous aircraft are coming, but I can't see AMF leading the way. It will likely be FedEx and their feeder fleet. They have always been on the cutting edge when it comes to keeping their fleet modern.
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How about that 99 out in ONT that would compressor stall every time you applied takeoff power, and had the yoke held together with duct tape.
 
KLB said:
Autonomous aircraft are coming, but I can't see AMF leading the way. It will likely be FedEx and their feeder fleet. They have always been on the cutting edge when it comes to keeping their fleet modern.
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If you saw how hard it was to print things you’d realize how far away that is.
They have somewhere around 600,000 employees. Less than 1% of those are pilots. It’s also pretty much the only job they don’t have trouble staffing. Automation is coming to freight, but the cockpit will be the very last place.
 
DE727UPS said:
Hope you gig lasts a while. It sounds like a non-aviation company trying to do an aviation thing and you're the "pilot guy". I'm trying to find an old building that has a residential component and a small restaurant or bar, or whatever, in the building. Something that's income producing and I could stay there part of the time or Airbnb it. I'm pretty specific right now on location cause it's the area I want to move to (between Spokane and Pullman, to include nearby Idaho) but as I explore other areas in retirement, might consider something else. I may regret passing on a 100 year old building in Palouse, WA a couple months ago. It was listed at 380 and had a small cafe/bar that had closed, a yoga studio space, and a 2 bedroom apartment above. I just didn't want to complicate my life at that point in time and was hoping it would be around in the spring for a closer look. It's pending now. Maybe it will fall through. Or maybe I'll find something else. No hurry.
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You're retired, enjoy it. Being a landlord without someone like @SlumTodd_Millionaire to represent you is going to be a nightmare. Open the bar (that might be more difficult than you think) and leave the other tenants for management. If it were me I'd buy the building, hire a management company, act like a tenant and never tell the tenants you own the building. YMMV. I should write a movie about a retired airline pilot.
 
ppragman said:
i used to fly with a guy who always asked hotel staff if the internet was sufficient to upload for his cam show… pretty sure he was joking? I hope?
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Flew with an FA a couple of times at compass, that did just thought. Brought her laptop and camera with her on overnights. I imagine she made far more doing that than flying.
 
AA34 said:
Quote that stuck out the most:

"Today, a pilot might come to us with a thousand hours of flight experience," Chase said. "With the processes that Merlin uses to certify its technology, we're putting the equivalent of much more experience into the cockpit on Day One. You don't have this learning curve that pilots need to go through, and that lowers the overall risk profile to the airline. That's a win for our pilots, our customers, and our company."

Merlin Labs Partners With Ameriflight on Autonomous Flight Solutions

/PRNewswire/ -- Merlin Labs has reached an agreement with Ameriflight to equip the cargo airline's fleet with autonomous and semi-autonomous flight capability....
www.prnewswire.com www.prnewswire.com
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Who's gonna reset the fuse?
 
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