You are here: Home / Archives for Stephen Force

Subscribe on Facebook for More Immediate Airspeed Content

February 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment

When we decided to re-tool the Airspeed website, we also worked out a strategy to more fully connect Airspeed to other social media.  The show notes and the blog here at airspeedonline.com hold the long-form, detailed commentary that you’ve come to expect from the show and its related projects.  But you can also subscribe to get all of the as-it-happens content.  Here’s how!

Head over to Steve Tupper’s timeline on Facebook.  It’s at www.facebook.com/StephenLTupper.   Then click the “Subscribe” button (highlighted by the arrows above).  And done!  It’s that simple.

Thanks to Mark Curtis and the folks at C3Designs, we’re rapidly adding tentacles to the Airspeed octopus!

Keep coming to the website for show notes, think-pieces, and the rest of the in-depth content that you expect from Airspeed.  But, if I walk out of the flight surgeon’s office cleared to fly at some Air Force base or Naval Air Station, the as-it-happens commentary will be available immediately through the Facebook subscription feed and it’ll land right in your brain automatically.

Just another way that we’re making great content even more available to the best audience in all of online media:  You!

 

Filed Under: Stephen Force Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Making a Run at TED2013

February 4, 2012 by 1 Comment

I’ve admired the TED Conference since I discovered videos of TED talks online five or six years ago.  Each presenter gets 18 minutes to express his or her “ideas worth spreading” in the most engaging way possible.  A genuine “stand up, make sense, and sit down” presentation format that does away with the stuff that doesn’t matter and puts the important stuff out front.  I think that my favorites thus far have been Jill Tarter and Mike Rowe.  I’ve become aware through TED of people who have since become heroes of sorts.  And I’ve come across ideas that I’d like to think that I’ve internalized and used to fuel much of what I’ve done, whether professionally or avocationally.

The TED approach has had a lot to do with the way in which I’ve approached Airspeed over the last six years.  After all, what else could be to blame for a suburban schlub who’s talked his way into military aircraft, flown with some of the best airshow performers out there, and become a competitive aerobatic pilot himself?

So you can imagine how exciting it was when I saw the announcement for TED2013.  At least half of the program will be crowdsourced.  Auditions will take place in 14 cities around the world.  Applications open for the New York auditions on March 30, they close on April 19m and the auditions are on June 7.  The application allows the applicant to submit a video. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Stephen Force Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

CAP Shoe Flag

January 29, 2012 by 1 Comment

It’s a harvester of evil
That no one can control
And it’s here to take your soul.
Don’t try to fight it.
There’s nothing you can do.
S.O.S. is coming for you!

- Dos Gringos, “S.O.S.”

I have survived Shoe Flag.  It’s actually called CAP’s Squadron Leadership School.  It and its related follow-on schools are roughly analogous to the Air Force’s Squadron Officer School or “SOS,” although the CAP courses each last a few days at most and SOS goes for a month or more.

If the legends are true, non-pilots in the Air Force (known to pilots by the pejorative term “shoe clerks”) regard SOS as a prized opportunity.  Pilots are reputed to dread SOS because it tends to take pilots out of the cockpit for a month or so.  And, let’s face it, SOS involves very little flying upside down – or any other kind of flying.  Taking a cue from Red Flag and other “Flag” exercises, pilots occasionally refer to SOS or any similar endeavor as a “Shoe Flag.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Stephen Force

Red Tails Disappoints

January 27, 2012 by 32 Comments

As a new-media and social-media guy, you build audience by getting excited about your subject matter and getting the audience excited, too. But you build credibility when you point out the ugly among the good. I really wish that this post wasn’t going to have to be about credibility. Or about ugly. But it is.

I just got home from seeing Red Tails. I had heard that the film had received less than stellar reviews, but I made it a point to avoid others’ opinions and go see the film for myself.

I’m so disappointed. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.  Here’s what I saw. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Stephen Force Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Acro Camp Sneak Peek – Lynda’s First Hammer

January 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

More editing this evening.  Mostly Lynda’s first flight in the Super Decathlon.  For starting the day pretty bunched up, Lynda is having a lot of fun on this one.  Rolls, loops, and sustained inverted.  As I pause now, Don has just demonstrated a hammerhead.

Not the best light and there are issues with shake in the cockpit camera.  But that’s okay.  I’ve got good stuff here and the camp is unfolding reasonably well.  I still wish that I had more footage on the ground with full debriefs for each flight.  I learned that lesson on this film and I remain very happy that Jack Hodgson came out for the second one and interrogated everyone at all the right points in the experience.

There’ll be challenges in making the thing hang together, but I’m pretty pleased with the fruits of what is, after all, my first stab at a feature film.  In any case, it’s a boatload of fun.

 

Filed Under: Stephen Force, Video Episodes