A couple of years ago when I was having fun chasing down all the doublespeak larding up the avgas replacement effort, NATA President Jim Coyne made a comment to me as we were leaving yet another information-free meeting masquerading as a press conference. “You know,” he said, “you were born for this.”
Jim is an old-school airplane guy from back in the days when the industry was a friendlier place than it is now and he’s a long-time aircraft owner and reader of Aviation Consumer. He knows me we’ll enough to sense my unrestrained glee in pursuing stories that certain interests in the industry would rather see kept in the shadows. This natural predilection springs from my experience as an unreconstructed hooligan in Catholic school and was further reinforced early in my career in the newspaper business, where wide-eyed awe is checked at the newsroom door.