Crisis like a boss

I flew Pipers at Purdue. Student pilot thing. It was fun and when I returned home to South Bend I continued casually working on my pilot’s license.

The club in South Bend had Cessnas instead of Pipers, but it’s all good. Coming back to the airport one flight I was a bit high on final approach. You add one click of flaps on downwind, another on cross wind, and the third on final. The flaps create drag to slow you down so that you loose altitude and eventually you gently land.

I was a bit too high on final, and the easy fix for that when flying a Piper is to turn the aircraft slightly sideways, what we call crabbing, to present a non-streamlined surface to the wind and slow down more and loose more altitude. But in a Cessna crabbing with full flaps disrupts airflow over the wings and control surfaces: you loose all of your lift and most of your controls, and immediately begin to fall like a 985 pound rock, quite literally. And that is exactly what I did.

Anywhere this is uncomfortable, but on final approach it can easily mean death. I did what I had learned to do: I kicked rudder like my life depended upon it, because it did. My little falling rock turned back into an aircraft a foot or two above the ground and gently kissed the runway then stopped, directly on top of the numbers at the start of the runway. I had to accelerate again to drive to the off ramp and back to the hanger.

If I had not been trained how to handle that crisis I would not be here today. Because I did get trained, and took action immediately, I survived that crisis and 40 years and four kids later I’m writing this little missive to you, now.

We are entering now into a financial crisis unlike anything our nation has experienced before, and the expectation is that it will get much worse before it gets better. Seventy-eight percent of Americans cannot afford to miss one paycheck. If you are not one of them chances are you know some who are. Your past paycheck-to-paycheck financial practices won’t work in this new aircraft – it’s a sure way to crash hard.

My public charity is making a special effort to help your family make it through this crisis by teaching you some simple financial steps that you can take to protect your family. Adult Life Training, Inc. is a public charity, we get no money for this.

Adult Life Training will start our 3rd FREE Financial Peace class series Tuesday April 7 at 7:00pm EDT. If there are not 2-3 families signed up by then then we will delay starting another week or two to allow them time to register.

This free public workshop has been underwritten by a generous grant from the 3Rivers Federal Credit Union Foundation. 3Rivers is Here for you: here for good. If you’re ready to start a lifelong banking relationship with a local organization you can trust, then 3Rivers is for you. https://www.3riversfcu.org/

This special set of FREE public FPU classes is available to everyone at home via Internet using the free conference app from Zoom.us in Windows, Mac, or your Android or iPhone, or by opening in your web browser.

You will need the membership kit sold by Ramsey corp to participate. You can presently get a free trial membership at https://www.daveramsey.com/.

You will need the FPU membership kit to view the videos and use the other financial survival tools on the FPU web site. We will all watch the video before class, then meet on Zoom to discuss and answer any questions on getting through this crisis.

Registration link (and access to buy the Ramsey kit from Ramsey) is http://fpu.com/1116938. The Zoom.us meeting link will be sent to you the week before the first class.

There are three things that are useless to you as a pilot: the airspace above you, the runway behind you, and what you could have done a tenth of a second ago. In a similar way, what you could have done financially is irrelevant: you need steps now that you actually can do to get through this! Letting your financial things just do whatever they are going to do during this present financial crisis, or trusting someone else to save you, is how you turn a crisis into a tragedy. But there are some really simple things everyone can do to stop their financial tailspin.

Register now, get the training you need now: survive and maybe thrive a little in this present struggle. The Registration link is http://fpu.com/1116938.