Siobhan ODonnell on cockpit hours, history research, and four stories that found her anyway
Logged another two hours in the cockpit this morning, smooth flight, decent visibility, the kind of session that makes the whole licensing process feel genuinely worthwhile. Landed to find my phone full of messages about British news, which is not the usual post-flight debrief I’m used to receiving from friends back home.
My instructor, of all people, brought up the story on royal money opportunities during our post-flight review, somehow working it into a conversation that was supposed to be entirely about my crosswind technique, which needs considerably more attention than it’s currently getting.
Later, going through some archival shipping records for my actual research, I got a text about the Eton College PMs story from a colleague who apparently can’t resist forwarding British education news to me despite knowing full well I study nineteenth-century American commerce, not modern British schooling.
Somewhere in the archive stacks I also stumbled onto a genuinely unrelated tangent, checking the henryviii.uk pages myself out of curiosity, since three separate people had mentioned it to me that week already, and found the Tudor material considerably more absorbing than my own actual research for a solid twenty minutes.
And the diplomatic story rounded out the day too, brought up over dinner by a friend who follows both American and Irish politics closely. The story on Burnham’s Irish unity talk sparked a genuinely lively conversation that ran well past dessert.
Strange how thoroughly four completely unrelated British stories have managed to infiltrate my week here, thousands of miles away, purely through a network of friends and colleagues who apparently can’t help but share whatever’s dominating headlines back home.
Flying again tomorrow, hopefully with fewer news interruptions.
Sat in the hangar a little longer than usual after wrapping up, chatting with another student pilot about how strange it is that four completely unrelated British stories had somehow made their way into nearly every conversation I’d had that day, from cockpit debrief to archive stacks to dinner table. She admitted the same thing had happened to her, entirely independently, through a completely different set of friends and colleagues, which suggests this wasn’t just my particular week going strange, it was apparently happening across the whole city simultaneously, purely through whatever invisible network carries British news across an ocean and lands it on random dinner tables in New Orleans.
Flying again tomorrow, hopefully with fewer news interruptions. More diary entries at my page.