Saturday, May 14, 2011

Prior Spaceflight Experience is a Plus

Here are two pilot jobs that amused me, but which I must admit I didn't apply to. The first one is a modification on the usual tactic of hiring people at starvation wages to throw bags and check in customers, while dangling "if you show a good work ethic we'll put you on the airplane" in front of them. It works fairly well for the companies. They get a relatively sober, intelligent and obedient workforce for the price of dumping them in a remote location and ensuring they don't starve to death. Promote a few into the airplanes every spring and the supply of new suckers keeps pace with the ones you have to fire for going crazy.

Need IT pilot with extensive experience in servers and software to help with our computer system and be in line to move up to be trained as first officer. If you have over 1500 hrs you might be eligible for immediate consideration.

There are so many pilots out there that if an employer has specific needs, they might as well ask for what they want. Pilots who do not meet the qualifications will apply. Reader Chris Thompson sent me the second one requiring more than just IT experience.

Virgin Galactic seeking private spaceship pilots

MOJAVE, Calif.—Virgin Galactic is seeking people with the right stuff. The Antelope Valley Press in California says the spaceline founded by Sir Richard Branson has put out a call for pilots to operate its SpaceShipTwo spacecraft and WhiteKnightTwo mother ship. Those selected would fly during development testing currently under way and commercial operations at some point in the future. The company is looking for test pilots who graduated from a respectable flight school and who have a minimum of 3,000 hours of flying experience. Prior spaceflight experience is a plus, but not required. Virgin Galactic plans to fly tourists on brief suborbital flights at a cost of $200,000 per person. SpaceShipTwo is based on the design of SpaceShipOne, the first private manned craft to reach space.

That's the first time I remember seeing the word 'spaceline'. We have airlines and bus lines, railway lines and cruise ship lines, and had stagecoach lines (my great-something grandfather ran one). I wonder what the first thing we called a transportation "line" was.

8 comments:

DataPilot said...

Need IT pilot with extensive experience in servers and software to help with our computer system and be in line to move up to be trained as first officer.

Hmm, is that the same thing as a data pilot? Maybe I should apply. :)

Aviatrix said...

By the way, I didn't delete anyone's comments (well except for that one guy who refuses to respect my request to stop including sunglasses ads in his comments). The blog host had a problem that resulted in a database rollback.

Milos said...

Have you then considered this as your new line of work LearJet Repo Man

Aluwings said...

Virgin Galactic shouldn't have a problem filling those job slots. How cool would that be to drop into a conversation:
"So, what do you do for a living...?"
"Oh, I get high."

I recall when NASA posted real job openings for Space Shuttle jockeys. All the posts went to military pilots, but I knew sooner or later space flight would become something civilians would do. The pilots with the most supersonic flight time in the logbok are still those few lucky souls who flew the Concorde.

Nice to know.

Cirrocumulus said...

Railway line. You made "a line of rails" by fixing the short lengths end to end so the horses could pull more and couldn't wander off course.

Today's verification word is in Portugues.

Anoynmous said...

The first "lines" were probably stagecoach lines, with the word referring to the series of stations from one end of a journey to the other. Each trip from one station to the next was a "stage" in the journey.

Q. Pheevr said...

The OED's earliest citation for line in the sense of "a regular succession of public conveyances plying between certain places" refers to stagecoaches; in January of 1786, the Massachusetts Centinel wrote about "the new arrangement ordered by Congress, for the more safe and regular conveyance of the Mails, by the line of stages."

Aviatrix said...

Q.Pheevr: Well there it is. I guessed it. From stagecoach line to spaceline. Cool.