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Byron Edgington

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Blogs by Byron Edgington

Life Du Soleil
7/1/2013 8:12:16 AM

No one gets out of this alive
A recent Huff Post report is about a performer with Circ Du Soleil who was killed in Las Vegas. The woman fell fifty feet to the stage just as the performance ended. A tragedy for her family, and for those around her, no doubt. She was young, vibrant, energetic and clearly in better physical shape than 99.99999....% of the rest of the known world population or she would not have been in that prestigious troupe. I'm sure she'll be missed, safety concerns will be raised, equipment examined and the show itself scanned for ways it might be made safer for the athletes involved.
The other side if the story is that the young woman died doing what she loved. In the photo above I've included a number of items gathered during my forty year career in the cockpit. In my book, The Sky Behind Me, I refer to the control stick shown here, an actual cyclic that was removed from an AStar I flew for many, many patient transports in Iowa as an Air Med pilot. The inscription in the book reads: "I may have held the stick in my hand for forty years, but in actuality it was the other way around." There's something to be said for doing what we love, regardless of how dangerous, threatening or unpredictable it is. No one gets out of this alive. I don't pretend to know what the young Circ performer thought as she plunged to her death. But she certainly understood the perils she faced, every time the show began. I am sure of this: she thought of those risks, and she dismissed them, a necessity for her in order to do what she was trained to do, and what she loved.
Just so, every time I took off I was aware of the potential for peril, from weather hazards, mechanical malfunctions, unpredicted anomalies, midair collision, even dangers from various medical processes conducted inside my cabin on patients as I flew them to a hospital. One night many years ago a fellow weighing more than 250 pounds, and wildly combative from a head injury, broke his restraints and began thrashing around the cabin. I was at two thousand feet at the time, fully dark outside, with one flight nurse on board, a woman who was petite to begin with, and eight months pregnant. Fortunately for us he settled down, and the remainder of the flight was uneventful but I was heading for the ground in the meantime. Some of the dangers we face cannot be predicted, but must be addressed as they arise.
I'm sure Circ Du Soleil will go on, the show in question will continue and the young woman who was killed will be mourned. But she died doing what she loved, and had reached the pinnacle of success in her chosen field. I know just how she felt as she went into her final act, even if she didn't know it was to be her curtain call and last bow.

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More Blogs by Byron Edgington
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• The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life, $1.99 for Kindle - Tuesday, November 4, 2014
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• Interview: Mike Petersen, Killer Book Marketing - Tuesday, October 14, 2014
• Audio Review_The Unheralded King - Sunday, October 5, 2014
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• Silent Sky: From 9/11/202 - Thursday, September 11, 2014
• Great stories and a chance to help - Monday, August 25, 2014
• The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life, $4.95 for Kindle - Saturday, August 23, 2014
• SkyWriting: Essays on the Art and Craft of Aviation - Monday, August 11, 2014
• Book review: There I Wuz - Monday, August 4, 2014
• Lip smacking mystery - Tuesday, July 22, 2014
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