SKY KINGS FLYING Opinion
T & T
TRAINING
& TECHNIQUE
22 | AUGUST 2019 FLYINGMAG.COMH
e could have been a 10-year-old
kid. He was certainly acting
like one. We were at the Helicopter
Association International annual
convention, and John was sitting in
a helicopter pretending to f ly it. He
gradually became aware that someone
had been standing beside him, wait-
ing for him to come out of his fantasy.
“I am so sorry,” John said. “I just real-
ized you’ve been waiting to get into
the helicopter.”
“No,” the patient man said. “I’ve
been waiting to talk to you.”
The person waiting had recently
used our courses in his studying to
learn to fly, and he wanted to explain
that we had helped him with some-
thing that meant the world to him.
As the conversation progressed, John
began to realize that this very expres-
sive, personable man was an extraor-
dinary person. “I’m John King,” John
said as he extended his hand. “I’m Ray
Dolby,” the good-natured man replied.
John can be slow on the uptake at
times, and it took him a while to real-
ize that this was the Dolby who had
created the eponymous noise-reduc-
tion system—and the company that
was known worldwide for extraordi-
nary innovations in audio systems.
As John and Ray talked about
f lying, Ray explained that he had dis-
covered flying late in life and deeplyregretted the many years he hadn’t
been experiencing the joy of fly-
ing. Ray was now in a hurry to drink
deeply from the well of satisfaction
and fulfillment that f lying provides.
As John and Ray talked, they
realized that they had much more to
talk about than the circumstances
allowed. Ray invited us to spend
a weekend with him and his wife,
Dagmar, at their Lake Tahoe vaca-
tion home. There we discovered that
this was a person with deep pas-
sions not only about f lying, but about
many subjects. He had lots of inter-
ests and, even in his 70s, was always
learning. These were habits he had
all his life, and they served him well.
They certainly made him interest-
ing company. We became friends and
did many things together, includ-
ing taking f lying vacations. We never
ran out of fascinating things to talk
about. It was a relationship that we
continued to enjoy greatly right up
until Ray passed away.
We knew what Ray meant to us—he
was a great friend and a fabulous intel-
lectual companion. But it wasn’t until
we attended his celebration of life that
we began to realize what Ray meant to
the rest of the world. He had improved
the quality of sound experienced in
movies, symphonies and every other
form of music so significantly thatpeople in those communities referred
to time as B.D. and A.D.—before
Dolby and after Dolby. At his service,
representatives of each of these com-
munities were there to explain how
Ray had improved their world.
When John and I read the articles
about Ray afterward, we began to
fully understand that he was an
enormous success in about every way
you could measure—including in his
contributions to the communities he
served and financially. We had never
considered that he was a billionaire.
This made us very thoughtful.
There are not that many billionaires
around, but as we began to think about
it, we realized that we knew more
than a few. Why did we know so many
billionaires? Because we have spent
our lives teaching, talking about, and
living and breathing f lying. Flying
attracts successful, motivated win-
ners and, we believe, supports them in
becoming even more successful.
Since the beginning, humankind
has envied the birds in their command
of flight. It is only in the infinitesi-
mally short time frame of the past
hundred years or so that we have
begun to take to the air ourselves. Our
relatively newfound ability to explore
and utilize the third dimension is a
powerful attraction and, as learning
pilots discover, deeply rewarding.HOW FLYING BUILDS
HABITS FOR SUCCESS
A GREAT REASON TO ENCOURAGE PROSPECTIVE PILOTSBy Martha King