The phone rang. It was a flying buddy calling from Daytona Beach.

"Have you read Aero-News today?"

"Dude, the ISP tech just left my lab. I have been off the internet for four long days. Why, what's up?"

"You're not going to like this. Don Wylie of AST augered in."

"Oh, no."

"Paul [a mutual friend] flew with him. Hell, had dinner and all. He's taking it pretty hard."

"Aw, [expletive]."

The next thing I thought was that Rick and the others who were on Don's flying version of an all-star team at D. W. Hooks Memorial must be devastated, disconsolate. Disoriented, even -- something they weren't, in an airplane.

So the first item I wound up reading when my net was restored was Aero-News. I guess I was hoping the story wasn't true. It was, of course.  [Expletive].

In this business, people you know occasionally die. It's the downside of the deal we each make with the four winds, with the machine, with Lady Luck, with our Maker. Sometimes the dice come up snake eyes.

I didn't know Don Wylie, but I knew of him. He did send me a nice note after we ran a story I wrote on a seminar one of his guys, Rick Gillenwaters, gave at AOPA this year. He didn't have to do that. The sad fact is that lots of the people . This accident hit me right as I was working on a piece that dwells a bit on another man who died doing what he loved -- flying. Don, and his student William Eisenhauer, went in in one of the T-34s that Don's company used both for "air combat experience" flying and for upset and recovery training.

There's going to be a lot of second-guessing and a lot of grandstanding coming as a result of this mishap. The best thing that we can do is note that as a pilot, Don was as good as they get; the company's T-34s are supposed to have had the strongest and most costly of the spar repairs, and were cleared for aerobatic flying; and in time, we'll know a lot more as the NTSB investigates and the FAA, no doubt, reviews its past work in the light of what the NTSB learns.

The responsible thing for us to do is to wait, and to honour the memory of Don Wylie, fighter pilot to the end, and William Eisenhauer, whose "eyes lit up" over flying. Our family has sent two brothers to Valhalla; let us close ranks behind them, learn what there is to be learned, and keep flying.

I bet they would like that.

Kevin 'Hognose" O'Brien

FMI: www.aviationsafetytraining.com/