Thinking Out Loud

Another day at the office

Who is Budd Davisson?
Just to put this blog thing in context: I'm a small town Nebraska boy (Seward) who found a professional home in a number of different places including aviation, magazines, music and some other semi-escoteric arenas. They'll pop up in some of these commentaries.

I've been flying since I was fifteen, flown over three hundred different types as pilot in command, type rated in B-25's and P-38s, logged time in P-51s, Bearcats, Spitfires, etc.. All of this has been in support of doing over 4,000 magazine articles and 300+ cover photos. The Grassroots column had been running in one form or another for 46 years. Oh, yeah...had a 55-piece, one-man photo show hanging in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum for eight years (Air Show: An exhibition of photography by Budd Davisson) and I've been running a Pitts-only flight school for 46 years boasting "I can teach ANYONE to land a Pitts." I've logged somewhere just over 6,500 hours of dual-given in that venture. Oops forgot: I'm Editor-in-Chief of Flight Journal magazine and have been since its beginning 22 years ago.

I keep forgetting stuff: I published two novels and two non-fiction books just to lend some credibility to my poverty.

For most of the '60's I split my time between cockpits and stages, as I drove 35,000 miles a year while in undergraduate and graduate school touring as a guitar player/singer: Being part of the '60's music scene has always colored my outlook on life. I am still a fair to middlin' blues picker. I eventually got a BS in aeronautical engineering and an MBA in finance/marketing. All that education didn't do me much good on the job market because I'm chronically unemployable: I've had W-2 income for exactly two years in my entire adult life. You'll never see me in anything but boots and jeans except at airshows where boots kill my back, so I give in and wear sneakers to protect my back and a Stetson to protect my nose (and ears, and cheeks, and...).