A good guy remembered

For a person so young, Andrew Phillips sure fit a lot of life into life, before his death at the control of the RV airplane he built a few weeks ago.

His obituary was in Macleans.ca today. Who among us, who have flown an airplane, doesn't recognize this transforming nature of an airplane toward a pilot:

Andy, who “seemed to go from toy to toy,” says Dawn, always had a project in the works. After he finished building his “dream house” in Carp, Ont., about five years ago, says Dawn, she encouraged him to indulge his oft-expressed desire to learn to fly planes. When he began taking lessons, “his whole demeanour changed,” she says. Andy, who had always been happy, became giddy. “It was like someone flicked a switch,” she says. “He just had this passion.”

Like so many on Planet RV, Andy and I kept in touch via e-mail from time to time, and he came to the RV BBQ I used to host at Oshkosh (I think it was the big one we put on in 2007. I didn't see him in the pictures here but if you spot him, let me know). He was a good guy.

The wordsmith who wrote the obituary probably said it better, but that's what I'm going with: He was a good guy.

Kevin Horton, who I had the great pleasure to meet at Oshkosh last year, sums it up very well:

I've lost a huge number of friends and acquaintances in aircraft accidents over the years. I was counting them for awhile, but stopped counting when I hit twelve back in the early 90s. Flying certainly has its risks - you can greatly minimize the risk by using best practices for everything, but you can never completely eliminate the risk. Everything we do in life has risk. You can die in a car accident (as we almost did last year), you can be killed walking along the street (as happened to a neighbour a few years ago), and you can expire in your sleep. In the end, you need to live your life. Be smart and careful about what you do, and how you do it, but don't stop living.