Republished by permission from The Crucibel – The Transponder of Story – CRUCIBEL by Annabelle Peeretti A man walked onto a stage in Orlando and told a room full of pilots something they already knew. They had just forgotten where they kept it. Then he told them the other half—the half that keeps seventy veterans a day from getting on with life. Rick Adams has been covering the World Aviation Training Summit for twenty-seven years. He is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He has seen every keynote, every panel, every vendor pitch, every lanyard-wearing delegate shuffling between sessions with a cold coffee and a conference bag. When a man like that writes that a twenty-minute presentation was “the most captivating of the week,” the sentence carries weight that no press release can manufacture. The presenter at WATS 2025 was Dino Garner. The topic was storytelling in aviation training. The thesis was simple and devastating: before a pilot in distress reaches for the checklist, the pilot reaches for a story. Not a procedure. Not a memory item. A story. Told by an instructor, months or years earlier, in a briefing room or a crew lounge or standing next to a jet on a cold ramp. A story about a mistake that almost killed someone. A story about the three detents of an ejection seat handle. The Lanyard Here is the story Garner told at WATS 2025. A photographer is in the backseat of an F-16. The pilot pushes the aircraft into a near-vertical dive, then pulls a violent nine-G turn. The photographer—bent over, crushed downward by the physics of the maneuver—has a lanyard around his neck. The lanyard is attached to a Minolta light meter. In slow motion, he watches the light meter slide down over the yellow ejection…
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I Won’t Be at WATS This Year – The Reason Why
By Rick Adams, FRAeS This year, for the first time in more than two decades, I will not be participating in the World Aviation Training Summit (WATS) in Orlando, Florida – an event which I chaired for multiple years. The reason? Onerous and intrusive US Government practices regarding social media for visitors from foreign countries. For those who may be unaware, I am a Swiss citizen. And somewhat vocal about American and world events. The MAGA-inspired border practices pose the very real threat that I would be denied entry into the US. It’s simply not worth the risk of being detained, harassed, and shipped back to my airport of origin. Or maybe to some other country, as has been the case with deported immigrants. Not to mention the cost of non-refundable transatlantic air tickets: about €1,800 or more. Under a December 2025 proposal by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), travellers from Visa Waiver Program (VWP) countries – the ones considered ‘friendliest’ to the US, like Switzerland and other European nations, would need to provide: • Social media identifiers (user names and passwords) from the past 5 years • Telephone numbers used over the last 5 years • Email addresses used over the past 10 years • Names and addresses of family members Even though the DHS proposal is still technically ‘under review,’ and there has been considerable pushback, it could be implemented at any time. (A similar requirement for non-immigrant visa applicants such as fiancés of US citizens and cultural exchange participants took effect just last week.) Indeed, the practice of checking selected travellers’ phones, electronics and social media began unofficially more than a year ago. Noteworthy rejections that made headlines included a Norwegian tourist and a French scientist (enroute to a professional conference) who had content on…