Pilots have their names painted just beneath the canopy of their aircraft. This gives the pilot a sense of ownership for his or her jet. What’s more, like cars, each aircraft has its own personality, so it’s important for a pilot to get to know and love his aircraft.
I think every test pilot’s dream is to be on the start of something that’s brand new.
When you accept a role in a pilot, you automatically sign up for five years. You think it’s scary to walk down the aisle? Try signing a five-year contract for a show you may not want to be part of down the road.
I didn’t get a pilot slot my first time trying. We Texans don’t give up easy, and everything we’ve accomplished is just the beginning.
During World War II, the pilot losses were staggering. In some bombing raids, as many as 80% of the planes that left did not return.
I’ve pitched many things that have not gone, but every year, I’m in that pilot game like a lot of other writers in Hollywood.
With ‘Twilight,’ you have these massive tomes that you have to condense. With ‘Penoza,’ we had an eight episode Dutch series that, just for the pilot alone, I condensed three episodes. So, there’s a lot of filling in and a ton of invention that has to happen to fill out eight episodes.
As a kid, I always wanted to be lots of things. I was a Walter Mitty type. I wanted to be in the French Foreign Legion, a detective, a doctor, a test pilot with a scarf, a fisherman who hauled in a tremendous marlin after a 12-hour fight.
I’ve known numerous actors who got a pilot that they thought was going to run forever, and they went out and blew all of the money. Now they’ve got a mortgage they can’t pay for.
If you go back and look at the pilot of ‘Seinfeld,’ no one would have thought that show would be what it became, and television isn’t given that kind of chance anymore.
I wasn’t really interested in doing anything except going from pilot season to pilot season and sowing my oats in the months between and telling my agency to stop sending me movie scripts, because they’d pile up in my house and make me feel guilty because I had to read them.
I went to the University of Washington as a physics and astronomy major. My other interest, of course, was aviation. I always wanted to be a pilot. And if you’re going to fly airplanes, the best place to be is the Air Force.
Having kids has proven to be this amazing – for me, this amazing source of ideas of anecdotes, of examples, I can test my own kids without human subject permission, so they pilot – I pilot my ideas on them. And so it is a tremendous advantage to have kids if you’re going to be a developmental psychologist.
It’s always interesting for me to watch the pilot of an established show because you see how the writers and actors weren’t really sure what the show was and what the dynamics were. If you look at the pilot for ‘Seinfeld,’ for example, it’s practically unrecognizable.
I had never been to Boston before shooting the ‘Chasing Life’ pilot in 2012. I love it there!
During the pilot, director Len Wiseman and I discussed how Lucifer views humanity, and we can came up with this notion that he sees them as lab rats.
I don’t know about living on an automatic pilot, but I’ve had times where I’ve decided to just test myself and my mettle, and for no good reason other than it’s what life is. Even before I was acting, I had, like, one day in high school I decided to just show them my pajamas, just for no good reason.
We passed a bill in 1997, signed by Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, which created a pilot program for a novel experiment called Florida Virtual School. The notion of children using a computer for a classroom and reporting to virtual teachers wasn’t exactly mainstream thinking in those days.
Well, I’m about to do another western, a pilot for HBO this fall.
My dad is a pilot so I think I was born with the travel bug.
I flew fighters for the Navy in San Diego for three years, went and did my post-graduate education, and then I was a test pilot in Patuxent River, Maryland, for a few years. I was back in the fleet in the Navy when I was selected to come back here to NASA to become an astronaut.
My auntie and uncle live in Inglewood, and I used to stay with them when I would come to L.A. to audition for pilot season and other things like that.
I believe really deeply in the pilot process because you learn things about tone and casting. Even some of our best shows have had substantial re-shoots and reworking before they’ve gone on the air.
I used to train with my husband, Anthony Maina, but he is now too busy as a helicopter pilot, so we only run together when I do light jogging. I don’t want to kill him before his next flight!
I got a young black woman agent, and she kinda just knew what I would be attracted to. She sent me this pilot for ‘Insecure.’ I never saw myself as a comedy director, but when I read those pages, I said, ‘Wow – this is my life on the page.’
I’m shooting a pilot based on my show. It’s a one-camera show. I play myself.
I’m a commercial pilot before I was an actor.
The interesting thing for ‘Playing House’ to me is we both are at crossroads in the pilot. We both have our lives kind of upside-down, and then because we’re taking care of each other, we’re able to move forward and live our best lives.
NBC’s pilot season of 1994 is legendary in the business. In a world where failure is commonplace, we midwifed the birth of both ‘Friends’ and ‘ER’. While ‘ER’ came essentially out of the blue, we’d been casting around for a ‘Friends’-like show for some time at the network.
In truth, I have done nothing alone. God has called me and has been my pilot. The Holy Spirit has been my comforter, my guide, and my power source.
It’s ‘Star Trek!’ It’s as close to an American mythology as we get. To be a part of that storytelling after being a fan since I was a teenage boy who saw the pilot episode of ‘Next Generation’ air, it’s all very surreal.
Very few pilots even know how to read Morse code anymore. But if a pilot could read Morse code, he could tell which beacon he was approaching by the code that was flashing from it.
Even failures can turn into something positive if you just keep going. I wrote a television pilot called ‘Head of the Family.’ CBS didn’t want it. It was considered a failure. But we reworked it. A year later, it became ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show.’
Seeing that a Pilot steers the ship in which we sail, who will never allow us to perish even in the midst of shipwrecks, there is no reason why our minds should be overwhelmed with fear and overcome with weariness.
I came to New York and started doing stand-up and improv, and started auditioning for commercials and voiceovers and stuff. My first job was on a pilot of that prank show called ‘Boiling Points’ on MTV.
I did a pilot for Fox years ago called ‘Faceless,’ with Sean Bean. I always thought it was such a cool show because it was really raw. I thought we were pushing it. This was back at a time before there was the ‘cable standard.’
I had worked for ten years in theater; I had worked at Second City in Chicago. Then I got to Hollywood, and I was like, naively, ‘Where’s my pilot?’
You hope for that with anything, but with a TV show, the writer and the actor being the right mix are more important than the actual writing of the pilot because you hope it’s something that can have a long life.
There is a peculiar gratification in receiving congratulations from one’s squadron for a victory in the air. It is worth more to a pilot than the applause of the whole outside world.
I believe that 99 percent of successful TV shows change an immense amount from the pilot to the tenth or twelfth episode.
I have often been asked what I think about at the moment of take-off. Of course, no pilot sits and feels his pulse as he flies. He has to be part of the machine. If he thinks of anything but the task in hand, then trouble is probably just around the corner.
Some infrastructure projects clearly require massive, coordinated investment – interstate highways or a new trans-Hudson tunnel, for instance. Others don’t have to. We should be unafraid of pilot projects and learning.
I took my first flying lesson in 1967, when I was 16. By October 1968, I had 70 hours in the air and got my pilot’s license.
When I got the offer to do ‘Weird Ernie’ in the pilot, I was living in New York, and somebody had made a mistake, and they made an offer that was supposed to be $2,500 for the job, but they offered $25,000. I couldn’t turn that down. I’d never heard of anything like that!
I saw the pilot, you know, because you have to have some knowledge of the piece that you are in, but I never saw an episode of ‘Lost.’
There are a lot of things I might be good at, such as competitive figure skating, window washing from ten stories up, and being an open heart surgeon. I might also make an excellent Kamikaze pilot – except for the fact that I don’t want to learn how to fly and have no interest in taking my own life on behalf of Japan.
I’ve learned through experience that you can’t ever predict what’s going to happen with any show. When I signed on to ‘Ugly Betty,’ I just prayed that I wouldn’t get fired after the pilot, and four years later, I was still doing it.
When I did the pilot, Mort was very real to me. When I got through with the ten weeks, Maura is even more real to me.
As a female pilot, the sacred rose garden in my heart is the motherland’s blue sky.
