D2 Government Solutions

10/20/2026

Fred Smith flew to Las Vegas with the last $5,000 his company had. FedEx needed $24,000 for jet fuel, and without it, his planes could not fly on Monday. He took the $5,000 to a blackjack table.

Long odds were nothing new to him. He was 4 when his father passed away, and a bone disease kept him on crutches and in leg braces until he was about 10. He outgrew it, became an athlete, and learned to fly as a teenager.

At Yale, he wrote a paper about a company that would fly small packages overnight. Before he could try it, the Marines sent him to Vietnam. As a 23-year-old lieutenant, he led his company against a dug-in North Vietnamese battalion. When the enemy hit back, he went into the heaviest fire to get his wounded men out and called in air strikes close to his own position. He earned a Silver Star, and on his second tour he flew combat missions in a small spotter plane. He came home wounded twice, with a lesson he used for the rest of his life: “If you take care of the troops, they’ll take care of, in our case, the customers or the mission.”

Back home, he put his inheritance into the idea from his Yale paper and started Federal Express. On the first night, 14 small jets carried just 186 packages. “It was a pretty grim night,” he said. The money ran short fast. Paychecks were sometimes postdated, and pilots sometimes paid for fuel with their own credit cards. Then General Dynamics, the investor he was counting on, said no.

That’s how he ended up in Las Vegas. “I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000,” he told one of his executives. Asked how he could risk their last $5,000, he said, “What difference does it make? Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldn’t have flown anyway.” The win kept FedEx flying for another week, and new funding followed.

He spent the next 5 decades building FedEx into the world’s largest cargo airline, and he kept taking care of the troops. He gave $65 million to send Marines’ children to college. When he passed away at 80, he was buried at Arlington with full military honors.

10/14/2026

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That's why CFI and CFII qualifications matter. They prepare instructors to teach, evaluate, and guide students through flight training, from their first lesson to advanced instrument flying.

At Tradewind Flight Training Center, our instructors are committed to helping students develop the knowledge, skills, and confidence they need to succeed in aviation.

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10/14/2026

10/14/2026

We have a contract training culinary technicians

10/13/2026

10/12/2026

Never Forget!

10/12/2026

10/03/2026

Today Charlie Duke turns 91.

In April 1972, Duke flew to the Moon as the lunar module pilot of Apollo 16. At 36 years old, he became the 10th person to walk on the Moon and remains the youngest person ever to do so.

Alongside commander John Young, Duke spent more than 20 hours outside on the lunar surface during three moonwalks. They traveled more than 16 miles in the Lunar Roving Vehicle and collected about 209 pounds of lunar rocks and soil for scientists back on Earth.

But Duke had already played a part in another historic Moon landing. During Apollo 11 in 1969, he served as CAPCOM in Mission Control. After Neil Armstrong reported that Eagle had landed, Duke famously replied, “We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”

Apollo 16 was Duke’s only spaceflight, but it placed him among just 12 humans who have ever walked on the Moon.

Today, he is also the last living member of Apollo 16’s three-man crew. Commander John Young died in 2018, while command module pilot Ken Mattingly died in 2023.

Happy 91st birthday, Charlie Duke!

10/03/2026

𝐈𝐂𝐘𝐌𝐈: 𝐅𝐋𝐘𝐃𝐔𝐁𝐀𝐈 𝐂𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐀𝐈𝐍, 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐁𝐁𝐄𝐃, 𝐓𝐎 𝐌𝐎𝐃𝐈: “𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐏𝐔𝐒𝐇, 𝐒𝐌𝐈𝐓 — 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐎𝐎𝐑 𝐈𝐒 𝐑𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄”

The first words from the hero pilot came from a hospital bed in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Captain Smit Machchhar, attacked by his own co-pilot on Wednesday, spoke by video call with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and walked him through the moment he decided not to quit.

He said he was down on the cockpit floor when he sensed the plane was sinking. Then he told himself: “𝘖𝘯𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘶𝘴𝘩, 𝘚𝘮𝘪𝘵! 𝘑𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘥𝘰 𝘪𝘵. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘰𝘳 𝘪𝘴 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦”. He got the door open, and the passengers rushed in and restrained the attacker.

Look at what that took. By his own account, Machchhar has 𝟏𝟕 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 and 11 as a captain. He knew that aircraft well enough to know it was going down, and he was badly hurt, and he still dragged himself to the one lever that mattered.

He was honest about the instinct, too. He said he was acting for his own survival, but deep down he knew he could not let everyone else d∗e. Modi praised his 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝 and told him he is just a phone call away (CNN, Public TV).

Machchhar says he expects to be fully healthy again. The rest of us got an Israeli plumber, a steel door and a captain who refused to stop, and 𝟏𝟕𝟒 𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬 went home because of it.

𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐢𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞.

10/01/2026

Gordon Bethune grew up the son of a crop duster. He spent his summers with his father in Mississippi, where his dad ran a crop dusting business.

At 17, he dropped out of high school and joined the Navy. He stayed 20 years, mostly as an enlisted man, working on aircraft. He finished high school while in the Navy and later earned a college degree.

After the Navy, he took a job supervising mechanics at an airline. He kept climbing, all the way to an executive job at Boeing.

Then Continental hired him. "We weren't just the worst major airline. We lapped the field," he later wrote. It had gone bankrupt twice and burned through 10 CEOs in 10 years. It ranked last in on-time arrivals and lost bags. It ranked first in just 1 thing: customer complaints.

Bethune made every employee a deal. Every month Continental finished in the top 5 for on-time flights, each of them got $65.

He insisted it come as a separate check, not buried in their paycheck, so nobody could miss it. Every check carried the same message: "Thank you for helping make Continental one of the best."

Within months, Continental finished first in on-time arrivals for the first time ever. Later, a first-place month paid $100.

Bethune was also a licensed pilot. When new jets were delivered from Boeing, he often flew them from Seattle to Houston himself. On one of those trips, he flew the new plane home while employees celebrated with Ch*****ne in the cabin.

Under his leadership, Continental's stock went from about $2 a share to over $50. Fortune named it one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For 6 years in a row.

When Bethune wrote a book about the turnaround, he gave all his proceeds to a nonprofit that helps Continental employees and their families in times of need.