I lost a friend this week. I hadn’t known Shawn Akers long, but we became close in the way students and instructors become close when trapped in a full-motion simulator for four hours at a time, and we remained friends during the year since we first met.

I was Shawn’s Boeing 777 instructor when he was a new-hire at Omni Air International, and he immediately impressed me with his skill, discipline and dedication. He mastered the basics early on, and before the course was half over he was asking the kind of questions that I called the “graduate school questions”, things that usually don’t occur to a pilot until he’s been flying the airplane for quite some time. And, I’ll admit, I had to really get into the books to answer some of them.

Shawn was a real supporter of my concept of developing the Ready For Takeoff Podcast, and I bounced ideas off him during the gestation of this website. As a contract instructor at Omni, I get to fly one cockpit observation flight each year, and I was delighted that Shawn was on the crew I observed for my most recent two-leg flight. When I told him about the article I was preparing on Crew Incapacitation, he offered to pose for the picture I used to illustrate the blog post. And, of course, he offered to be one of my initial interview subjects for the podcast. You can hear Shawn tell his story in podcast episode RFT 013.

Shawn leaves behind a widow and four children. I hope you’ll join me in making a small contribution to the fund established for his children. 

RIP, Shawn.