Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Haiti bound pilot Dr. Richard McGlaughlin was flying with his daughter in his Cirrus SR22 on a trip to volunteer his services at a medical clinic. After departing Florida, McGlaughlin says he noticed the oil pressure dropped slightly while flying at 9,500 feet. A few minutes later the engine had stopped completely. He and his daughter were now flying a glider over the blue waters of the Bahamas.

An experienced pilot, McGlaughlin immediately established a slower air speed that would allow the airplane to glide the maximum distance given the altitude above the water. After declaring an emergency with Miami air traffic control, he determined that he and his daughter were not going to make it to the nearest island. Based on their altitude and the glide characteristics of the airplane, they were going to come up about two miles short.

All pilots learn the basics of how to make an emergency landing in the water during pilot training and about 90 percent of pilots who ditch their airplanes in water survive. But landing on the water at more than 60 miles per hour can result in an airplane flipping over and can cause injuries. McGlaughlin had another option. His Cirrus airplane is equipped with its own parachute designed to carry the aircraft and its passengers down to the surface when other options may not look as good.

So minutes after his engine stopped and McGlaughlin determined he couldn’t glide to land, he and his daughter tightened their seat belts and he pulled on the handle on the panel above his shoulder that deploys the parachute according to the Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association website.

After the initial jolt of the parachute inflating, the airplane was descending through 2,000 feet at a rate of about 1,700 feet per minute. That’s not exactly a speed for a soft landing, and McGlaughlin says they did hit the water harder than he expected, but both were okay with no injuries.

A Cirrus aircraft under parachute during flight testing.

McGlaughlin has made the trip to Haiti several times before to deliver supplies and volunteer his services and was prepared for the over water trip. Within minutes he and his daughter were out of the airplane with their life jackets on. They were able to get into the inflatable raft they had brought with them and less than an hour after declaring an emergency, the two were on a Coast Guard helicopter.

Cirrus was a pioneer in implementing the use of airframe parachutes on small general aviation aircraft. Since the SR22 and the similar SR20 were first delivered to customers in 1999, there have been 32 deployments of the parachute. Not all of the deployments have resulted in injury free touchdowns like the McGlaughlins. There have been six fatalities and several injuries.

Many of the problems have occurred when the parachute is deployed at an altitude too low for it to fully inflate, or too fast a speed. Aviation writer and pilot Paul Bertorelli believes better training for Cirrus pilots could improve the safety of the parachute equipped airplane, writing that pilots may be waiting too long or not long enough before pulling the handle. Both the Cirrus owners group and the airplane maker emphasize the need for training specifically aimed at when to deploy the parachute.

Several other companies also offer airframe parachutes on general aviation aircraft, mostly light sport manufacturers such as Flight Design CT and the Cessna 162 Skycatcher.

Photos: U.S. Coast Guard (top); Cirrus Aircraft (bottom)

If you take a look at the top 10 Twitter users you’ll see a list of famous men and women, from Justin Bieber to Selena Gomez, who have
used the popular platform to further expand their personal brands.
Perhaps more interesting, however, is how everyday people are
investing more time and energy into social networking for professional
purposes.

Just over a year ago, a local 16-year-old high school student emailed
me out of the blue, proposing that he join me as a guest on a TV show
I host. Winston Sih didn’t send along a resume, but instead included
links to his website, Twitter account,
Facebook page, and three relevant YouTube clips. While there are
plenty of examples of teens jeopardizing their digital reputation,
with bullying and threats on friends’ walls or late-night “I hate my
job” tweets, Sih is a perfect example of someone who has learned how
to use the web to his advantage–building a strong and positive
personal brand before he even reaches his adult years (12 months into
his brand-building exercise, he is already a well-known regular tech
TV expert and blogger–and he’s not even out of high school yet).

While few of us will ever have the celebrity factor to drive our
online networks (or a PR spin team to protect us if we post something
stupid), there is a lot we can learn from Sih and other
personal brand-builders. In 2012, if you have a plan in place, smart
social networking is the key to taking control of your professional
life. Here are 5 steps to building a better personal brand online.

1. Have a home base online.  While Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are
excellent destinations to promote what you do, make sure that you also
invest time and energy into your own personal website. Whether you
take advantage of easy-to-use tools such as Squarespace or WordPress,
a simple and clean online home for all your professional information
and social streams is a necessity. Not only is it critical to build
this home base, but it’s also important to drive traffic back to this
site to further educate visitors about what you do (or want to do) for
a living. Finally, use a professional headshot on your site to give
you that competitive edge (sorry–a cropped Facebook photo just won’t do!).

2. Be a better blogger.  Although online pundits regularly declare
that blogging is dead, such as Jason Calacanis did at a tech
conference toward the end of December, blogging has simply become
much more diverse. It’s no longer necessary to write multi-paragraph
posts, but instead services such as Tumblr make it easy for
individuals to share shorter entries or snippets of text that often
include photos and other multimedia. A weekly blog update (or more
frequent if you can afford the time) that includes some shareable
content is a useful way to drive traffic back from social channels to
your website (and to establish yourself as an expert on a topic).

3. Avoid mobile mistakes.  In April 2009, we often referred to Ashton
Kutcher as the King of Twitter. This past November, the actor posted
a tweet defending Penn State’s Joe Paterno (without realizing the sex
abuse controversy surrounding the coach) that inspired a “hailstorm of
responses” from Kutcher’s many followers. Once again, this was an
example of how 140 characters or less can immediately damage someone’s
reputation. Moreover, with more people posting from mobile phones,
it’s far too easy to make a real-time mistake like this–whether it’s
updating your status with an inappropriate comment or letting
auto-correct do some digital damage. In other words, when networking
on the go make sure you carefully review what you’re about to push
live or, perhaps a better idea, wait until you have a few minutes to
review the update without so many mobile distractions.

4. Never stop networking.  For non-celebrities who build themselves
into well-known brands online, take a look at how frequently they
interact. For example, social media author Scott Stratten has tweeted more than 80,000 times. If he’s not
sharing digital wisdom across his many online channels, he’s
responding to messages and reaching out to people to keep the web
conversation going. If you don’t know where to start, whether it’s on
LinkedIn or Twitter, find five new people to follow or connect with
every day. Make an effort to share something these people have posted
or, a simple task, reach out and say hello.

5. Adopt new services.  When it comes to personal branding, there is
a lot of emphasis on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but there are
plenty of other channels to tell your story. Take a look at how well
author Timothy Ferriss has used short YouTube videos to promote his
4-Hour mantra and other activities. Google+ is a solid new
service for building a personal brand and apps, such as Path, will
also allow you to network with people you care about connecting with
on a professional level (keep in mind that the latter has a 150-friend
limit). While it’s not critical to jump on every newly launched
service, it can help to choose two or three of the most popular
services and then every few months try a new platform on for size.

Read more from the Work Flow series

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Image: Flickr user Joshua Hoffman

“The economy made everyone rethink how they consume,”
says
designer Christopher Stuart. He knows firsthand–after losing his job as
a prototype maker turned industrial designer in 2009, he returned to his
hometown of Noblesville, Indiana, and got to work crafting
industrial-modern furniture pieces from unassuming materials, such as an
armoire from spare flooring and aluminum trim. His work reenergized the
design firm Luur Studio, which he originally launched in 2007, and
inspired his latest project, how-to book DIY Furniture: A Step-by-Step
Guide. “I had to consider how I could open doors for myself,” he says.
“Couple that thinking with a hardware store, which is accessible to
everyone, and you end up with a creativity that’s for the people.”