Since I retired from the FAA on October 31, 2014 many people have asked, “how is retirement” the answer is it is absolutely great. I wonder many times how I had time to accomplish all I did while working a 40 hour a week job. Don’t get me wrong the 40 hour a week job is paying my retirement and I loved every minute of working for the FAA, but I also enjoy working on Snake Saturday and in the auto racing track management field.

A good friend and former manager of mine retired from the FAA and started his own consultant company. His limited liability business allows him to remain actively involved wherein his experience, qualifications, and skills are utilized successfully benefiting those who employ his services. His services include being an expert witness in aviation litigation, in fact since 2003 he has been retained over 60 times to perform consultant, plaintiff, and defendant work.

Over the years in the racing community people have called asking my opinion such as where have all the cars gone, who can we hire as race director/competition director, how do we get fans back, etc? Part of these questions led to me writing this blog and here recently meeting with a team of attorneys because of possible first amendment infringement. All these are learning experiences for me and others.

Recently I had the opportunity to talk with an insurance company that deals within the racing community. You could call it an interview, you could call it becoming what my friend became with his aviation business after he retired. The topic we were discussing was safety at the local race tracks, safety which includes the obvious, catch fences, walls, safety tech, rules requirements, rules enforcement, ingress and egress at racetracks, sign in procedures, a whole multitude of safety issues. One of the items of most interest was officials and their backgrounds, and not only their backgrounds but their experiences, experience including how long in position, medical and equipment issues (such as are officials who are in a safety area of making a call able to hear their radios), what are the procedures when someone rolls over, what are the procedures during a fire, does a track have an emergency plan, all these were great questions.

We will have to see how this all plays out, but quite possibly I need to open my own consulting business, like my friend above. It is amazing all I have learned from this sport over the years and yet we can always make it better, take Kyle Busch wreck at Daytona. That should always be our goal.