Once my pilot and I push and jump into the sled, I hold on for dear life in the back while she skillfully and hopefully quickly navigates the two of us down a mile of icy, often bumpy, sharp right and left turns. I then pull the brakes at the end.

I read, studied, and learned everything I could find about aviation. It was my greatest desire to become a pilot. I could already picture myself in the cockpit of an airliner or in a military fighter plane. I felt deep in my heart this was my thing!

Whether you are an astronomer or a life scientist, geophysicist, or a pilot, you've got to be there because you believe you are good in your field, and you can contribute, not because you are going to get a lot of fame or whatever when you get back.

When I got the first e-mail suggesting we cast Zooey Deschanel in 'New Girl', I thought, 'That's exactly right.' In the pilot of 'Modern Family', when Cam is holding up the baby with the 'Lion King' theme, it was very clear we had something special.

Literally, when the pilot came out for 'Glee,' I think we had a watching party or something. We were all seniors, and everyone all of a sudden in the show choir were so excited. We were like, 'This show is awesome. It's so cool. This is exactly us.'

After I graduated Star City school, I entered to the Tambov Military School of Pilots because I really wanted to be a pilot, and in Russia, it's one of the steps of how you make a career as a cosmonaut. You have to be a military pilot or an engineer.

I wrote a script - a script about a guy working on the automobile assembly line; I never could get money for that. I did a pilot about minimum wage workers for HBO that didn't get picked up; they thought it was depressing, even though it was a comedy.

When I first began doing TV pilots, my expectations were high. I didn't understand that world. So when 'Weeds' took off, I was so happy. Especially as I was just a guest star in the pilot. But once it got picked up, they made me a regular cast member.

The obviously inexperienced pilot is the game the scientific air-fighter goes after, and the majority of victories are won that way. But, on the other hand, it is the novice usually who gets the famous ace by doing at some moment the unexpected thing.

Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.

When I fly in a helicopter, I insist there be two sets of controls, one for me in case something happens to the pilot. I'm no expert, but I know enough to at least get the thing on the ground. Nothing scares me like the thought of not being in control.

My main incentive now is to be so successful that I can get a private jet and sit with the pilot. I got upgraded to first class the other week, but even there I was still scared. I could be massaged for the whole flight and still think I'm going to die.

I have one brother, John, an airline pilot, who is seven years younger. He's adopted, though we're still blood related - he's my cousin. My parents couldn't have any more children after me, so when Dad's brother died, they adopted John, then just a baby.

I would like to pilot a government-led scheme, alongside Help to Buy, to offer a loan to young people on a reasonable income to be able to pay the deposit on a new home and then swap their high rents for a mortgage and actually have a place of their own.

In between shooting for 'Awake,' I was attempting to have my own pilot season. The audition for 'Anger Management' actually came during a week that I was already testing for a couple other shows and we weren't really letting any other shows into the mix.

I'm one of the only actresses in Los Angeles who has never waited tables - yet - and I'm so terrible at holding trays. When we shot the 'Vampire Diaries' pilot, I totally spilled water all down Nina Dobrev, and she had to get her hair and make-up redone.

I was a pilot and flying hang gliders, paragliders, aerobatics airplanes, and then I discovered skydiving. Free fall. Free. With nothing around you, just a parachute on your back. And you go down. But you don't feel like you're going down. Total freedom.

In August 1945, a former Army pilot with an artificial leg pitched five and a third innings for Washington against Boston. This would turn out to be Bert Shepard's only major league game, and it remains one of the heartwarming moments in baseball history.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

I remember, when we started 'Leverage,' we were all in Chicago, and I read the script for the pilot and thought, 'Boy, this is just a real interesting place to begin a character.' I had to figure out how to go about playing someone who had hit rock bottom.

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.

For someone making a pilot, assuming the talent is there and you can maneuver the system properly, it's just a matter of standing your ground and trying to make something great until you are making enough money for the studio that they let you keep making it.

Observe, orient, decide, act. It's fighter pilot terminology. If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed.

Pilot season can be maddening. You're basically putting yourself and your talent out there to be scrutinized several times a day for months by network executives who have probably never acted in anything since their junior high school production of 'The Wiz.'

It is easy to fall into despair thinking about all that is wrong with the world. The joys seems so small in comparison. Internet videos of cats riding Roombas just can't compete with a father talking about how his dead 13-year-old son had wanted to be a pilot.

People were watching the TV set, and they said three rock-and-rollers died - Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, including the pilot. I walked out of the hotel. I got on the bus alone. Their clothes were hanging on the racks, their guitars on the seats.

I got my first pilot license, an airplane private pilot license, in 1997 for the purpose of going to pick up my kids, who were living with their mother in Arizona, and I was in L.A. It was easier than to put them on a commercial flight. It was purely practical.

I love flying; I love aircraft, and you could say I've had a love affair with flight since I was a child. I travel a huge amount. I use airports, and as a pilot, I've flown in and out of airports thousands of times, so really, I have a fairly broad perspective.

I grew up thinking that I would become a fighter pilot and was fascinated by aircrafts as I had grown up around that. But my father encouraged me to not become an Air Force person, given the varied interests I had, be it books, movies, sports or fighter flying.

My family didn't have time for me, so I decided to join the Suvorov military academy, which is in St. Petersburg. I spent two years there and studied general military science. At that point, once I graduated, I joined the Chernigov higher education pilot academy.

Years ago, Barry Diller asked me to be a judge on a pilot for an inventor show on USA, and when it was over, the producer, Ken Mok, took me out to dinner and really got me talking. It was a long dinner. Afterward, he said, 'One day, I'm going to write your movie'.

The funny thing is that making a pilot is sort of an audition, at least for me. There's something psychological there, where you're sort of asking for the job while you're acting. And then when it's been picked up, it's a completely different psychological dynamic.

After Hurricane Katrina, over New Orleans, my helicopter crashed and the pilot and I were only saved because we fell on the roof of a flooded house that absorbed the shock. When the helicopter was spiraling downward out of control, I didn't expect to survive at all.

There were no surprises, because when you sell a pilot based on a pitch, no matter how great the script is, it's going to look different and feel different from what someone imagines in their head. There will always be varying degrees of disappointment or confusion.

I don't know much about writing a show or being a show-runner on a show, but I can only imagine that when you first cast a show and you first do a pilot, there are so many components that you're throwing into the mix and you're not sure how they're going to develop.

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.

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.

Without mincing words or really embellishing anything... I consider Mike Alsbury the renaissance man. He could do it all. He was an engineer. He was a pilot. He worked well with others. He had a great sense of humor. I never heard him raise his voice or lose his cool.

I grew up and I kind of took the road of becoming a pilot, which was another dream I had of flying, and once I did attend the air force academy, that dream of flying became more like a project, and I wanted to be a fighter pilot, which I did. I became a fighter pilot.

I did the pilot, and when they came through and said they were going to put it on the air, I had already some dates in the book with my band and so on. So Barry did the first one, he may have done a few more than the first one in the series, and I took it up from then.

I can't believe it's been four years now, and from watching that pilot, we really all looked like babies. It's unbelievable just how far everything has come. I'm happier now than I've ever been on the show and in my life. I really owe so much of my happiness to 'Glee.'

If I was a guy, based on how I performed in pilot training, I would have been able to have selected a fighter. I mean, I have always said unemotionally, if we want the best fighting force, why would we have 50 percent of our population not competing for these positions?

I loved being a test pilot, and so being an astronaut was - was not my end point in, you know, either I achieved success by being an astronaut, or if I don't get picked, I'm not successful. I loved my career as a pilot, and it was a bonus to be selected as an astronaut.

We're not militant, but there are certain things that are absolutely secret. There was a pilot printed on red paper, and I read everything on my iPad and have a scanner on my desk for these purposes. I scanned in the script, and red paper script scans in perfectly fine.

I had been pursuing a Ph.D. in political science when my National Guard unit was sent to Iraq. Eight months into our deployment, in November 2004, a rocket-propelled grenade fired by Iraqi insurgents tore through the pilot's side of the Blackhawk helicopter I was flying.

I've already begun to put pilot programs in place that give CUNY grads opportunities to get good tech jobs. We should expand on that so that New Yorkers are getting those jobs, because those jobs are probably one of the biggest 21st Century pathways into the middle class.

A lot of people think Formula One isn't a sport because everyone drives a car when they go to work in the morning. But we're pulling up to six G on a corner or during breaking, which is almost like being a fighter pilot. So we have to do a lot of work on our neck muscles.

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 had to think ahead. How much would I really enjoy committing five or seven years to working on this? When you're an unemployed actor offered a TV pilot, no matter who you are you're tempted by the good hunk of change to be made. It keeps you out of the unemployment line.

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.

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