I once met the famous U2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers whose jet was shot down during the cold war by the Soviet Union.

He was working for the same company I was working for – the great Buckley Broadcasting.

At a cocktail party at the Buckley rep firm in New York, I will never forget what he told me.

In short, it was to never fly in anything but a fixed wing aircraft because unlike a helicopter, you could always have a chance to bring it down and land safely.

Powers was a traffic reporter for Buckley’s LA area station at the time.

So you can imagine my reaction when I heard that Francis Gary Powers subsequently took a job with flying a helicopter for an LA TV news operation.

And how shocked I was to eventually hear he died in a helicopter crash – the very thing he feared and warned me to avoid.

Our instincts are usually always right.

What’s wrong is that we are often out of touch with them.

As Agatha Christie put it, “Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.”

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