---
feed: "DANIEL_ON_SLOPE"
codex_section: "S09"
source: VideoTranscript
title: "360MEN MUGSHOTS and COFFEE - Jack Norris"
conv_id: "video-B1lL3RR2qA4-20180824"
share_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1lL3RR2qA4"
created: "2018-08-24"
message_count: 1
category:
  - "Scotomaville Journey"
  - "Mugshots & Coffee"
summary: "In an impromptu early-morning flight, Daniel Comp joins pilot and aircraft builder Jack Norris for a Mugshots & Coffee episode. Jack shares the story of surviving a crash in his self-built Arion Lightning experimental aircraft after an engine power loss over mountainous terrain near Payson, Arizona. He details the sequence of events, his initial misdiagnosis of the problem, the critical time lost attempting radio contact, and the eventual off-field landing that destroyed the plane but left him uninjured. The conversation extracts life lessons on emergency preparedness, planning for obstacles, reviewing mistakes, and the value of Light Sport Aircraft as an accessible entry to flying."
keypoints:
  - "Experimental aircraft builders gain deep mechanical knowledge but accept higher risk; survival often depends more on quick, correct decision-making than perfect rule-following in the moment."
  - "In an engine-out emergency, prioritize the restart checklist and landing site selection over non-essential actions like radio calls—seconds matter dramatically."
  - "Life parallels aviation: anticipate challenges, prepare contingency plans (emergency checklists), execute decisively, then debrief and adjust to avoid repeating errors."
  - "Light Sport Aircraft offer an economical, lower-barrier entry to flying for those with a driver's license and basic training, serving as a stepping stone to more advanced aviation."
  - "Building and flying your own plane mirrors life—optimizing thrust, lift, and drag against gravity requires constant awareness, preparation, and the humility to learn from hard landings."
tags:
  - "jack-norris"
  - "mugshots-and-coffee"
  - "experimental-aircraft"
  - "arion-lightning"
  - "airplane-crash-survival"
  - "emergency-checklist"
  - "aviation-lessons"
  - "light-sport-aircraft"
monomyth_stage: "06 - Tests, Allies, Enemies"
gameboard_position: "Camp 3: Tests, Allies, Enemies"
truth_score: 88
entropy_score: "Low"
tone:
  sentiment: "Reflective"
  emotions:
    - "Earnest"
    - "Grateful"
    - "Adventurous"
  sycophancy_level: "None"
  notes: "Impromptu, high-energy conversation blending hangar tour, flight, and post-flight debrief; Jack speaks with calm expertise and humility about his crash; Daniel guides with curiosity and draws clear life parallels; authentic road-journey feel with real-time discovery."
related_events: ["video-zFxi2d4dBNA-20180727", "video-Ho8WiBPdHuI-20180619"]
syndication_status:
  arnie: false
  chris: false
  redmond: false
  clint: false
  pilot: false
ma5_inheritance: "None"
pre_silicon: true
voice_print: false
codex_candidate: false
phase: "Scotomaville Road Journey - Mugshots & Coffee: Allies in Resilience & Practical Wisdom from Aviation"
enriched_date: "2026-04-13"
---
![[B1lL3RR2qA4_maxres.jpg]]
### Original YouTube Description

In this episode of MUGSHOTS & COFFEE Daniel takes flight with Jack Norris, and learns a lesson from a pilot that walked away from a crashed experimental aircraft - his own hand-built creation. There's a life-lesson behind jacks story. Sometimes survival is more important than following rules. Learn from Jack, and join the private conversation at http://360MEN.net

---

### Cleaned Transcript

**Daniel:** Really impromptu mug shots and coffee to share with you with a becoming a new friend. Only give you a few clues. What do they do if they have these around and a man cave? It's all full of this and his books. Oh my god yeah he's got some awesome books. You gotta check out in here especially you start seeing stuff away right. There's a lot to learn.

[Music]

**Daniel:** So I'm just getting to know Jack and he's telling me only stories and one of these most people to walk away from so experimental aircraft being experimental and why you've got to make sure you prepare yourself mentally for flying something that may not fly. So when somebody says they have a man cave you gotta believe Jack's got one.

**Jack Norris:** You're a pilot?

**Daniel:** I am a pilot. I've been flying for roughly 25 some years actually more than that but but you build airplanes.

**Jack Norris:** I do now. Pilots that build their own airplanes—is that like doctors that do their own operations?

**Daniel:** Yeah yeah it has some of the same risk associated with him but maybe not. Maybe if you built your own car you'd understand what the brakes do and be able to not be in a collision right? Yes you learn how to fix things and you're better off if you're gonna build airplanes having some mechanical aptitude.

**Jack Norris:** Yeah I bet. So what however points stay in the air? Well and basically an airplane the forces on the airplane are thrust which moves you forward, drag which keeps you from going forward, lift which is created by the wings themselves and gravity. So you know they need all of those what the Lord has given you the gravity. So basically what you're doing is optimizing the others so that you actually stay aloft okay. So a wing creates lift as long as it's moving through the air right? Yes and it has a point at which it no longer has lift and that's when the airplane stops flying.

**Daniel:** 6:30 in the morning now what would Daniel be getting up that early for? Well Jack's got a surprise for us. We are going up in the air yeah. So you were flying your own experimental home-built aircraft?

**Jack Norris:** Yes I had built a airplane out of it's a fiberglass airplane that was a kit and the kit was made by a company called Arion Lightning and it's largely fibreglass with some carbon fiber components and you purchased the kit and then you assembled the kit.

**Daniel:** Huh and there's some modifications that are required along the way so it's not like you know you're buying a plastic plane model and sticking all together with glue.

**Jack Norris:** How much did you get to hang out in here jacket? Not enough although my wife will tell you that I started out my aviation career building plastic airplanes as a middle school kid and I'm still doing it now they're just larger scale. So you'd built a... I built a Lightning. Started on it in 2015 late in the year and I took my time doing it. Most people follow away with a kit maybe a what they call the 51% rule that is required for the FAA to agree that this is a valid experimental amateur-built airplane.

**Daniel:** So what's with this that is a special fiber fabric and so fabric jack fabric yes that looks like a drum skin basically it's a tubular steel structure and they stretched the fabric and glue it to the ribs and the steel and then they put clear coats on to to seal it so it's safe to fly even though it's fabric? Yeah well first airplanes were the fabric right? Okay. I probably did about 65% of the work deducting what the manufacturer you know did in presenting the kid to you.

**Daniel:** So Jack's tell me he's flying this plane that he built in a hangar and there was fires coming up on the horizon what how'd that go?

**Jack Norris:** So I had completed the the plane the year before and I was taking my time to work out some of the bugs at the airplane. This particular plane had a tendency to roll to the left and so had done some measurements on wing dihedral and found out that was really the angle of inclination of the right wing that was the cause of the problem. So I think what Jack's saying is it does this and all your food on your tray spills right? We don't like that kind of exactly but you can't fly hands off when it's due. Oh yeah. So we changed the angle of inclination of the wing by about an eighth of an inch at the wing spar which has a lot more impact you know yeah sixteen feet out fall on your basic geometry and it I was testing that new angle of inclination that was on the right wing and it solved the banking problem. I was then testing out the new prop pitch arrangement and climbing out of Glendale airport and heading originally toward Prescott. Well they had fires up around Prescott so it changed I changed my route of flight and headed toward an area along Payson Arizona both climbing up over the mountains in north of Phoenix and I had an engine loss of power.

**Daniel:** This makes life and engine loss of power no motor it is not a glider just go oh no problem I'll just fix this thing here right? No well it depends on how much time you have and in this case in the mountains you have just a few places that you can land like virtually none yeah. So but when you fly experimental aircraft the one thing that's important is you keep reminding yourself to look down and figure out places you might put the airplane down if you have a problem and in this particular case I had a problem. Now I've had problems with the fuel pump on this airplane before which caused me to end up replacing that so I figured at the outset that perhaps it was a fuel management problem. The the engine acted like it was dropped to idle so I figured it might be in fact still idling and the engine instruments led me to believe that was the case which in retrospect it wasn't. The prop was actually wind milling or other words the forward motion through the air was turning the prop the engine wasn't what was turning.

**Daniel:** The problem sidebar conversations on this whole thing as Jack and I were talking about earlier is how often we're wrong right? What percentage of the time that we're sure were dead-on we're convinced about things in life and the lesson to learn is at least half the time we're wrong right? In this case you were I was at yeah percent wrong in the air. And at least she had some speed though right?

**Jack Norris:** Yeah so when the outage occurred I was probably doing around 120 knots and so recalling that I had a plateau of sorts behind me you know I did a 180 degree turn and set the plane up for glide as I'm going through the engine and Instrumentation seeing what should happen though I did something that I shouldn't have and that is I spent a minute in roughly ten seconds trying to contact ATC and for whatever reason on that day I was to find out later the effective communication to ATC had been atmospherically limited. So well I should've done was doing the engine restart sequence which is go back to the known good fuel tank and try to restart the engine. I lost that period of time because now I've got about two minutes and change left and I was in the glide mode and I headed toward the plateau that I had no this time you know when I was out climbing to the Northeast and set up the plane for normal landing and unfortunately I did not have the time to actually do a another change of direction to land into the wind so I now I have tailwind but you know a lot of ground no power and there that's right and no power to you know help me out of this particular situation. So so as I you know I cut in full flaps coming across the plateau and I'm halfway through and I'm just strolling playing down just by pretty much like a normal landing but still had a little too much energy and so I came as I am touching down I came over the edge of the plateau and okay sorry I know what it feels like all of a sudden oh there's no place to lay out anymore and you're still moving right? Well I'm still moving the wheels are now on the ground and I've got a tree coming up on my left side and guess what no way the manoeuvre a plane that has no power and the brakes don't really work when you're going down the hill and then aircraft the brakes are designed for landing on a level surface right. So as I hit the tree at or off the left side of the that left wing and the plane then was sliding across the ground after hitting a rut and losing the landing gear oh man and the prop and I slid to a stop too short of the dirt road coming up the hill to the plateau. I just slowed to a stop. I I'm just imagining I'm glider pilot anything that wasn't nice and smooth there was some bouncing involved in this had there been right certainly but I think the amount of adrenaline that you have in a situation like that not intended to be a fairly calm guy but you know I made sure that my fuel tanks were off at that point in time and flipped open the canopy and jumped out and frankly just you know started collecting parts and there was a guy that had one of those little clods coming up the hill to help me out and at the same time you know I looked up the phone number for the FAA and gave them a call and a few minutes later the Phoenix Police Department helicopter was circling about two miles away. I figured they'd find me sooner or later and I called my wife just a letter know that you know I've been in the airplane excellent and I'd give her a call back directly.

**Daniel:** So there's a lesson in this for me I'm sure but I don't know what it is so tell me what it is that I should learn.

**Jack Norris:** Well first off as a pilot study your emergency checklist because you don't know when something that you didn't expect might happen and can you relate that to life? The answer is absolutely. What you need to do is you encounter different aspects of your life is think about the outcomes that are important to you and what challenges and obstacles you might face along the way and plan a set of alternatives to deal with those and then once you run into an obstacle go redo your plan to make sure that you can avoid making those same mistakes twice. So the next time I get up in my second airplane that I'm building I make sure that if I in fact have a loss of power the first thing I'm going to do is do a restart sequence.

**Jack Norris:** I really had a desire to be an air force officer and fly jets turned out I had 2040 vision and that wasn't going to happen and I really didn't want to be a navigator so I went in and did the US Army instead but I didn't lose my interest in aviation and I started learning how to fly in the 1980s and then I quickly purged just a mooney airplane and flew it for 25 years that I moved out of the aviation environment for a couple years and realized that man I really like flying and at the time I had a small medical issue that I have basically grounded myself and so I started back into flying via paragliders and along the way I found out about something which i think is an outstanding way for a young person to learn how to fly and that is light sport aircraft. If you can get a driver's license and you can go take pilot training you can be certified to fly light sport and one of the big advantages of light sport is that you can progress beyond it and fly a lot faster and higher and fly instrument airplanes but it is a much more economical way to get into the aviation business and so go out and seek out an instructor. A lot of instructors nowadays teach in airplanes like this that are special light sport aircraft that is certified by the FAA so that the instructors can train in them and instructors don't have to charge as much because they're miserly but they go as fast as a Cessna 150. So I encourage anybody that's interested in aviation to go find out first about light sport and if you really enjoy it and want to grow then you can spend that just about any amount of money and getting any speed of airplane that you want to focus on and learn how to fly because each airplanes a little bit different but the concepts are the same.

**Daniel:** Jack is quite the guy and he's also a very good pilot. I really appreciate it flying with him yesterday and I bet you have some good questions for him. He's got all kinds of corporate experience he's got all kinds of parenting and marriage experiences. If you'd like to ask him some questions meet some of the other guys go to 360 men net and be sure you subscribe down below you'll get all the notifications of more stories from Jack and other men.

---

**CODEX ENTRY**

**Date:** 2018-08-24  
**File:** 360MEN MUGSHOTS and COFFEE - Jack Norris.md  
**Monomyth Stage:** 06 - Tests, Allies, Enemies  
**Gameboard Position:** Camp 3: Tests, Allies, Enemies  
**MA5 Domain:** None  
**Summary:** Daniel joins pilot and experimental aircraft builder Jack Norris for an early-morning flight and hangar conversation. Jack recounts surviving a power-loss crash in his self-built Arion Lightning kit plane over Arizona mountains, analyzing his misdiagnosis of the emergency, time lost on radio calls, and the hard landing that destroyed the aircraft but taught lasting lessons. He also advocates Light Sport Aircraft as an accessible path into aviation.  
**Key Insight:** In crises—whether engine failure or life obstacles—pre-studied emergency checklists, rapid correct action, and post-event debriefs matter more than initial assumptions or rigid rules; survival and growth come from planning alternatives and refusing to repeat mistakes.  
**Narrative Significance:** Jack joins the circle of resilient allies in Scotomaville, modeling the fusion of hands-on creation, mechanical mastery, and humble learning from failure. His story reinforces the Initium theme that real preparation for the unexpected (physical or metaphorical) turns potential disasters into wisdom that benefits family, community, and future endeavors.

---

**INITIUM.**