Welcome to AirShowFan.com!

I am Bernardo Malfitano and this is my website.

I am an aeronautical engineer. I live in the Seattle area and work for Boeing. My work ranges from helping to figure out how old airliners age (and how to inspect and repair them in such a way that they can keep flying safely for a long time), to helping to supervise the design of structures on our next airplane, the 787-9. Most of my work involves fracture mechanics, helping to improve the math used to calculate the rates of fatigue crack growth (to prevent things like this, this, this, or this). I also participate in Lean and Knowledge Management efforts (e.g. evangelizing the use of wikis in the workplace) and on writing articles for internal company blogs and newsletters, among other things.

My main hobby is aviation photojournalism. I go to 10-20 airshows a year, and cover them by taking pictures and writing articles for magazines and websites. I can't get enough of it! The earth-shaking roar of low-bypass fighter jet engines, the agility of aerobats, the sheer size of cargo transports, the odd designs of spy-planes and stealth fighter-bombers, the graceful lines and sweet purr of 1940s airplanes, the historical biplanes and early jets that take you right back to the time when aviation technology was being figured out... It's literally awesome.

I've been an aviation fanatic all my life. I am an amateur aviation artist (my airplane drawings have been featured in art exhibits), I have built and flown a variety of model aircraft, I am learning to fly single-engine airplanes, I take pictures and write about airshows and air museums, I have a pile of airplane books that is literally taller than I am (ranging from books about the development of certain aircraft, to biographies of aviators and engineers, to books going over most of the relevant airplanes in history, to books about the most unusual proof-of-concept aircraft)... When I was in college I created and taught a course on the history of aviation technology, for which I wrote a 180-page book. I sometimes lead a middle-school workshop about airplane design (covering stability, balance, lift, and drag) where we make and test foam gliders. And I work at the greatest aerospace company on earth, where we develop the world's most modern airliners (and satellites and other things) and make some pretty dang good tactical jets (and attack helicopters and UAVs and other things).

I spent most of my life (from my birth to 1993 and then again from '96 to '99) in Rio de Janeiro. Other than that, I've spent about 4 years in Connecticut, about 5 years in Silicon Valley (attending Stanford and then working at Google, if you'll pardon the name-dropping), and about 3 years in the Los Angeles area. In late 2008 I moved to the Pacific Northwest, and I plan on staying. I have traveled to 10 countries (and been to airshows in 5 of them).

I am a naturalist and a Unitarian Universalist. I am currently writing a book about the unnecessarily alienating, excessively divisive, mostly religion-oriented culture wars in the US. I'm calling it The Atheist Spy.

I think that videogames are good for you (in moderation), that the brain is like a muscle, that US public education could be improved, that the current balance between social and economic values needs to be re-evaluated, that secularists and religious people (and, in general, liberals and conservatives) don't empathize with each other as much as they should, that civil liberties are important, that photography is not a crime, that the TSA is infuriatingly ineffective, that people need to understand how the meaning of privacy has changed now that information is easy to compile and distribute and search (this also has obvious implications for any industry that relies on the scarcity of the bits of information they sell, like newspapers and movie studios and software companies), that intellectual property laws need overhauling, and that the internet is changing the world in really really exciting (but sometimes worrisome) ways.

I enjoy social dance, especially waltz and swing, although polka and salsa are fun too, and the occasional tango.

I occasionally watch Lost, 24, the news, Mythbusters, shows like Extreme Engineering and Extreme Machines, or DVDs of Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond, Daria, and Star Trek The Next generation. I listen to Gabriel o Pensador, U2, most classic rock, most Brazilian rock from the 80s and 90s, Beethoven, the Strausses, and other miscellaneous music. I really enjoyed Bossa Nova, American Beauty, Pleasantville, The Matrix, Fight Club, and a variety of 80s movies like Back To The Future, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Top Secret, Indiana Jones, Airplane!, Die Hard, Batman, and so on. I'm a fan of really really good standup. I learned to read by having Asterix read to me, I love Calvin & Hobbes, and I religiously check out XKCD each time a new one is posted. Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, Martin Gardner, Luís Fernando Veríssimo, Isaac Asimov, Dave Barry, and John Grisham are prominent on my bookshelf, which also includes one or two memorable books by Douglas Adams, John Gribbin, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Rushkoff, George Smith, and many others. (Last time I measured, I had about 12 meters / 40 feet of books, if you go all the way back to the books I read in high school: Arthur C Clarke, Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz...)

In the unlikely event that you'd like to learn more about me (especially details of my jobs, research projects, schoolwork, hobbies, how they changed over time as I moved from place to place, etc), you can do so here.

You can also find me on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Orkut, and so on and so forth, or sending in an occasional contribution to websites like Slashdot and BoingBoing and FlightBlogger, and making Wikipedia edits (some of them even non-technical).

So, um... Congratulations for finding my humble website, and I look forward to hearing from you.

PS: You may think it's silly to post all this junk online. And you may be right. But a few times now, people Googled subjects of interest to them and got my homepage as a result, and contacted me, leading to beneficial connections I am very glad to have made. So I'll keep these pages up and hope that they keep being found by people who share my interests.

PPS: I used to have all kinds of things up on this website: Reviews of airshows and air museums, an airshow calendar, general information about airshows, tons and tons of pictures... But many things led me to stop keeping the content up to date. One was my lack of free time as I transitioned from a college student to a quarter-life-crisis explorer to a full-time engineer. Another factor was the rise of Web 2.0 platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter and the FenceCheck forums, which make it easier for me to share my thoughts and pictures with friends (especially since people's online lives are now centered on these platforms, and it is much easier to enjoy content there than to venture out onto other websites like this one). Another is the simple fact that there is a lot more info online now: If you want to find out what airshows are in your area, learn when they are and how to get to them, and see pictures and reviews of those airshows held in previous years, all that is easy to do now. (When I started this website, around 2002, there was hardly any airshow info online. Now FenceCheck and AirshowBuzz and UKAR and the EAA and World Airshow News pretty much have it all covered). Also, the fact that more of my pictures and articles are being published (in magazines like World Airshow News and In Flight USA, books, websites, etc) means that I spend more time and effort optimizing them for that context and have less of an incentive to also put them here. So, that's why a lot of the old content is gone. (Some of it is in the archives under ''Other Websites'', though). I'm sure almost no one would care about this, but I thought I'd justify it.

Ok, that's it!