Greg Brown's Flying Carpet Blog

Greg’s “sky bio”

Greg Brown’s passion for flying is obvious to anyone who knows his “Flying Carpet” column in AOPA Flight Training magazine, or who has read his books, You Can Fly!, Flying Carpet: The Soul of an Airplane, The Savvy Flight Instructor, The Turbine Pilot’s Flight Manual, and Job Hunting for Pilots.

A CFI since 1979, Greg was 2000 Industry/FAA National Flight Instructor of the Year, winner of the 1999 NATA Excellence in Pilot Training Award, and the first-ever Master Flight Instructor. He has flown professionally in both scheduled and corporate aviation, and holds an ATP pilot certificate with Boeing 737 type rating, and Flight Instructor certificate with all fixed-wing aircraft ratings.

Greg’s “earth bio”

Greg Brown is a widely published author, designer, photographer, and artist. During his varied career, he has served as faculty member in industrial, visual, and interior design in the Department of Creative Arts at Purdue University, led a product and visual design consultancy that attracted numerous national corporate clients, and directed an art furniture collaborative. Along with fine art and photography, Mr. Brown has wide-ranging commercial product design experience including creative commissions for everything from toys to appliances to medical equipment to automobiles.

More recently Greg’s activities have turned to non-fiction and creative writing. Author of five commercially published books with more in progress, Mr. Brown was named November 2003 Barnes & Noble Arizona Author of the Month. Some reviewers have compared his book, Flying Carpet, to 1960s road-trip classics like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Mr. Brown is also in his eleventh year as aviation adventure columnist for Flight Training, a national newsstand magazine published by the world’s largest pilot association.

Over the years Brown has spoken extensively on topics including careers, networking, art promotion, design methodology, creative problem solving, and aviation adventure. Among his popular topics is “Armchair Marketing: Secrets of Selling your Writing.” (Few other authors have sold their first two books to a publisher with one telephone call, then broken the press’s first year sales record with one of them.)

Greg holds an MFA in Art & Design and a BS in Architectural Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with prior studies in the Integrated Liberal Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He currently serves with his wife, Jean, on the Dean’s Advisory Council for the College of Arts & Letters, Northern Arizona University.

For those bewildered by Greg’s schizophrenia between the arts and aviation, some understanding may be derived from one of his favorite quotes, taken from The War in the Air, 1922, by Sir Walter Raleigh: “The engine is the heart of an aeroplane, but the pilot is its soul.”