Rich is apart of the Virgin America and Virgin Galactic exchange program that allows VA captains the opportunity to pilot the Virgin Galactic flights when they start in 2010. He’s pretty stoked to have been picked from the VA fleet and who wouldn’t be?! Rich has an extensive resume in aviation with over 16,000 hours clocked and he overlooked the testing for Virgin American flights before launch. There is no word on what the training will entail since it’s still in the early stages, but Rich is excited at the prospect of going up into space and says some of the training will involve flight simulators. He wasn’t notified before hand that he was one of few pilots chosen for the exchange program and found out when it was announced internally to the whole company.
Good luck, Rich. Save me a seat.
PS- Due to some technical difficulties resulting from live blogging in the Mojave, the video interview we took is FUBAR at the moment, but we’ll see what we can do to fix that once we get back to LAX.