Kirby Harrison is a freelance writer for The Weekly of Business Aviation, Business & Commercial Aviation and others in the Informa publishing chain. Harrison joined the Navy in 1962 and spent 20 years in the service, virtually all of it as a photojournalist, traveling from small islands in the South Pacific to Vietnam to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. When Harrison retired from the Navy, he went back to college and graduated in 1971 from Syracuse University with a Bachelor's Degree in Photojournalism. Along the way, he spent two years as a news photographer at the Daily Press & Times Herald in Newport News, Virginia, and three years working for Studio Sebe in Nice, France as a photographer. More recently, before retiring, he worked nearly 20 years for Naval Aviation News.
Aircraft systems monitoring and reporting is on the cutting edge of the digital age, recording and reporting everything from oil pressure at takeoff compared with the previous 49 takeoffs, to detecting faults in a sensor itself.
