About the author
During seven years of active duty in the Navy Samson commanded dozens of sensitive reconnaissance missions throughout the world in the P-3 Orion aircraft. Many years later, three days after the 9/11 attacks, Captain Samson was pressed in to service providing critical security training for airline crews in around the country.
His twenty-seven-year-piloting-career at Delta Air Lines provided him many opportunities to influence the outcome of high-performance-teams. As a founding member of the company’s Crew Resource Management (CRM) team, he went on to lead the airline’s pilot instructor school, served as a 737 check airman, and FAA sanctioned crew-incident-debriefer. For his remarkable accomplishments Captain Samson was honored as one of the finest employees in the seventy-thousand-member corporation.
An educator at heart, he instructed in the cockpit, developed curricula, and authored numerous training manuals and assessments. At Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where Samson completed a master’s degree in Professional Communication, he created and taught a course in interactive-problem-solving to fledgling aviators. Art continues to conduct training sessions for the aviation students and instructors at Westminster.
He has returned to his roots in Oregon where he can be found gliding through black-diamond-powder on Mt. Bachelor, running-biking-swimming, casting a delicate fly on the Deschutes, and tending his ranch east of Bend. Captain Samson writes and lectures about critical-human-factors-issues in aviation and has been quoted in USA Today and in Oregon and Los Angeles radio interviews.