Fred Smith Made FEDEX The Best Airline in the World for Pilots Artwork

Wingmen Show

Two Dope Boys in a Navy jet. The Wingmen Show is a weekly podcast about challenges and opportunities in everyday life. Your hosts are two guys born in Harlem, New York previously unknown to each other. Separately, they became Navy pilots flying high performance jet aircraft on and off of aircraft carriers patrolling the world’s oceans. Their paths did not cross formally until they ended up flying for the same airline after their active-duty military service had ended. They have a wide range of experiences spanning the worlds of basketball and boxing. Drew’s father is Drew Bundini Brown, Muhammad Ali’s Wingman and coined the iconic phrase “Float Like A Butterfly Sting, Like A Bee". Martial Arts and Show Business are also areas of mutual interest. Drew has been featured nationally on television programs such as the Donahue Show and the Today Show. He has also appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines. Both are published authors as well as former Navy jet pilots and Commercial Airline Pilots; they retired after having flown the Boeing 777 airliner. The cultural mix of religions, immigrant parents and grandparents from Europe and the Caribbean gives them an uncommon perspective on racial matters. Melding the cultures of New York City, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Memphis, the Caribbean and Atlanta has helped shape their worldview when combined with the life they have seen and experienced having flown extensively to countries throughout the world.They are wingmen to each other, providing advice, guidance and constructive criticism when needed. The goal of the show is to inspire and entertain those unafraid to expand their minds and perhaps learn something new in the hope that the listeners can become wingmen to others. Each one, teach one.

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Wingmen Show

Fred Smith Made FEDEX The Best Airline in the World for Pilots

July 01, 2025 • Drew Brown and Paul Thompson

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A visionary is defined as a person with original and innovative ideas about the future. The man known as Fred Smith of the Federal Express Corporation was that, and a whole lot more. Along with millions of people around the world, both of your wingmen owe much of their success and life fulfillment to this great man that not only created the organization that invented overnight express delivery but also helped connect commercial markets around the world with each other.

The company now known as FedEx was actually a start-up company that barely survived, not that long ago. Following his service to America as a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter pilot and Forward Air Controller during the Viet Nam war, Fred Smith began putting the pieces together of a fledgling operation that would in a short time, emerge as a global powerhouse that became inextricably tied to the U.S. as well as the global economy.

This risk-taker managed to stay in business by actually winning a little money during a card game in Las Vegas. He took a leap of faith and put all of his fortune on the line to see his dreams come true. This titan of industry who both wingmen had the good fortune to interact with, asked nothing of his employees, other than to do their very best to satisfy the customer. The contributions this man has made to the United States and the rest of the world are too long to list here. Suffice it to say, he was a shining symbol of American innovation enhanced by technological achievement powered by a solid team.

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United States Navy carrier aviation has changed radically from its earliest days dating back to the year 1911. But throughout all of the technological innovations during the last century, the primary method of successfully landing aircraft on moving ships at sea is fundamentally the same; it involves the extended tail hook of an airplane snagging a metal wire that has been strung across the width of the flight deck to make it stop.

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