“We fly because of the weather, not despite it,” says Adam Alpert, a passionate commercial pilot and the owner of 6o-metre Perini Navi sailing yacht Seahawk. That motto, which he first heard from Robert Buck, TWA's chief pilot when Howard Hughes owned the airline, applies equally to his life on board. “A windy day for a motor yacht is an inconvenience, maybe even threatening. For us, it's a blessing. It is magnificent to really sail that boat - an empowering feeling.”
However, alongside the visceral gratification is an intellectual pleasure. “There's a difference between knowing the name of something and understanding how it works but most people confuse those two things,” he says. “Flying teaches you this and sailing does too, especially complicated sailing boats like Seahawk. For curious people, it is kind of fun because you really can figure out what's going on when you turn that key, so to speak.”
Intellectual curiosity has been a thread running through Alpert's life, from his degree in mathematics and computer science to his first job in nuclear power, his second in aerospace and his later career as owner and vice-president of BioTek Instruments - a large multinational life-science tools company until his retirement in 2018. as a platform for an ambitious programme of world-roaming charity work with a scientific bent.
