"Are You Feeling Lucky, Punk?"

There is a website that attempts to rank the best all time movie lines, and, amazingly, Dirty Harry’s question to the fugitive he has on the ground, with a gun within reach, after asking the “punk” if he thinks he has any rounds left in his 44 magnum, isn’t number one. It fact, it was more like 48, just ahead of, “Why do I have to be Mr. Pink?” (Reservoir Dogs), which was good, but would hardly rank on my top 100. I would have put “Are you feeling lucky, punk?” right up near the top. In fact, my biggest problem would be which came first, that, or “Make my day.” But “Are you feeling lucky” gets the nod here, because this post is about the role luck plays in aviation, indeed, in life.

Lee Trevino supposedly said, “Yah, there’s a lot of luck in golf, but the more I practice, the better my luck.” There’s a lot of luck in aviation, too, and the same rule applies. Not always, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t call it luck, we’d call it karma, but hard work does seem to put the odds more in your favor.

I had some bad luck early in my career at ATA, really nothing I could do much about, but after having finally made it to L-1011 captain, I found out less than a year later that I was going to be bounced back to the 727—the victim of another round of cutbacks, a perennially favorite of airline management. There’s nothing wrong with the 727, but it was a smaller, older airplane, it meant a pay cut, some retraining, and it meant having to go back to commuting—there were no 727 slots in Boston, my preferred base. But I did it, and less than a year or so later, management decided that the problem wasn’t too many 1011 captains after all, it was not enough (another perennial favorite of management, changing their minds without ever admitting their mistake, but at least it worked in my favor this time). The result was that I again found myself down in Miami (where ATA kept its 1011 simulator), to get a quick check out on the 1011 after a year away.

The check airman was Tom Hopp (see “Turns”), which I was happy about because I always had a good experience with Tom’s training and checks. I was paired up with a copilot who was also coming back to the 1011, but, unfortunately for him, he was coming back to the 1011 as a copilot because he had “busted”, or failed, his six month check as a 727 captain. There probably was more to the story than that, it usually takes more than a single bust to get dropped back to copilot from captain, but that wasn’t my business. What was my business was that I was paired up with a sim partner who was, understandably, not happy to be there.

The first day was a warm up and refresher, which Tom started off in the briefing room by trying to set a relaxed, no pressure tone, first telling my partner how sorry he was the way things turned out, but that it was just a little bump in the road, and to give it his best and he’d be pack in the left seat in no time. We then had a little chit chat about what we were going to do that day and the next, and he then started going over the various maneuvers to be covered, with questions thrown in as appropriate—a common (and, I think, very good) way to work into “oral questions” without making it seem like a test. At that point in my career I had been through several of these little question and answer sessions with Tom, and hadn’t always gotten all the answers right but had been smart enough to make notes afterwards and had a pretty good little file on his “orals”—which I’m sure Tom knew, and was probably something he wanted you to do. I knew for sure he didn’t want you to come back a year later and still not know the answers to the questions he had asked you a year before. So Tom started by asking my partner all the questions first, and it became pretty clear pretty quick that he hadn’t studied at all and had only the vaguest memory of 1011 systems. He had a particularly bad habit of starting each answer with, “I’m going to say...” He might as well have said, “I have no idea—but I’ll make a guess and maybe I’ll get lucky.” Each time my partner didn’t know the answer, Tom would turn to me and they were all questions I had gotten previously, so I pretty much knew all the answers, but each time it got a little more awkward.

Finally Tom said, “You know, Brian [not his real name, of course], there is no good reason that Clausing here is the only one in the room who knows the answers to my questions, because I’ve been working with Clausing for a long time and I know he’s not all that sharp.” (I took that as a left handed compliment—that I was good enough to take a jab from Tom—but with Tom you never really knew for sure.) “So,” he continued, “I’m not going to ask any more questions right now, but when you come in here tomorrow, I’ll expect you to have some answers.”

Poor kid, I thought. He’s going to be up all night.

So we moved on to the simulator, and as you can probably guess it didn’t go all that well either. There were lots of excuses and complaints—“The simulator’s messed up”—“The visuals are no good”—Tom even offered to climb into his seat “to see what the problem was”—which put an end to most of the complaining, and when it was over we headed back to the briefing room. A very quiet walk down a very sterile corridor, the kind of walk where all you hear are footsteps on linoleum.

I didn’t know what was going to come next, I had never been in that sort of situation before. Tom started with words to the effect that that didn’t go very well, and if we all were going to get through this checkout we needed to spend a whole lot less time blaming the simulator and a whole lot more time concentrating on the maneuvers. Then he paused for a moment and said, “Brian, have you ever had the experience where you got your bid for the next month [your bid is your schedule and the name of the other pilot you were going to be paired up with for that month], and you found out you were going to be flying with Captain Blackcloud, and you just knew it was going to be a long month—that everything little thing always seemed to go against this guy, lots of little problems and hassles, nothing ever seemed to go smoothly, the weather was always bad for this guy, his airplanes always broke, his passengers always had problems, he just had the worst luck in the world and you just wished you’d bid another line?”

And Brian said, “Sure, happens a lot.”

And then Tom said, “And then the next month you get your bid and you find out that you’re going to be flying with Captain Sunshine, and you just know it’s going to be a great month, this guy just has the best luck in the world, everything always seems to go along just fine without any big problems or hassles when you fly with him, and you wish you could fly with him very month.”

And Brian said, “Yah, sometimes that happens too.”

And then Tom said, “You know what, Brian? It’s not luck.”

That was almost 20 years ago and I have spent the rest of my career trying to figure out what it is if it isn’t luck. Because what “it” is is the essence of what it takes to be a good pilot, maybe the essence of what it takes to be good at anything.

Tom had some of the answers, things like anticipating problems, reacting but not over reacting, listening, looking around, and, mainly, fixing small problems quickly before they became big problems. It was all good advice but nothing revolutionary and nothing you could say in just a few words: “This is it. This is what being a good pilot is, this is why some guys seem to have all the luck and others none.”

As a check airman I used to spend a lot of time watching the good ones, the Captain Sunshines, the ones who seemed to be completely in charge and at ease, trying to figure out what it was that told me right away they knew what they were doing, and, conversely, what it was that told me right away that the not so good ones weren’t completely at ease or in charge. And I’d like to say that I finally figured it out, but I can’t. The best I have been able to come up with are two little ideas. One is a sort of standard, or test, a very general idea to help determine whether you are headed in the right direction or not. The second is a sort of “mantra,” an easily remembered phrase, or saying, to help in getting that standard right. These two ideas are all I really know about being a pilot that is worth anything, and each will take a little bit of explaining. The first idea will be the subject of a later post, to be called “The Test.” The second will be the subject of a further post, to be called “The Way.”