Professionalism and Non-Professional Pilots

 

What does professionalism have to do with general aviation—with pilots who don’t fly for a living? A lot, I think, but first let’s look at what we mean by “professionalism.”

The word “professionalism” gets thrown around to mean a lot of different things.  It’s one of those words like “fairness” that means something different from one person to another, and even to any one person depending on the circumstances.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  One of the beauties and strengths of the English language is its flexibility.  But it can lead to misunderstandings, and worse, to manipulation: when someone asks you to “be fair”, they usually mean “Do it my way”.

Professionalism, in the literal sense, means to act according to the customs, methods and ethics that have been established for that profession.  The connotation, if not the actual sense, is always one of service first, profit second.  Thus medicine, the law, accounting, are considered to be professions.  But we often use the word in a broader sense.  Commercial pilots are often considered to be professionals, even if we think of their work as more of a job than a profession.  But there certainly is a service first aspect to professional aviation and there certainly are customs, methods and ethics related to it.

I often hear people use the work “professional” to mean “objective” or “not emotional.” They say, “I put on my professional face.” “I tried to act professionally, despite his unreasonableness.”  “As a professional, I tried to give him a balanced response, even though it was clear there was only one way to go.” And so on.  There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it is clear that that is the meaning intended.  But it is more of a side effect than it is a description: a person acting professionally will be objective and unemotional, but that’s not all there is to being professional.

There is another characteristic of professionalism that I think is very important, particularly for our discussion here.  Professionals work with other professionals.  A surgeon doesn’t operate alone, he or she operates in the company of other medical professionals.  The lawyer’s arguments and briefs do not exist in a vacuum, they are read and reviewed by other legal professionals.  The violinists doesn’t play alone, he or she plays with other musicians.  And they all know what they are seeing, because they all do the same things themselves.  They can judge.  A professional continuously subjects his or her work to the opinions and observations and judgments of other professionals, people whose judgments matter.

In a professional cockpit, there are always at least two pilots, often more—jump seaters, check airmen, FAA inspectors. A professional pilot doesn’t fly alone, he or she is always being observed by someone else and, consciously or otherwise, being judged on his or her performance.  Good performance is noted and admired and bad performance is noted and remembered.  A professional pilot has a real incentive to do a good job and avoid mistakes: both will be noted.

In turn, there are two different aspects to that performance, one that I would call systemic and one that I would call operational.  The systemic is the overall training and experience level of the pilot in question--his or her competence in a general sense.  Does this pilot seem to be generally well trained and experienced and know what he or she is doing?  The operational is specific: How good was that descent planning? How good an approach was that? How good a crosswind landing was that?

Pilot hiring for professional positions is largely about determining that the candidate first has the systemic training and experience to do the job and fit in with other professionals, and second can perform at a level that insures safety, efficiency, and comfort.  The first part is done by verifying training and experience claims and the later part with simulator rides.  Backgrounds are checked and performance is observed.  As it will be every time that pilots flies.

Where does this leave general aviation, those who fly as single pilots (except for check rides, refreshers and review)? Their performance is almost never observed by another pilot.  He or she can operate the aircraft well, badly, carefully or carelessly.  Unless there is a violation observed, a rarity, or an accident or incident, also rare, no one knows. 

Which brings up another important difference between the professional and the non-professional pilot: for the single pilot, no else is there to correct, critique and instruct.  Professional aviation is really an apprenticeship system: copilots learn from captains, generally directly, but also indirectly, by observing the captain’s performance, both good and bad.  The two pilots have each other to help each other, to learn from each other and to correct each other.  (And copilots do correct captains, even if they have to be a bit diplomatic in doing so: “Hey Boss, weren’t we cleared for the Back Course?”) So not only are observations going on and judgments being made, instruction and correction are happening, too.  None of this happens in a single pilot general aviation aircraft. No one’s fault, it just can’t happen.

So what can the non-professional do? The first thing to recognize is that you can’t have too much training.  The systemic part—the background and general competence level comes mostly from training.  A little comes from experience, usually obtained the hard way, but training is much more concentrated and effective.  So if all you’re doing is a biennial flight review, you’re not expanding your systemic knowledge at all, or very, very, little.  If you haven’t got an instrument rating, start.  Even if money is tight, start.  Every hour will help.  Think about a new rating: seaplane, glider, tail dragger, or start work on a commercial certificate.  If you are instrument rated and fly mostly one type of aircraft, take a ground school and simulator refresher course every year.  You don’t “learn to fly.”  Flying is always a matter of continuing education. If you aren’t getting regular training of some sort, you aren’t getting any better as a pilot.

In the aircraft, imagine another pilot there, one with a lot more experience, maybe even someone specific like the guy down the street who flies for FedEx or the kid next door who went on to fly C-17s for the Air Force. How much more careful would you be and how much better would you try to fly if that person or someone like that were there in the airplane with you? This isn’t play acting, this is discipline.  If you would want to make the best possible approach and landing for someone who knows what you’re doing, why wouldn’t you want to do the same thing any time, even alone?

Here’s one way to know you’re doing a really good job, even if no one is there to observe and comment who is qualified to make that call.  If no one says anything at the end of the flight except maybe, “Thanks, I enjoyed that,” that’s a good sign.  When you do a really good job, it seems ordinary, even boring. People are hard pressed to know what to say.  When you do a lousy job, they may not know what went wrong, but they’ll have a lot to ask and say.  A really well planned and well executed flight is boring: you take off, climb to altitude, cruise along for a while, descend and land.  No big deal. What’s there to say?

So, train often, plan every flight thoroughly, assume an experienced professional pilot is riding along with you, and treat yourself to a little, knowing smile when you walk away from the airplane and no one says anything. You earned it. Captain.