The Test

Back in the early ’70s, shortly after I was released from active duty as a tank platoon leader, I found myself in a graduate-level course in English at the University of Michigan. (In cockpit conversations, stories like this usually begin with, “In a previous life….”) How that happened, and why, and where it went from there, is not terribly important. What is important is something I learned in that course, something that had very little to do with the study of English per se, but an awful lot to do with life in general.

The course itself was a comparison of the works of Henry James and Mark Twain, two 19^th century authors about as far apart as the Army was from graduate school. Both were master story tellers, but where Twain’s stories were full of action on the surface but with much more complex and even sinister currents underneath, James’s were enormously subtle, even, at times, tedious, on the surface, but with powerful, slow moving currents underneath. Twain was far easier and more enjoyable to read, to me anyway, and to most of the other students in the class, while James was a bit of a struggle—his slow-paced, somewhat archaic character studies didn’t appeal to our need for action and drama.

The professor knew this—I’m sure he dealt with it each time he taught the course—and he was ready with a defense of James. He asked the question, “How do you know when someone is really good at something—better than almost anyone else? Not just good at writing novels, but anything: baseball, music, art, acting, raising kids—anything.” That was quite a question. I don’t know what we said; whatever it was we clearly didn’t have the time to come up with a well thought-out answer, so he answered it for us.

“I think,” he said, “We know when someone has done something exceptionally well when he, or she, makes it look easy. The outfielder, for instance, who always seems to be standing right where the ball is hit makes it look easy. The outfielder who needs to make a spectacular diving run to catch the ball makes it look like he is good, and he is to an extent, but the better player is the one who was standing there already. And the same applies to writers, Henry James, in this case. It seems like nothing actually happens in his stories, but in fact we are mislead because he makes something that is actually very difficult, a story that centers on character, not action, seem so easy. We are tempted, with James, to think that nothing is going on, just as we are tempted to think that the outfielder who is always in position is just lucky. But, in fact, both are actually making something very difficult look easy, and they are able to do that because both are so good at what they do.”

That class was a long time ago, so I’m not quoting his exact words, but that is more or less what I remember, and I remember it well because it was, I thought, a tremendously significant insight. It applies, of course, to aviation as well: The good ones make it look easy, the not-so-good ones make it look hard. The good pilots always seem to have easy, even boring flights; up and down, the same old thing every day. Once in awhile a curve ball gets thrown, a long line of thunderstorms has to be circumvented, an aircraft system malfunctions, a medical emergency occurs, but the good ones seem to just take care of the problem and move on. The not-so-good ones bark orders, change their minds, focus on a small part of the problem and let the big part get worse and often compound the problem before finally solving it. Their flights are seldom uneventful and are usually full of drama. Ironically, often they, and sometimes others, think that they are the good ones, taking charge, making decisions, barking orders, and that the ones who make it look easy are just lucky or lazy.

There are, of course, times when every pilot needs to get busy, take charge, and, if not bark, at least issue some orders. Making it look easy is not the same as doing nothing, and making it look hard doesn’t mean it isn’t actually sometimes hard. Just as it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between a sales pitch and good information, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between making it look easy and being easy, and making it look hard and being hard. But it usually doesn’t take very long to figure it out. The lazy pilot will get in trouble at some point—his, or her unwillingness to do what is required will eventually result in a small problem becoming a bigger problem. And the pilot who lacks the ability or the willingness to make the solution look easy will always make it look hard, even when it isn’t. Sometimes, he or she may even want to make it look hard to show to fellow crewmembers what a terrific pilot he or she is, afraid that no one will notice otherwise.

So what I learned in that English course almost forty years ago stuck with me and has formed the basis for what I call The Test: Are you making it look easy, or are you making it look hard? If you’re not making it look easy, as easy as it can be anyway, then you’re on the wrong path.

The Test itself is simple—a question you can ask yourself to see how you are doing. Getting on the right path is the hard part, and that will be the subject I will take up in the next post, to be called The Way.

Edited by Nicole Clausing

Plans for Oshkosh Continued

I meant to include in my last post, "Plans for Oshkosh," that I also plan on doing a daily post during AirVenture2008, which runs from July 28 to August 3. I hope to focus each day on a different aspect of the event---one day might be the warbirds flight line and another the exhibitors' hall, for instance--and each will probably include something that I found significant that day. It will also be an excuse to post some photos. What it won't be is a recap of events. You have to be there for that.

Plans for Oshkosh

I have rented a house for the week of AirVenture 2008 (“Oshkosh”). It has several bedrooms and is on a tributary of Lake Winnebago. Lacking an airplane and needing a car, my wife, Emmy, and I will be driving to Oshkosh. I am hoping that my daughters can be there at least part of the week, and will be inviting a few of my very best pilot friends and their wives as well, the exact number depending upon my daughters’ plans. So it should be not just a great week at Oshkosh, but a nice summer vacation as well.

I will be giving a presentation sometime during the week—the schedule hasn’t been published yet—on the subject of air navigation, past, present, and future. I will also be participating in the Authors’ Corner, promoting my navigation book. I’m really looking forward to the week. If you have ever thought about going to Oshkosh, I strongly encourage you to make plans to do so this year (see www.airventure.org). I guarantee you won’t regret it, in fact the only thing you will regret is that you waited so long. If you do go and see me at either the presentation or at the Authors’ Corner, please introduce yourself to me as a blog reader. I would like to get to know the people at the receiving end of this transmission.

"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.”

Turns

Regular readers of this blog may remember that in “Pro Am” (Archives, January, 2008) I said that one of the things a general aviation pilot has going for him or her that an airline pilot does not, is that the general aviation pilot never, “has to fly with a difficult copilot, one that is argumentative, combative, competitive, lazy, uncooperative, or unresponsive.” If you’ve never flown in a professional cockpit (a two pilot cockpit), you might think that that statement was a bit petty, perhaps overreaching. How often could that be a problem? And the answer is, quite often. They put human beings in cockpits for a reason, and the price paid is a considerable amount of pushing and pulling between two individuals with strong opinions and often strong egos. The captain has to listen to his copilot—good CRM (Crew Resources Management) demands it—but he still must maintain his authority: there can only be one captain. The copilot has to defer to the captain when questions of technique arise, but must be forceful when he or she feels that safety is being jeopardized. In between is a gray area of cosmic dimension. In the best of worlds, each gives a little when there are differences, and reasonableness prevails, like in any partnership. But at times, reasonableness does not prevail, and a stronger stand has to be taken.

Tom Hopp was one of several pilots, check airmen, and simulator instructors that ATA was lucky enough to get from Eastern Airlines after those pilots were unlucky enough to see their strike fail. I remember once riding jump seat on an L-1011 with Tom Hopp as captain. His copilot was being difficult at nearly every turn, insisting on doing things his way, dragging his heels with Tom’s requests, and at times simply ignoring him; in short, he was “argumentative, combative, competitive, lazy, uncooperative, [and, at times,] unresponsive.” I knew Tom had a lot of patience, but I also knew we were headed for some kind of a show down, I just didn’t know what kind.

Tom put up with it for the whole flight, which fortunately was not a long one, saying things like, “Well, I know that’s one way to do it, but this time I really do want to do it this way.” When the flight was over, though, after all the checklists were done and everyone had started to pack up his stuff, Tom got up, closed and then locked the cockpit door. That’s never a good sign. He said to the copilot, “Do you know why I’m in this seat [the captain’s] and you’re in that seat [the copilot’s]?” It was a rhetorical question, he wasn’t supposed to answer, and, he didn’t, the first smart thing he had done all day.

Tom said, “It’s not because I’m such a great pilot and you’re not, and it’s not because I’m more deserving than you are, or luckier, or anything else. There is only one reason I’m in this seat and you’re not, and that is because it’s my turn. That’s all—it’s my turn. And someday it will be your turn. And when it’s your turn, you can run the cockpit the way you want to, but as long as it is still my turn we’re going to run it the way I want to. Okay?” Another rhetorical question, and again, no answer. But he got the message.

We all understand the concept of “having a turn,” because from infancy we are taught to take turns, to wait our turn, to be fair about whose turn it is, and so on. It’s a fundamental of the socializing our elders teach us, something that keeps us from descending to savagery and chaos with each generation. I’ve been thinking a lot about “turns” since I retired, because in the simplest sense, retirement meant my turn was up, it was someone else’s turn, and it helped me understand the change: I wasn’t a captain up until then because I was the best of the bunch, it was simply my turn; and I didn’t have to quit being a captain because I wasn’t any good anymore, it was just that my turn was up.

Kids understand turns very well, because they have to deal with taking turns every day, from sunrise to sunset. I was reminded of this by my Italian teacher. We were discussing the verb “toccare”, which means “to touch,” but is also used idiomatically to mean to take a turn: “tocca a te,” means “your turn,” tocca a me” means “my turn.” (I don’t know why Italians call a “turn” a “touch”—there are a lot of things about Italian I don’t understand—maybe it comes from chess. I don’t really know why we call it a “turn” either—who turns?—but we do. Language is funny. ) In fact, kids understand the concept of taking turns so well they shorten the phrases to “tocca-me, tocca-te,” in Italian, just as English speaking kids say, “My turn,” or “Your turn.”

So the concept of taking turns begins in childhood and the pain and sadness of having your turn be over is universal. But there is something worse than having your turn be over, that is having it taken from you. On April 3, 2008, ATA ceased operations. On that day ATA pilots didn’t have their turn come to an end, their turn was gone: They went to bed that night as ATA pilots, and they woke up the next morning unemployed. That is a wrenching change and one that is much worse than simply having your turn come to an end. So I feel very lucky that, whatever feelings of sadness I had as I walked away from my airplane for the last time (see “Last Flight”, Archives 2007), I was able to see my turn through to its end.

This will be a difficult time for all those ATA pilots who lost their jobs, but almost all will survive, land on their feet, and come out the other side with something that gives them satisfaction and security. And I hope that someday they all have the somewhat sad satisfaction of seeing their turns come to an end.

For the record, the picture at the top is what it looks like when you walk away from an airplane for the last time. Bangor, Maine, September 24, 2006.