The Way

The question is this: Can we say, in just a few words, what it is that makes a good pilot? A quick review.

First, we know it isn’t luck. Luck—the random, the chaotic, the unpredictable—is always there, in aviation as in anything, but for good pilots randomness is just part of the fun, part of what makes it interesting. Good luck has nothing to do with what it takes to be a good pilot, and bad luck has nothing to do with being a not-so-good pilot. It’s not luck. (See “Are you feeling lucky, punk?”)

Second, what, more than anything else, distinguishes a good pilot from a not-so-good pilot? Simple: The good ones make it look easy; the not-so-good ones make it look hard. (See “The Test.”)

So the question boils down to this: How do the good ones make it look easy? And I think the key to answering that question lies not in how the good ones make it look easy, but in how the not-so-good ones make it look hard: It’s easy to make it look hard, just act real busy all the time without actually doing anything. But it’s very hard to make it look easy. And there’s the rub: The hard way is the easy way. Let me try to explain what I mean.

Mark Barnard was a very good friend of mine at ATA. I first met him when he taught my navigation class and later, when I upgraded to 727 Captain, he taught general operations, otherwise known as “Charm School.” (“Charm School” is where an experienced Captain tries to tell new Captains how to stay out of trouble.) He impressed me both times not just with his knowledge, but also with his wit and intelligence. He eventually went on to be the Chief Pilot for the L-1011, a position that suited him perfectly because he loved the 1011, was on a first name basis with most of the 1011 engineers at Lockheed, and was probably the most knowledgeable person outside of Lockheed on that airplane. He and I, along with another friend and Check Airman, John Stahl, were in Indianapolis working on a major revision to the L-1011 operations manual on September 11, 2001. I ended up doing a rescue mission when flying resumed, but in street clothes because I hadn’t taken a uniform. No one seemed to mind. We never finished the revision. So we have a little history.

Mark used to say that his father, an Indiana farmer with little education, was one of the smartest people he ever knew. He quoted his father a lot, and one of his better sayings was, “If you don’t have time to do it right, you sure don’t have time to do it wrong.” It was funny and smart at the same time, which made it easy to remember. It was also another way of saying, “The hard way is the easy way.”

This wasn’t a lesson that came to me naturally. I’m not very good with tools. I don’t know why. My father is, my brother Dean was, but I’m not. A lot has to do with my impatience and some has to do with laziness. (An FAA inspector once told me that the goal of all pilots was to have the most amount of fun with the least amount of effort. Not too far from the truth, actually.) I’m much more likely to reach in the kitchen drawer and grab a table knife to tighten the screw on the pot handle than I am to go to the basement where I keep my tools and get a screwdriver. And I’ll do this knowing that the best that can come out of it is that the pot handle will still have to be retightened a week later, and the worst that can come out of it is that I will ruin the knife, wreck the slot in the screw, and have to either throw the pot out or spend some money getting somebody who knows what he’s doing to fix it. The hard way to fix it, for me, is to take the time to go get the screwdriver—the right one, the one that fits, even if that means going back to the toolbox again—and do it right the first time, because that seems to take extra effort. But the hard way ends up being the easy way.

How does this apply to aviation, to being a good pilot? The answer is probably not the one anyone wants to hear, but here it is anyway: There is no easy way to be a good pilot. No one is born a pilot. It has to be learned, and no one learns anything without an effort, and no one retains the skills and knowledge without practice and review. Flight planning and preflights, weather briefings and weight and balance do not happen by themselves. There are no short cuts, no easy ways, “Nothing will come of nothing.” (King Lear, Act I, Scene 1.) The good ones make it look easy because they have worked hard to be good pilots. They are never content to reach a certain minimally acceptable level and then quit. The good ones read, they think, they never have aviation too far from their minds. As a practical matter, they know that being a good pilot takes time—both time to learn and time to do it right.

This means they don’t just check the destination weather and forecast; they get a full briefing. This means they don’t just open the hangar doors, drag the airplane out and fly away; they do a complete preflight including powering up the panel and checking the flight instruments and aircraft systems. It means, if they are VFR-only pilots, that they don’t just stick a Garmin on the panel and launch, hoping for the best; they prepare a dead reckoning log with VOR cross checks to back up their GPS. If they are instrument-rated, they file IFR for every serious cross country—anytime the object is to get somewhere, as opposed to just flying around to have fun—because they know that is the sound and sensible way to do it and the best way to stay current and confidant in their instrument skills. They also prepare a flight log and keep a running tally of times and fuel enroute, and when the trend is negative they have a Plan B. It means they sometimes file to destinations that are further away from where they want to go, but that have good approach facilities and long runways. It also means that when they do try to fly to small airports with limited approaches and facilities, they don’t keep trying when the first attempt doesn’t work; they divert to their alternate, an alternate that does have good approaches, good facilities, and much better weather forecast. They land, and that’s that—no drama, no scares, no worries.

In means, in short, that good pilots do what they have been trained and taught to do, not what is easy to do. I can’t list everything a good pilot should do—that’s what flight training is for. I can only tell you that that is what you must do if you want to make it look easy. Good flying should be boring—the exciting part is having a flight go off smoothly and without a hitch, even if you’re the only one who knows how much work it took. The hard way is the easy way. All the rest is just, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5.)

Edited by Nicole Clausing

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.”