Not within a thousand years

Monday will mark the 115th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk. With the passage of time, major breakthroughs like this sometimes seem inevitable. The hard work, sacrifices, and doubts along the way are long gone, wallpapered over by the glow of success.

While it is an amazing achievement that the Wrights started their aeronautical research in 1896 and managed to make history at Kitty Hawk only seven years later (and this while running a successful bicycle shop at the same time), the outcome wasn't always certain. After all, many bright, hardworking people had spent decades of their lives trying to solve the mystery of flight. Some of them went bankrupt—and those were the lucky ones, since they only lost their fortunes. Others like Otto Lilienthal and Percy Pilcher lost their lives.

Lilienthal's last words are said to have been "Opfer müssen gemacht werden": Sacrifices must be made. His (and Pilcher's) sacrifice was not in vain, at the Wrights cited both of them as influences on their work.

The Wrights built on the work of those who had given up so much before them, and in 1900 started their first experiments at Kitty Hawk. Their first year there they learned a large amount about aerodynamics, and found that much of what had been hypothesized at the time was wrong. Nonetheless, they had very promising results in regard to the largest aeronautical problem of the time: aircraft control. They finished that year very encouraged and eager to take their new results back to Dayton to work with before next year's voyage back to North Carolina's sand dunes.

It seemed as if all was going extremely well. They thought they were on their way to solving the unsolvable problem of flight. Unfortunately, in 1901, they were unable to duplicate their former success. Nothing came easily. Nothing worked. They gave up a month early and trudged back to Dayton dejectedly. The going had gotten tough, and they thought it might be too tough for them. In 1912, Wilbur said of those days:

[W]e doubted that we would ever resume our experiments. Although we had broken the record for distance in gliding, and although Mr. Chanute, who was present at that time, assured us that our results were better than had ever before been attained, yet when we looked at the time and money which we had expended, and considered the progress made and the distance yet to go, we considered our experiments a failure. At that time I made the prediction that men would sometime fly, but that it would not be within our lifetime.

According to Orville, Wilbur was even more hopeless than that, and said simply, "Not within a thousand years would man ever fly."

As we all know, only two years later they would go down in history. So when you're feeling like you'll never manage to fly, remember that the Wright Brothers themselves thought the same thing too.

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Happy Birthday, Dad

My father passed away over 8 years ago. He loved flying with me, and I loved taking him up flying. He died four years before I would fly my first airliner, but I know he would have come out to the airport to see me fly into Cleveland-Hopkins for the first time. (Sadly, my first flight into CLE was also our airline's last flight there in the old Dash-8. It would be over 3 more years before we'd fly into it again, this time as an all-jet airline.)

I still think of him often. I occasionally get sad when I think about how he never got the chance to see me go from the 2-seat Flight Design light sport airplane we used to poke holes in the sky together in to the captain of a jet airliner. I know he'd be happy and proud, which lessens some of the sadness sometimes.

This year, Wednesday also happens to fall on what would have been his 71st birthday, so I'm going to do something I almost never do and go back into the archives. I'm re-posting "Last flight with my best passenger" as this week's blog entry. It is the story of an impromptu flight up the Ohio River with him. What was supposed to have been a much shorter flight with him turned out to be a much longer, much more fun experience, but unfortunately (and unbeknownst to us), it would be our last one together.

You can read it here. See you next Wednesday!

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Richard Collins gone west

Yesterday, aviation writing legend Richard Collins passed away at the age of 84. In his over five decades as the timekeeper of aviation history, he influenced an almost uncountable number of pilots, myself included. He'll pull into the hangar alongside such other writers as Bob Buck and Wolfgang Langewiesche as someone who had a deep understanding of not just aviation but how to write about aviation.

Early on in my aviation journey, I read his books Flying the Weather Map and The Next Hour: The Most Important Hour in Your Logbook. The Sporty's private pilot course had special vignettes by him on certain topics scattered throughout the pile of CDs (yes, we still used CDs way back then!) it came on. I still use some of his videos on weather theory when teaching my college aviation courses, as he was able to take weather knowledge and synthesize it into useful technique.

What makes me saddest about his passing is that because he had been flying since 1952, he was one of the last bridges between "classic" and modern aviation in the GA world. He saw everything from Cubs to Concorde, and was able to use his old experience to inform the new world aviation has been moving into in the 21st century.

In a world that prizes technological solutions to human problems, his voice was one that reminded us that skill is more important than glass cockpits and magenta lines. His voice was a thread that sewed together timeless aviation common sense in a tapestry that ranged all the way to Wilbur Wright himself, as many of his columns are elaborations on Wright's famous quote, "What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery."

In an age of highly-sophisticated airplanes and a world of "Direct to - Enter - Enter", we still need voices to remind us that the most important piece of technology in any airplane is installed between the left and right earpieces, with analog outputs of hands and feet at the stick and rudder. The aviation community's greatest loss is that his experience will no longer be there to remind us of the essence of aviation.

Farewell, Mr. Collins. It is a large void you leave.



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The Impostor Syndrome

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This month, Southwest's application window was open for new pilots. I'm over half way to my 1000 hours of jet PIC, so I'm getting close enough to their requirements that I wouldn't be totally wasting their time. So, for the first time, I applied.

I remember feeling a mixture of nervousness and excitement when I applied at my current airline. It was mixed with a "What am I doing applying at an airline? Can I really do this?"

When I got hired and went through training, I was sure I shouldn't be there. I was positive I wasn't doing it right and any day they were going to send me home. If you read my series "Becoming an Airline Pilot" back in 2014, you might remember that it wasn't until over halfway through I dared open my training folder and look at the grades in it.

I was sure I was one step from failing, and yet when I finally did get the courage to peek, I was doing just fine!

I have over twice as many hours in the logbook as I did then. I've added an EMB-145 type rating on top of the Dash-8. I passed upgrade with flying colors and I've spent a year in the Captain's seat now. After four years on the job, I'm reaching the point in my career where people start to move on to major carriers. It should be a piece of cake to apply by this point, right?

Nope. Despite having spent the last several years zooming around the sky at hundreds of MPH in 50,000-pound airplanes and having carried 59,897 passengers 522,369 miles, I felt the same thing this time around as I did when the largest thing I'd ever flown was a 6-seat Beech Baron: "What am I doing applying at a place like Southwest? Who do I think I am?"

This must mean I'm insecure and lack confidence, right? Well, actually, that rhetorical question was thrown in there to make my wife roll on the floor with laughter. That's probably the absolute last way she'd describe me.

It's actually a very common phenomenon called the "Impostor Syndrome". It's rarely talked about in aviation because pilots would never admit to something like that. Nonetheless, Wikipedia's article includes a small example of some people who actually have admitted to having felt like an impostor, and it includes a Supreme Court justice, several super-successful actors (like Tom Hanks, for instance), multiple best-selling authors, and some billionaires.

It's also addressed in Barbara Oakley's book A Mind for Numbers, which I raved about two years ago and highly recommend. Although its subtitle is "How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)", I wrote about it several times because it's really a book that is more about learning how to learn than it is learning math and science, which makes it extremely valuable to people who are learning how to fly. The material applies to all subjects and tasks you'll need to learn throughout your lifetime, and is really a book for everyone in that respect.

In my case, I certainly don't suffer from a lack of confidence. I simply have extremely high standards; sometimes to the point of them being unrealistically high standards. I tend to expect more out of myself than is humanly possible, and despite asking for more from myself than what is reasonable, I still am unhappy when I fail to jump over the bar I've set too high. If that's a real flaw, it's one I'm happy to live with, and my next post will go into why that is.

I don't expect to get a call from Southwest this time around. Not because I don't think I don't deserve one, but simply because I haven't yet checked off all the boxes they like to see. Their total time requirement is only 2500 hours, and I'm almost twice that now, but they do prefer 1000 hours of jet PIC time and I'm not quite 2/3rds of the way there at the moment.

So even though I don't expect a call, it's not because of the impostor syndrome per se, but because there are still a lot of people out there that have checked all the boxes. Nonetheless, I will still keep applying, because they like to see you applying over and over. To them, it means you have the persistence and real desire to work for them.

I will keep applying until one day you get to read a series on becoming a 737 pilot! See you next Wednesday!


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The circle of training

Last week, the FAA issued a Safety Enhancement Topic on emergency management handling (PDF file) after engine failure, especially in twins. Here's an excerpt:

Every pilot needs to prepare for the unexpected. Engine failures and inflight emergencies have a nasty habit of cropping up at the most inopportune times. However, with the right training and preparation, you can be ready for any hazardous situation that comes your way.

During your initial pilot training, you may recall the layers of learning involved with acquiring and mastering aeronautical skills. You might begin your learning path by memorizing certain facts or details like airspeeds for best rate (V_y) or angle of climb (V_x). You would then need to understand the relationship between these speeds in order to best choose which speed might be applicable for your environment. You would then apply that knowledge by actually choosing to fly at V_x to clear an obstacle on takeoff.

Finally, through correlation of V_x/V_y knowledge with climb performance at high density altitudes, engine cooling, and traffic spotting requirements, a pilot may opt to begin a departure climb at V_x, transition to V_y after obstacles are cleared, maintain V_y until a safe maneuvering altitude is reached, and then transition to cruise climb to improve traffic spotting.

Correlative learning takes place when students are able to apply previously acquired knowledge to solve new problems.

It praises Scenario-Based Training, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. I'm a big fan of SBT. In fact, my Flying the Mississippi book is designed to be one big scenario in which to learn and/or practice.

Nonetheless, as much as I like SBT, it is not a one-size-fits-all magic cloak. It is extremely powerful if used when appropriate, and horribly inefficient when jammed into places it doesn't fit. This is a place where it probably doesn't fit.

While the excerpt above sounds pretty and contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance of FAA-approved educational jargon, it doesn't actually address the cause of loss of control accidents in twins. Basically zero accidents are caused by pilots reaching the "correlative" level and not being able to decide whether they should choose Vx or Vy. Those pilots are smoking holes in the ground long before that stage.

In other words, the last thoughts of a pilot about to die from an engine failure on takeoff aren't

Hmm, I think I should choose V_x here due to obstacle clearance requirements. Or was it V_y? I can't really remember exactly the difference between the two. Perhaps I should split the difference and choose a target airspeed between the two. In any case, it is warmer than standard today, but I'm 800 pounds below max gross weight. That means my V_x will be lower than normal. Or higher? That's quite the interesting mathematical challenge here. Let me think about it...

Nope. The last thoughts are going to be a LOT more like

I'm rolling! Why am I rolling!? That roll is making us sink. Why aren't the ailerons leveling us the way they usually do?!? Pull back on the yoke to keep us from sinking so fast!!! Got to pull--[SPLAT]

No scenario-based training is going to help here. What is necessary is a return to memorization. But not the "entry-level" memorization that is the only type the FAA mentions above. This memorization is "mastery-level" memorization, which is a term you won't find in any FAA textbook.

This level of memorization is also different in that it takes place less on a cognitive plane than a physical one. While ELM (Entry-Level Memorization) is concerned with storing and regurgitating facts and figures, MLM (Mastery-Level Memorization) concerns itself with physical responses.

This is by no means a new concept. What I'm calling MLM here has been known for decades as "automaticity". In fact, it's not even new to this blog: I referred to automaticity last year in "Smart people do stupid things in emergencies".

This MLM or automaticity is what it will take to reduce the number of accidents caused by loss of control. Pilots aren't dying because they didn't grok a scenario; they are dying because they didn't have the response to an engine failure so ingrained, so physically memorized, that it was automatic.

So we go full circle, from one form of memorization to another. We go from a mere fact stored in our head to an entire memorized response stored deep in our mental being. One stored so deep it no longer even looks memorized; it simply looks natural. The circle of training goes from the beginner's memorization to understanding to application to correlation... and finally to the master's memorization.

The master's memorization is a way of understanding without having to understand. It has passed through understanding and become being.

That sounds very Zen-like, and it is. It is at that point of mastery that it paradoxically becomes difficult to explain to someone else what you are doing because the skill is no longer a set of discrete steps. It has become one single chunk.

As an example, go and land a plane and think of each step as you're doing it. You'll probably find it extremely awkward and won't make the best landing. It is something you've internalized so much that landing is something you "just do" now. (Or if you're not a pilot yet, try to explain to someone everything you're doing as you drive down the highway.)

That's why SBT won't fix this issue. Pilots of twins have to go beyond the conscious, awkward response into the unconscious memorized response. In other words, not to practice until they get it right, but to practice until they can't get it wrong.

The next post will go into what SBT is really good for. See you next Wednesday!


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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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You know you've found the right job when...

In my former life, I was an IT guy. I liked it, but I can't say I was in love with it. I certainly can't say I ever looked forward to going back to work after a week off. As a pilot, though, I actually do look forward to getting back in the cockpit after a week or so off.

The decidedly non-traditional schedule of an airline pilot with a good amount of seniority means I get a week or more off every month or two. Consistently, after 5-6 days off, I'm looking forward to going back. Not because I want to get away from the wife, because I have the most wonderful woman in the world. (Right, Shannon?) Not because I like seeing the dog get depressed. Not because I'm bored, because I'm one of those people who is always trying to get 28 hours worth of stuff done every day.

I look forward to going back because I love what I do.

I came across "Airline Captain For A Day" today and it brought to light another reason I know I've found the perfect job for me. Although every job has its days, I consider myself insanely lucky to have found something that most of the working world unfortunately has never experienced: a job that is fun, intellectually stimulating, and meaningful all at the same time.

When I looked at the simulators (which cost $589, $628, and $789 an hour for the MD-80, 737-300, and 737-800 respectively), my response was, "Hell yeah... I'd do a V₁ cut [an engine failure at the most critical time during takeoff] in any or all of those!"

Then I realized what I was saying: that I'd be willing to pay real money to pretend to do what I already do for a living, just in a different kind of airliner. I'm an Airline Captain Every Day, so just three weeks ago, I got paid to spend four hours in the simulator, since that was when I completed my last six-month recurrent session. (And, yes, V₁ cuts and single engine approaches were part of the required tasks.)

There is absolutely no scenario in which I can see myself back in my IT days saying, "You have simulators that will let me pretend I'm working in a Linux shop instead of a Windows one? Wow! Shut up and take my money!" In fact, the very thought of voluntarily paying to pretend to work in any other field makes me giggle a bit:

"You mean I can pretend to litigate civil cases instead of criminal ones? Sign me up!"
"You mean I can pretend to perform heart surgery instead of brain surgery? Here's my credit card!"
"You mean I can pretend to run the grill instead of the fryer? Woo hoo!"

I spent years before finding a field where I'd say, "Shut up and take my money!" and mean it. May you be so lucky! And if you happen to have an extra $500, $600, or $700 lying around, I can put it to good use for you....


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The blank canvas of the white darkness

This week, the New Yorker published a long story on an Antarctic journey. Although it took me over an hour to read, it was time well spent. I hadn't realized how long I had been reading until I reached the end.

I'm drawn to stories about people who make demands of themselves that go beyond the ordinary and into the extraordinary. While the engineer side of me is interested in the how, the psychologist in me wants to know why. There is rarely a how without a why.

Some of my curiosity about why people go beyond the normal is because as an airline pilot, nothing I do is normal, yet it's the safest normal man has yet found. Nothing is less normal than buckling into a metal tube going 500 MPH at 7 miles above the Earth's surface, relying on machines to cram air into the little metal sausage so we can have something to breathe. Nonetheless, I do it 5 times a day, go to the hotel, get some sleep, and do it several more times the next day. Just as if nothing could be more normal.

We've made it look so normal that it's news when it doesn't work. Much of that has to do with technology that we take for granted, like incredibly reliable jet engines and GPS navigation which relies on dozens of little satellites whizzing around in space.

Some of it has to do with advances in understanding human limitations and finding workarounds for them like standard operating procedures and pre-made decisions.

We know that humans are often very poor decision makers under stress. The only reason humans are better decision makers than computers is because as stupid as we are, computers can't even make stupid decisions yet. That's why my aircraft has a two-inch-thick manual of emergency and abnormal checklists that is required to be in it at all times: when it's important that decisions be correct, it's important to make them ahead of time, away from stress.

That's why it's so impressive that Ernest Shackleton in his Nimrod Expedition of 1907-09 made the decision to turn around only 97 miles away from the South Pole. After all the miles trudging painfully through the blinding snow, after two months of misfortune and misery, they were less than a hundred miles away... and he said stop.

That takes courage to do. It would have been easy to press on, only a few days away from setting foot where no human had done so before; only a few days from becoming an immortalized Figure of History. It would have been easy to be dead, like R. F. Scott, who lacked the courage to stop.

About mid-way through the story, the main subject, Henry Worsley, and his two companions reach the place where Shackleton turned around:

During the next two days, the storm abated, and they covered more than twenty-five nautical miles. On January 9th, they barrelled ahead for six hours. Then Worsley took out his G.P.S. and gripped it, as he put it, "like an old man carefully carrying a cup of tea." As Gow and Adams anxiously looked on, Worsley shuffled around until the G.P.S. connected with satellites and coördinates flashed on the screen: 88° 23' S, 162° E.

"That’s it!" he yelled, slamming his poles into the ground. "We’ve made it!" The men looked around, examining the place that had long consumed their imaginations, and which had lured them nearly to their demise. All they could see was barren ice—their grail was no more than a geographical data point. As Adams later put it, "What is Antarctica other than a blank canvas on which you seek to impose yourself?"

... Worsley kept thinking about the predicament that Shackleton had faced a hundred years earlier. Shortly before reaching the ninety-seven-mile mark, Shackleton had written in his diary, "I cannot think of failure yet. I must look at the matter sensibly and consider the lives of those who are with me. I feel that if we go on too far it will be impossible to get back over this surface, and then all the results will be lost to the world." He added, "Man can only do his best, and we have arrayed against us the strongest forces of nature." When he finally made the decision to retreat, on January 9th, he wrote, "We have shot our bolt."

A little further on, the team encounters a particularly strong storm that blocks their way forward for a while:

"Proper Antarctic storm!" he wrote in his diary, noting that there was no chance of moving forward that day. The next morning, the gusts felt strong enough to hurl a small dog; one of the tent poles broke, and he had to repair it. "A salutary reminder just who is in control around here," he said of the conditions. "Trespassers will be punished."

In the cockpit, each day I have the privilege to partake of a peaceful yet powerful view, with sunrises and sunsets that no painter can match, rare days where the air is so clear I can see from one side of an entire state to the other, and clouds dancing below me in peculiar formations that have never happened before and never will again. Nonetheless, I and my craft are still trespassers in this air, tolerated only through a mixture of technological ingenuity and a healthy respect for who is really in control. I call it a privilege because I have no right no be here.

A final thing I found fascinating was Shackleton's "fourth man": a sense of a divine presence accompanying him. As I pointed out in my review of Charles Lindbergh's The Spirit of St. Louis, the same thing happened to Lindbergh:

While I'm staring at the instruments, during an unearthly age of time, both conscious and asleep, the fuselage behind me becomes filled with ghostly presences--vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane. I feel no surprise at their coming...

These phantoms speak with human voices--friendly, vapor-like shapes, without substance, able to vanish or appear at will, to pass in and out through the walls of the fuselage as though no walls were there...

[These were] familiar voices, conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.

Compare this to Worsley's experience on his solo journey to the Antarctic, taken after his previous effort with two companions had been successful:

And so Worsley pressed on, muttering to himself a line from Tennyson’s poem "Ulysses": "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." Once, he looked up in the sky and saw, through his frozen goggles, a dazzling sun halo. On the edge of the circle, there were intense bursts of light, as if the sun were being splintered into three fiery balls. He knew that the phenomenon was caused by sunlight being refracted through a scrim of ice particles. Yet, as he stumbled onward through the void, he wondered if the light was actually some guiding spirit, like the "fourth man" that Shackleton had spoken of. Perhaps Worsley, too, had pierced the "veneer of outside things"—or perhaps his mind was simply unravelling. His diary entries had become sparer and darker: "So breathless . . . I am fading . . . hands/fingers are forever shutting down . . . wonder how long they will last."

I shall not ruin the ending of this powerful story for you. Read it for yourself and you will not regret the time it takes to do so.


A quick and easy request: Please do me a favor and subscribe to the Larry the Flying Guy channel. YouTube has changed their policies in a way that makes it harder for smaller channels to be found and grow, so your subscription would help a lot! All you have to do is click the button below and you're done!

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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.