A Lesson on Christmas

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. My dogs, Orion and Meissa (pronounced "MAY-suh"), certainly did.

Orion and Meissa. They're as opposite as they look.

Orion, the black/tri-color guy on the left with the serious look, is a Border Collie/Australian Shepherd mix. Meissa, the merle on the right with the goofy grin who is slightly blurry because she has a problem sitting still, is pure Australian Shepherd. I mentioned Orion in my post Turn the Page: The Downside of Being an Airline Pilot. Since I wrote that in 2017, we've added Meissa. (Basically, we got our dog a dog.)

Although they're the same breed, their personalities could hardly be more different. In fact, we call the pair "Pinky and the Brain" after the old Steven Spielberg cartoon, and one of the nicknames we have for Meissa is "Narf", which is one of Pinky's tag-lines.

Orion is a highly focused, very task-driven dog. Once he sets about doing something, he has to see it all the way to completion, and is very good at ignoring distractions until his task is done.

Meissa, on the other hand, is a much more happy-go-lucky dog. She's very intelligent in her own right, and learns tricks and other things very quickly, but she has the attention span of a hypercaffeinated gnat. This is even more ironic since Meissa is named after the star that forms the head of the constellation Orion.

A perfect example of how these personalities play out is their reaction if their ball bounces through the fence when we're playing. Orion will stand by the fence where it went out, point at it, look back worriedly, and won't budge until I rescue it. Meissa will run around in a circle once, then trot back to me as if to say, "Hey, that one's gone. You got another ball?"

However, this Christmas she showed the advantage of not being so focused that she gets locked into one solution. We got them both a ball that holds treats, so they could have fun trying to get one of their favorite dog biscuits out of it.

They both took quite a while to get their treat out of the ball. Surprisingly, although Orion is the "Brain" of our "Pinky and the Brain" double dog duo, Meissa managed to get hers out long before he did. In fact, I finally had to sneak him a little help when he wasn't looking so he'd think he finally did it on his own.

They both initially tried pinning the ball against the wall and trying to push against it hard enough to be able to get the biscuit in their jaws. Unfortunately for them, the ball was slightly too big for this to work.

However, in this case, Meissa's lack of an attention span worked in her favor. After a while, it meant that she got bored with that approach and moved on to a different one. When that didn't work, she tried another different thing. Then another, and another, and so on. Finally she hit on the idea of holding the ball between her paws while lying on her back and letting gravity help her out as she chewed on it from the bottom. That let her break the biscuit into chunks that were small enough to fall out. Success!

Orion, on the other hand, stuck with the first approach and kept trying it over and over again. He had the determination, but his focus led him down a tunnel that wasn't ever going to lead to his objective. His failure wasn't due to lack of brains—he's one of the smartest dogs I've ever seen—but ironically because of one of his best qualities: his "stick-to-it-iveness".

Unfortunately, this trait is often seen in pilots who have accidents. The long chain of causes isn't linked together by someone who sets out to have an accident: it's often put together by an unintentional, unfortunate perseverance. The "accomplish the mission" mindset common in pilots is usually a good thing: after all, people who aren't willing to put in time, study, effort, and financial commitment don't accomplish the goal of becoming a pilot in the first place.

However, sometimes things aren't going the way they should and a solution is needed. Sometimes the solution is not flying in the first place. This is a hard choice to make when you're trying to make it somewhere for a business meeting or a family gathering or getting back home after a nice vacation and conditions at your destination are above your skill and/or equipment level. This often leads to "get-home-itis", and can be deadly. The AOPA Air Safety Institute's case study called "In Too Deep" is a perfect example of this scenario:

Another good example like that one is another AOPA ASI case study called "Cross-County Crisis":

In many ways, I have it easier as an airline pilot in these situations than general aviation pilots do: I fly a strictly-maintained, multi-engine turbine aircraft with good IFR equipment and ice protection in well-structured, controlled environments. If the weather is too bad for the plane I fly to handle, the no-go decision has probably already been made for me. In the remaining handful of cases where it's iffy, I have chosen to wait an hour or so to see if it clears up or passes through and that decision has never been questioned, but in most cases I've never even been given the chance to try to press on: the cancellation has already been made by that point.

That doesn't mean that airline pilots aren't immune to the danger of overly focusing on one solution to the exclusion of all others: Air France 447 is an example of my saying, "If what you're doing isn't working, doing more of it isn't going to work either."



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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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