When being "stupid" is the smart thing to do

I have accomplished many things during my COVID-19 time off. The clutter is slowly going away (do I really need that book on Unix written in 1998?), I'm almost done with my project of reading all of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders, and my basement is looking better than ever. Soon I'll be able to get that home gym set up the way I've wanted it for years so I can skip workouts by not bothering to walk downstairs instead of not getting in the car to not drive to the gym.

However, getting a Ph.D. in epidemiology isn't one of the things I've done in the last 32 days. I don't expect doctors to tell me how to fly my plane, and I don't tell doctors how to do their job. As much as I miss flying (I had a dream the other night that we were going to restart service but due to the lower loads were going back to my old aircraft, the Dash-8), and as eager as I am for things to get back to normal, I'm willing to wait until that is safe to do. I know enough to know that I don't know enough to know when that is.

As an example of how something that seems simple actually has a lot going on behind the scenes and how those unseen things make a difference, I'd like to take the simple, routine flight we do from Syracuse to Newark.

It seems easy enough: a quick 169 nm flight southeast:

SYR-EWR as the crow flies, 169 nautical miles.

However, the way our flight plans are made, we first fly 35 nm southwest, then hang a hard left, then go southeast for about 120 nm, then make a hard right to go south-southwest again. Seems stupid, doesn't it?

SYR-EWR as a drunken crow would fly, 215 nautical miles.

If you don't take into account the complexities of getting all the other airplanes lined up into New York's airspace, you'd think that that's the most idiotic way of getting between those two points. You might think our dispatcher doesn't know what they're doing and they need to be fired. But the reason we do that is because we fly an orderly, prearranged arrival path that fits into the much bigger ATC system; in this case, it's called the FLOSI 4 RNAV Arrival.

In the bigger system, what seems stupid is really only a way of making things work the best we can. There are dozens and dozens of airplanes trying to use this little chunk of airspace all at the same time and if everyone did what worked for them without regard for anything else, it would be chaos. The ATC system would fall apart and no one would be able to use it.

Instead, we have procedures to put all of those ducks in a neat, orderly row. Those stems off the little tree above are almost guaranteed to not be the single most efficient way for any of the airplanes on that path—in fact, it lengthens our SYR flight from 169 nm to 215 nm. We have to go what seems a bit out of our way in order to get there at all. Sometimes, we have to go a bit backwards to go a long way forwards. And sometimes what seems like stupidity is simply understanding at an expert level instead of an amateur level.

One of the common themes Warren Buffett refers to in those letters to shareholders referred to above is the idea of remaining within one's circle of competence. He often gets asked why he doesn't invest in x, y, or z, and he just says that he doesn't know enough about those sectors to know whether or not those stocks are good investments. He is also famous for saying that the key to investing isn't to make brilliant decisions, it's to avoid making dumb ones. Remember, this is one of the best investors in history and one of the richest men ever to walk the planet, and even he is willing to admit there are things about investing he doesn't know enough about to have an opinion on.

Often, the most important thing you can know is how much you don't know. Just like fatigue is surprisingly hard to detect because the same brain that's too tired to make a smart call is the one that is supposed to make that call, not knowing how much you don't know leads to the infamous Dunning-Kruger Effect. As Mark Twain once said, it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

An old joke goes, what's the difference between a pilot and God? God doesn't think he's a pilot. In this case, I'm just going to twist an old Star Trek quote: Dammit, Jim, I'm a pilot, not a doctor. Stay safe by staying at home until you can stay safe without being at home.



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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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How to get better when you can't get better

One of the memes that went around recently was the pilot working from home:

While I can't fly an airplane right now, I am fortunate that I am senior enough at my airline that I was able to avoid getting furloughed. Instead, I'm sitting at home on long-call reserve, getting paid to hurry up and wait. If airline flying picks up, I might get called in to do some flying that gets added back. For April and May, I'd estimate the chance of that happening as about .01%.

Like many, I've been wildly successful in handling this bounty of extra time to do things and wildly unsuccessful as well. One of the problems with being off for at least two months is that it's so easy to say, "Ehh, I'll just do that tomorrow," because there are so many tomorrows on the calendar now. I've certainly frittered away a lot of time already as "I'll just watch one episode on Hulu" becomes five episodes.

Nonetheless, I have been able to catch up on some of the "I'll get around to that someday" things as well. One of those things is catching up on reading research papers. While reading the scintillatingly-titled "Higher Landing Accuracy in Expert Pilots is Associated with Lower Activity in the Caudate Nucleus", I came across this passage that stood out:

In terms of expertise, there were differences between the two groups in flight experience and age. As expected, more hours of total flight experience, overall t (12)  = 2.61, p<.05 and more hours of flight experience in the past month, t (11)  = 2.62, p<.001 were associated with higher expertise. In addition level of expertise was associated with younger age, t (18)  = −2.25, p = 0.045).

In other words, how many total hours you have and how old you are have approximately the same impact on how well you would do in this study, but what is even more important by a large margin is how many recent flight hours you have.

This is particularly relevant in a time of social distancing and flight schools/FBOs being closed to help prevent the spread of coronavirus. (If your flight school isn't closed right now, IT SHOULD BE.) It's not exactly Earth-shattering news that your skills get rusty; everyone knows that. What struck me about that passage is how much more of an impact currency had on task performance than any of the three significant factors (total hours, recent hours, and age).

This is not the place to get into detailed statistical theory, so I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible by comparing only the p-values. There are much more sophisticated ways of analyzing the data, but a p-value is one of the most basic: it attempts to measure the probability that the result came about by dumb luck. In general, less than a 5% chance is considered acceptable; this would be p < .05. The researchers' values for these three were

• Flight hours last month: p < .001
• Age (younger): p < .045
• Flight hours total: p < .05

By comparing p-values, current flight hours was 20x more important than total hours! [Again, if you're looking for a mathematically-rigorous statistical treatment, don't follow my example. I'm a pilot because I'm too dumb to be a statistician. This is just a way to demonstrate the impact.]



What's important to take from this is that while you're enduring a forced lay-off from flying, you need to be doing things to stay engaged with the cockpit to stave off rustiness. I'm certainly in favor of flight simulators: they are the most active way to practice and therefore will keep your skills sharper for longer.

In fact, if you use your time right, you can come out on the other side with skills you didn't have before, but in order to do this, you have to use the sim to do more than just replicate what you're doing now. As the saying goes, if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses: things they're good at and things they're not good at. It's easy to practice the things you're already good at—after all, they're easy because you're good at them. What you need to do is figure out the things you're not good at and create scenarios in the sim that target those.

For example, let's say your home field is 5,000 feet long. Chances are you're not very good at short field landings then because you don't have to be. In that case, find a 1500-foot field and practice going into it. Since you're in a sim, there's no worry about bending metal: the only danger is a bruised ego the first time or two. Eventually, you'll think that 1500 feet is more runway than a 172 needs.

You'll find that the real benefit of this isn't just in being able to land at a short field. After all, in real life, you may still not have a short field near you to land at. However, you'll find that you've become a sharper pilot in other important ways that count every day. Your airspeed control will be much better because you can't add an extra 10 knots for the wife, 10 knots for the kids, 10 knots for the dog, and 10 knots just because. Your ability to gauge without looking at the altimeter whether you're too high or low will improve. Your feel for the relationship between power, pitch, and airspeed will improve. You'll develop better sensitivity for appropriate control/throttle inputs, and so on.

What's important is that you maintain what you have and use that as a base to build on. If you do it right, once you're able to climb back in the cockpit you'll have even more confidence than you did before!



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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.