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.



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!

Please like Larry the Flying Guy on Facebook to help it grow too! Just click the "Like" button below:

Follow @Lairspeed

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.