Confidence
I’ve been
flight instructing for twenty years and given thousands of hours of dual,
towards almost every fixed-wing permit, licence and rating for aeroplanes in
In that
time, many times I’ve noticed that the biggest problem that people learning to
fly have, is often themselves.
When people
encounter a difficult task, such as learning to land during Private Pilot
training, or learning to keep a tailwheel aircraft straight during the rollout on
the runway, people often simply give up. They erroneously conclude that because they’re
struggling with it right now, they can’t ever master it, so it’s time to give
up and buy a boat, or take up golf.
Not that I
have anything against boats or golf. And
I rather like boats, but I’m just not old enough to play golf, and don’t have
the right pants for it anyways.
What I find
surprising is how quickly people often give up when they encounter a task which
is not easy and quickly mastered. In
this day of instant gratification and easy loans, everyone wants it NOW, not
tomorrow. Unfortunately, that’s not the
case in aviation. Flying isn’t like
plumbing – you simply can’t learn it all in one day. Or even a year. Sorry.
I’ve been flying for 40 years and I still learn new things every day,
which I find is one of the attractions of aviation. No one knows it all.
I find that
nearly everyone is disappointed when they discover that they are not some kind
of extraordinary phenomenon, that doesn’t need to be taught (or practice) a
difficult skill. This is incredibly
unrealistic.
How many
people would expect to learn a new language in one evening, and be fluent in it
the next day? How many people would
expect to pick up a guitar, and play Carnegie Hall that night? I hate to burst people’s balloons, but it’s
going to take some practice if you want to play at Carnegie Hall. Or fly an aircraft.
I can
honestly say that in all my decades of flying, I have never met a “natural”
pilot. This creature simply doesn’t
exist. Some people naturally learn faster
than others, and some people eventually attain a higher level of skill than
others (and incidentally, the two often are completely decoupled) but I can
honestly tell you that all of the best pilots worked long and hard at learning
their craft, even if you didn’t see them do it.
Learning to
fly an aircraft is actually about building human capital. You can’t see it, but you have a bank account
of pilot knowledge and skill that comes from experience. And unfortunately putting knowledge and skill
into your pilot bank account isn’t always fun and easy.
Putting
money in your real bank account isn’t always fun or easy, either. At least 99% of people don’t like their jobs,
and I can prove it – stop paying them, and I guarantee that over 99% of them
would stop showing up for work.
Transport
I wish that
every flight lesson could make the student feel good about himself and his
performance. Unfortunately that’s not
always the case. In fact, I privately
suspect that the less he enjoys the lesson, often the more he learns.
What I have
seen, time and time again, is that someone has a horrible lesson. He doesn’t damage the airplane, but his ego
is severely damaged due to his poor performance or challenging
circumstances. As a Flight Instructor,
you have to ensure that you don’t throw too much at your students, to avoid
wasting their time and money, and crushing their egos at the same time.
For
example, let’s say you have a student who just went solo yesterday for the
first time, and the wind today is 90 degrees across the runway, at 20 gusting
30 knots. Obviously you aren’t going to
send him solo again today in that wind.
I wouldn’t even bother giving him dual in that wind, because he’s not
going to be able to keep up with what happens.
He isn’t going to learn much, and he’s going to waste his time and
money, and at the end of the lesson he’s going to feel bad about his
performance. Don’t do that.
However, if
I had a student about to go for his PPL flight test, I would take him up in
that wind, because it would be good experience for him. He might not be able to master the wind –
remember the instant gratification thing – and he probably won’t enjoy it very
much. But it would nicely work on his
crosswind landing skills. And the next
day he might do better with (e.g.) a 10 knot direct crosswind because of his
experience the previous day. He wouldn’t
learn much on the second flight, but he would feel good about himself, because
he had an ego-flattering experience.
Sigh.
As I said before,
I suspect that learning and gratification are often inversely proportional. If you feel great about a flight, odds are
you didn’t learn very much during it.
When
someone has a difficult flight, the important thing to tell him is that plenty
of people a lot stupider than he, have mastered this flying thing. Hang around some pilots for a while and you
will see what I mean. What he has to do,
is give himself a chance to learn something difficult, and not fail himself by
quitting.
I learned a
lot at University. Unfortunately I have
forgotten 99% of the Engineering and Mathematics I learned in the 25 years
since then, but one thing I did learn at school was to not quit, no matter how
bad things look. I took a very
challenging undergraduate course which was ego-bruising in the extreme for some
of the very brightest people in the country.
Many of them quit when the going got tough, and thus failed
themselves.
What I
learned is to hang around, and make them fail you. Don’t leave until the security guards toss
you out the front door, post your photo around the building and warn you that
you will be charged with trespassing if you show up again, which is pretty much
what happened at my last place of full-time employment, but that’s another
story.
That’s the
kind of spirit and pig-headed determination that is required to accomplish
something difficult. For every
professional, there was once an amateur who simply wouldn’t quit.
As one of
the most intelligent people on the planet once told me, decades ago:
“If it was easy, everyone would do it”.
Flying an
airplane isn’t always easy. Give
yourself the time to learn how to do it.
Don’t fail yourself.
--
acboyd@gmail.com Sept 2011