Flying Lessons of Life
Me with my temporary private license on the day I passed by checkride ride.I took my first flying lesson two days before John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy were killed when their plane crashed off Martha’s Vineyard. I described that first flight in my diary as follows:
We got into the Cessna 152 with me in the pilot’s seat and made a flight around the local area. It was awesome! We flow south out of Van Nuys, over the Santa Monica mountains. We then headed out over Malibu, then Calabasas, Simi Valley, Newhall, and back to Van Nuys. It was about 100 miles and I logged 0.8 hours of tach time.
It took me nine months to get my private license. After that, I flew for another 15 months, finally giving it up shortly after 9/11 when it become amore complicated to fly in the increasingly restricted airspace above greater Los Angeles. There are times when I miss it, when I wish I had kept it up. I imagine making our semi-annual pilgrimages to Florida or Maine in a Cessna rather than the minivan. On the other hand there are some life lessons I’ve taken from my flying days that have served me in good stead ever since.
Situational AwarenessI’d never heard the term “situational awareness” until I began taking flying lessons. The concept is important for flying because there is a lot of things that can require your attention as a pilot, and it is important to have a sense of the big picture. Taking off, for instance, you are talking to air traffic control, while climbing out, ensuring proper pitch of the aircraft, looking out for other aircraft, and keeping an eye on the instruments to make sure everything is in the green.
The idea of situational awareness had an almost immediate impact on me. It changed the way I drove around town, for instance. I was in my twenties, and often in a hurry, but after I started taking flying lessons, I slowed down, I was more cautious about my surroundings (is there a car in my blind spot? I should check before cutting across the lanes) and better attuned to the other drivers on the road.
Aviate, Navigate, CommunicateWhen flying an airplane, there is an order of precedence with which a pilot will prioritize their tasks: keep the plane flying (aviate); get the plane to where it is going (navigate); and talk to air traffic control (communicate). I’ve found this to be a useful adage for life in general, and my co-workers, especially, have heard this from me now and then. During some critical system failure, or attempting to fix a software bug ad hoc, you get a lot of people coming to your (now virtual) door. My typical response is to focus on the task at hand–getting the immediate problem solved, or aviating. When the bleeding has been stopped, I’ll look ahead at longer-term fixes (navigating). Finally, when I’ve got things stabilized, I’ll update Jira tickets, and send email status updates–communicating.
Occasionally, people are miffed by this approach until I explain it to them. I could spend time up from updating Jira tickets and sending out emails about what I think the problem is or what we intend to do to fix it, but that just prolongs the fix. Just like flying an airplane, the first job is to keep it flying, stabilize things, make sure you are heading in the right direction, and then let people know what’s going on.
(This sounds more complicated than it is. When flying, this typically arises in a situation like this: I’m lined up for runway 16R with a moderate crosswind. A few miles from the runway, the tower calls, “73-echo, can you switch to 16L for traffic?” at which point, I might respond, “Standby…” while I see if I can slip the plane over while managing the wind and keeping the nose aligned with the runway. Once that is done, I’ll reply, “We can do 16L, 73-echo.”)
Keep It Simple, SillyWhen designing software, reports, writing stories, or even blog posts, I try to keep in mind another adage I learned when flying: keep it simple, silly. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been in meetings with folks who want some kind of dashboard. They give me long lists of gadgets and charts and visualizations they want on the dashboard that will help them keep track of their business. I sit through these patiently, and when they have finished describing what they are looking for, I tell them the same story:
In good weather, a pilot really only needs 6 instruments to fly the plane: airspeed, altitude, attitude, vertical speed, turn-and-bank, and heading. With those 6 instruments, on a clear day, you are in good shape.
What, I ask these folks, are your six instruments? On a typical day, what are the six pieces of information you need to know to keep things running smoothly? By the way, it can be fewer than six, but let’s not make it any more. Chances are no one is going to look at all of them anyway.
Even writing a blog post, I’ll complete a draft, look at it, and say to myself, there’s more than six instruments in there. No one is going to know what to look at? How can I simplify this. Often this results in a complete rewrite.
Recently, I obtained a copy of the latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator for Xbox. I was amazed at how far that had come from when I first played around with it in the 1980s. I sat in the “Xbox room” with my son, setup a flight out of Van Nuys airport in a Cessna 172, set the difficulty at “realistic” or the equivalent, and then attempted to fly a pattern. I was successful, and I think my son was impressed by how smooth the landing was. It had been a long time, more than twenty years. Maybe it was just a case of beginner’s luck.
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