Wright and Wrong

imgresAll the calculations show it can’t work. There’s only one thing to do: make it work.   –Pierre Georges Latécoère, early French aviation entrepreneur.

When I went to school in Murray, Kentucky, there were plaques around town that honored Nathan Stubblefield, the inventor of the radio.   The inventor of the radio?  I grew up believing that it was Marconi who invented the radio, although later on I learned that the guy who I thought invented the telephone actually held the patent for the radio, good old Alex Bell.

I guess that when it comes to intellectual property and who reaps the benefits of their labor, the game of who gets credit for what is important.   But for those of us who use toasters, it hardly matters who invented them.  What intrigues me, especially as I travel to other parts of the world, is the extent to which nationalistic pride comes into it.

Ask Americans who was the first to take flight, and they will almost certainly say it was one of the Wright Brothers.  Ask that question in France, and they will tell you not only that the French invented aviation altogether, but they will reel off the names of Charles Renard, Henri Giffard and Arthur Krebs—all French of course.  In Italy, they will mention DaVinci, although there is no record of Leo ever actually lifting off.   They will, however, mention Tito Burattini, who successfully lifted a cat into flight in 1648 (but not himself).

In Great Britain, they will tell you that it was Sir George Cayley in 1846, five decades before the Wright Brothers invented the “aeroplane”.  Cayley began drawing pictures of airplanes when he was 10 years old, which was around 1792.

In Germany, they will mention Gustave Weisskopf, who emigrated to the U.S. where he changed his name to Whitehead.  In 1901, a year before the Wright Brothers’ flight, he carried out a controlled, powered flight in a monoplane in Fairfield, Connecticut.   Although a story ran about it in the local newspaper, he obviously didn’t have as good a press agent as the Wrights, so he never made it into the history books.  Or, perhaps, his neglecting to change his first name had something to do with it.

National pride, I suppose, is primarily an extension of the instinct to protect one’s own tribe.   Without tribal identity one vanishes into the whims of those who seek to conquer. Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing most likely depends on the outcome, and the question of who gets hurt in the process.

In reading the history of the development of the atom bomb, for example, it seemed clear that national pride had little to do with getting there first.   Getting there first was imposed by the circumstances, but those who labored to split the atom did so more out of the spirit of the challenge than out of tribal identity.

I have been fortunate enough to know a few inventors, and none of them invented out of national pride.   They did so because they had a creative instinct, a love affair with solving problems cleverly and doing things better.  Money and credit are often secondary motivations.  National pride seems to come into play more by those seeking to find a way to attach themselves and their identities to the cleverness of the inventors they celebrate.   I may not have invented Swiss cheese, but you can rest assured it must have been another Eastern European Jew.  We invent everything.

What is most important is the spirit of invention itself, a spirit that has resulted for the most part in prolonged lives with less suffering.   That is noble, and that is the thing to be nurtured.

Flying Sdrawkcab

UnknownThe first time I saw it happen, I was taking my boat out of the harbor, and about 50 yards away I saw a seagull flying backwards.  It was one of those quirks of nature, one of those things that shouldn’t be possible but happens anyway.  It was a beautiful sight, his wings outstretched, his nose pointed one direction and his body moving backwards against the landscape of the island behind him and the water below.

Recently, on a particularly windy day, I told my instrument instructor that I always wanted to fly backwards, and as is typical of him he said, “let’s do it.”   We had other plans for that day, and I wasn’t in the mood to change them, so I opted for another time. Apparently, it’s an easy thing to do, especially in a small, low-powered airplane such as a Piper Cub or a Cessna 150.   The wings of a J3 Cub stall at about 33 knots, or about 38 miles an hour, so all you need to do to fly backwards is to point your nose into a 45 mile an hour wind, fly just over stall speed, and you can find yourself flying backwards over the ground.  Find a stiff 60 mile an hour wind or more and you can fly backwards at 20 miles an hour.

Although I have never flown backwards, I have done many other things backwards.   The Pimsleur language wizards somehow figured out that it’s easier to learn difficult foreign words by rehearsing the syllables backwards, which is how I learned how to say thank you in Armenian (shnorhakalutyun).

Reading backwards is tricky at first, but after a while it gets easier, because, just like reading forwards, one begins to notice patterns.  When I first moved to California, the moment I looked at the sign for the street named “Moorpark” I cracked up laughing.   Reading it backwards, I thought that it was a joke, but none of the locals seemed to know it.

In Northern California, where I wrote the first draft of this post, there is a town called Ukiah.  I never looked it up to see if it was intentional that it was named for the 17-syllable poem we all had to write as kids in school.  Maybe someone else who values his or her precious time even less than I do will look it up for me.

A friend was visiting me from New York, and when somehow the conversation came to reading or speaking backwards, he immediately mentioned the Long Island town of Lynbrook, which is not really backwards, just a swapping of the syllables of Brooklyn, but still, I think, clever enough to be mildly entertaining.

There is a natural food store in LA that is called “Erewhon.”  It is actually one letter off, but it is more difficult to read “Erehwon,” and as far as I’m concerned they can be forgiven.

I had always assumed Oprah’s parents were Marx Brothers’ fans, until I read that her birth name was actually Orpah, after a biblical character.  Apparently, people mispronounced it as “Oprah” frequently enough for it to stick.   Oprah calls her production company Harpo Productions, so at least she gets it.

There is also a coffee shop called Amocat in Washington (guess what city it’s in?) and one in Tokyo called Alucard, which as far as I know does not serve doolb.  And my old buddy Francis Albert used to sign his oil paintings as Artanis.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”  So, by illogical extension, perhaps if I get up in the air on a particularly windy day, rent an old Cessna, point my nose directly into the wind, and slow down, I will begin to understand life as I find myself flying backwards.   But I doubt it.

Walking a Banana

Walking a Banana

Walking a Banana

More than a few years back, I called my cousin on the phone to ask him some real estate advice. He advised me against the deal I was pursuing, and added this bit of wisdom: “It’s the deals you don’t make that make you rich, not the deals you make.”

That was difficult advice for me. Ever since my early twenties, when I decided that I was done hiding from life, being alive meant engaging, taking risks and making deals. Saying no to something that looks like it might be a good deal feels like a retreat from life; there is no way to win if you keep folding your cards.

But then, knowing when to hold and when to fold is what makes a good poker player, and that is really what my cousin was saying. The poker expert Mike Skelza once said something very similar to my cousin: “It’s not how many hands you win, it’s how many hands you don’t lose.”

Of course, if you don’t ever make any deals, or take any risks, there can never be any gain. And every gain seems to require the pain of mistakes made along the way. Each of us has had it drilled into our psyches that we learn by making mistakes– so why do we fear them so much?

Sometimes it has to do with shame, and sometimes with perfectionism—an overly critical internalized voice that accepts nothing but the best from ourselves and others. Doing something wrong confirms an underlying self-hatred, a feeling of never being quite good enough.

That is why many therapists have their clients practice making mistakes. The iconic psychologist Albert Ellis developed a series of “shame-disputing” tactics that included walking a banana tied to the end of a leash as if it were a dog. Those clients whose fears of mistake-making were based more on perfectionism than shame would be encouraged to make mistakes intentionally and often, in order to ultimately get comfortable with the fact that few mistakes have disastrous effects.

But in aviation, small mistakes can have disastrous effects. Fortunately, it is rarely the single mistake that causes the mishap, but rather a series of bad decisions. That is why good aviation instruction includes intentionally making mistakes in order to learn how to recognize and recover from them. Or, as happened to me a couple of months ago, allowing students to discover their own mistakes before correcting them. After a complex instrument approach, I was told to do a “touch and go” in which I immediately took off after landing. I forgot to raise my flaps, which I didn’t notice until long after I should have. My instrument instructor, Michael Phillips, waited for me to figure out why the airplane was flying with its nose down and tail in the air like a downward dog in order to maintain the airspeed I was trying to get it to. I have done perhaps a thousand touch and goes, and never before forgot to raise my flaps, but now I know what happens when I do.

Focusing on not making bad deals, as my cousin suggested, is ultimately a way of not focusing too narrowly on winning. If we focus too narrowly on winning, we are less apt to notice our mistakes, and correct for them. I was so relieved that I successfully accomplished my instrument approach that I forgot the simple necessity of raising my flaps on my way out of the airport. You can drive full steam ahead toward your goal, but if you hit a deep pothole your axle will break and you’ll never get there. If, instead, you drive determinedly toward your goal but keep your eyes peeled on avoiding the potholes along the way, you may eventually get there.

Whether the arena is investing in real estate, making a business decision, flying an airplane, or teaching a child with autism, mistakes are going to happen. Given their inevitably, it is always a good idea to get a certain comfort level with making them, without letting our fixation on the goal get in the way. If you can’t, there’s always the leash and the banana.

Flying as Therapy

Unknown-1 Along with sailing, polo and race car driving, aviation can be an expensive hobby.   But I am fond of reminding detractors that by and large flying cost about as much as ongoing psychotherapy, and can be equally as effective.  Here’s how.

Piloting an airplane requires complete and thorough attention.  Sophisticated instruments eases that burden a bit, but one needs to constantly monitor them, listen attentively to the sounds of the engine, and keep vigilant eyes out for things that might go bump in the day or night.  Stuff can happen very quickly in an airplane, and a lapse of attention can be deadly.

It is the combination of complete attention and mastery of the fear that accompanies any dangerous activity that in part makes it a therapeutic experience.  But there is another element that also makes it therapeutic.

Humans are outrageously complex organisms, and the human brain functions more efficiently and effectively (at some tasks) than the most complex computers.  What makes the brain so incredible is its ability to manage so many functions in parallel.   At any moment, the human brain is processing and directing multiple complex processes, the vast majority of them outside of awareness.

Some of those processes have to do with attempts to resolve conflicts that arise in childhood and continue to play out in daily life.   These ancient conflicts, along with those that arise in the more recent course of work and family relationships, are streaming through our awareness, and can wreak havoc with our daily lives as we allow them to rear themselves when it would serve us better to direct them instead into the background.

Most people see a good psychotherapy session as one in which the client comes to believe movement has been made toward resolution of childhood conflicts.  But those conflicts are a little like a war that goes on interminably, and, recalling the famous bumper sticker from the sixties, what if they gave a war and nobody came?

That is not to say that it is a good thing to deny the existence of our conflicts, but rather to embrace them and trust in our integrity to be responsible for them and “work them through” when the time is appropriate to do so.  Stepping into a cockpit does not stop the world from turning outside; the world remains unjust, the argument with your partner still festers, but in that moment one’s job is to simply fly the airplane.

We can eliminate suffering not only through successfully resolving conflicts, but also through coming to accept those conflicts and engaging life more fully in the moment.  That is what a “healing exchange” with a therapist can do, and that is how flying, or engaging in any activity requiring complete focus and which forces one to live fully in the moment can be good therapy.

The Value of Getting Lost

imagesWhenever I set foot in a new place, my favorite thing to do is to set out walking.  Day or night, the objective is clear; walk just far enough that I feel lost, turn around and try to find my way back.   It is, after all, in the midst of feeling lost that discovery is possible.    Humans seek the comfort of familiarity, but are also novelty-seeking organisms, which is why solitary confinement is so punishing.  Traveling familiar routes, by definition, reduces the novelty in our lives.   It will certainly help us get to where we are aiming to go, but as Lao Tzu said, “If you don’t change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

In a beautiful piece in a recent aviation magazine, Peter Garrison wrote about “The Importance of Being Lost.”   In it, he details some of the history of navigating at night and the navigation systems, or lack thereof, that attempted to prevent pilots flying at night from getting lost.

Back in the early 1920’s, when the postal service attempted to deliver mail via airplane at night, rural towns had no electricity to light them up and “airways” consisted of either bonfires set by farmers and eventually a series of electric beacons.   A lot of pilots got lost, and many of them crashed as they were often flying in near total darkness.

With the recent advent of GPS, it is nearly impossible to get lost even if you tried.  Garrison wrote beautifully that GPS “makes us at once infants and gods.  Observers and observed, we watch from on high as our icon, a digital metaphor of self-awareness, creeps across the map.  With GPS, there is no longer such a thing as ‘lost.’  Navigation, a great and noble art whose traditions stretch back into prehistory, has been replaced by a computer game… We are much better off, but we have also forfeited something: an adventurous life in which anxiety and relief alternated like the beating of a heart.”

He cites Beryl Markham, who wrote in 1942 about her fear of what the future may hold for pilots:   By then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to a familiarity with labeled buttons, and in whose minds the knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of the weather will be as extraneous as passing fiction.

Back in the seventies, an American Airlines training pilot coined the term “children of the magenta” to refer to pilots trained in the new avionics of the time.  Computerized flight management systems, autopilots and now GPS paint a magenta line on a screen, guiding pilots to their destination, so all pilots need do to get where they want to go is simply follow the magenta line.  (By the way, you can see that prescient training session on Vimeo if you have 25 minutes to spare; just look up “children of the magenta.”)  The trainer warned that the more dependent pilots become on their sophisticated avionics, the more they are going to lose their basic “stick and rudder” skills.   This was decades before the Air France 447 flight, the Colgan crash, and possibly the Asiana crash in SFO were implicated in pilots’ degraded “hand-flying” skills.

Perhaps we are all “children of the magenta.”  We live in worlds in which the technology we use throughout the day is comprised of systems we may at best theoretically understand but could never begin to produce, even if given the materials to do so.  We have become dependent on our smart phones, our ATM machines, our computers, our cars, and even the electricity that powers nearly all of our gadgets.  I am certainly not a Luddite, and tend to be the first person on my block to play with whatever new gadget becomes available, but I do agree that sometimes there really is value in getting lost and testing our basic skills, knowledge, and imagination to find our way home. Our hearts are muscles, after all, and it is the fear that accompanies getting lost that gives them the jolt needed to kick into gear, the jolt of fear that ends in relief as we hopefully find our way home.

Flying with Understanding

Bald-eagle-wallpaper2In Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a rather silly story made into a really silly movie, Richard Bach wrote these words, which I find enchanting:

Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you.   All they show is limitations.  Look with your understanding.  Find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.

As a child, my self-esteem, on a scale from one to ten, was well below zero.   My mother, catching me during a moment of extreme self-doubt, told me that I was capable of doing anything in life that I wanted.  Challenging her optimism, I told her snootily that I could never fly.   Undaunted, she lovingly crouched down, put her arms on my shoulders, looked me directly in the eyes, and said, “Ira, if you wanted to badly enough, you could fly.”

At first, in my confusion, I began to trust my mother less.   But there was a part of me that wanted to believe in her magical thinking.   So over the years her words, and the conviction with which they were spoken, echoed.  Eventually, I began to understand.

I knew that as a mere mortal I could never actually fly, but perhaps I could accomplish things that logic and reason (“eyes,” in Bach’s metaphor) couldn’t, if I could somehow learn how to look with my understanding.  Perhaps I could learn to not be deceived by the facts in front of me, by the obstacles that life creates, but instead to believe in my ability to understand that which transcends facts, just as my mother leapt over reality with her conviction and belief in me.

You may know the Hasidic story about the origins of the philtrum, that little indentation above the mouth and below the nose.  According to the story, when we are conceived we are given all the knowledge in the universe.   Then, at birth, God touches us right below our nose and we forget everything.  We then spend the rest of our lives trying to remember what we already know.

What we already know is our understanding, which is more than the sum of our knowledge.   It is the way we imbue knowledge with meaning and connection that transforms it into understanding.

Understanding cannot be found simply by reference to our bodily sensations, or our “feelings.”  In instrument flying we learn that our eyes and the rest of our body can deceive us.   Our brain misinterprets the signals it receives through our senses.  We must, instead, fly with all of our understanding, and have faith that even if our bodies deceive us into thinking we are flying straight and level, we choose instead to believe what our instruments tell us.  And if our instruments give us conflicting messages, we must bring our entire understanding to the cockpit—the sum of our knowledge that transcends its parts and becomes a meaningful whole.

Our eyes do deceive us.  They show us the covers of books, but not what is inside of them.  They show us facts, and facts limit us.   They bind us to the ground; they show us what is, but never what can be.  They are the stories the news media, scientists, and our best friends tell us.  When we believe them, we deceive ourselves.     It is only through looking with our understanding that we can truly see, and it is only then that we can really fly.

In the Java Sea

As I write this, there is a gentle rain falling outside the window of the Ojai Coffee Roasting Co., and halfway around the world bodies are being plucked out of the Java Sea.   It is too soon to know, but the odds are that those on the doomed Air Asia flight experienced the violent throes of a thunderstorm, with up and downdrafts moving as fast as 100 miles an hour.

Somehow, the violence of mother nature was more than the pilots or their steed could handle. Pilots are taught to avoid thunderstorms, but they often don’t. There were, in fact, at least six jets in the same vicinity as the Air Asia flight that made it home intact.   Undoubtedly, pilots who fly along routes such as the one over the Java Sea fly among storms often, and each time they get through safely reinforces their belief that they can do it again.

I had a client once who was a rock musician, and although his father was an aviation engineer, and the client himself had an encyclopedic knowledge of nearly every human-made object that traversed the sky, he never flew on them himself.  When I asked him why, he just looked at me and said, “I’m a rock musician.”  I understood that he felt jinxed, and preferred not to die the way so many musicians have died. We could, just as my client did, decide to stay closer to the ground, spending our time reading and writing in coffee shops or imagining that somehow we are safer in cars than in airplanes.

We could, but we probably won’t. We know that the chances of being injured or killed in an airplane are still relatively minuscule, that getting out of the house at all is dangerous, and that staying cocooned and perhaps watching TV will assure that our adventures will all be vicarious.

The traditional Irish blessing begins with “May the road rise up to greet you, may the wind always be at your back…”  Pilots have their version, which is simply a wish for “clear skies and tailwinds.”

The unfortunate Air Asia flight had neither, and we all grieve the loss of fellow travelers whose lives were untimely taken from those who loved them.  And, as the Irish blessing concludes, “…And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.”

Reasons for Moving

Unknown-1Just about a year ago I wrote a blog post in which I quoted one of my favorite poems—“Keeping Things Whole,” by the Canadian-American poet Mark Strand.  I have always loved contemporary American poetry, and Strand was one of the best.  Just prior to leaving for my back-to-back trips to Mexico and Vietnam (from where I am writing this now), Strand passed away at the age of 80.  Poet Laureate and the Pulitzer prize were just two of his many honors.   I read “Keeping Things Whole” before I had any awareness of a desire to fly, but it struck a chord in me that continues to this day.   So, in honor of one of the greats, here it is again:

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

 

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body’s been.

 

We all have

reasons for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

 

To Ditch is a Verb

images-3I first encountered the word “ditch” in an aviation context when studying an emergency checklist for the Cessna 150.   I didn’t have any idea what it meant to ditch an airplane; I just assumed it meant you had given up all hope and were going going down.  That’s because, most likely, the only times I had heard the word “ditch” in my youth were in relationship to something you do to a girlfriend, or the thing you dig in order to hide the people you dispatch, or the thing that carries water from the street to the ocean.

When I arrived to California in high school I heard the word again, but this time in relationship to skipping school.  At my high school, they had a thing called a “senior ditch day” when the seniors somehow found themselves on the beach instead of class.   I had never heard that word used that way before, probably because growing up in New York skipping school was not a thing one ever considered.   Missing school was something you did if and only if you were deathly ill, and even that wasn’t a great excuse.

From the emergency checklist, I quickly learned that to ditch an airplane meant to land it on water.   Unless the airplane was specifically built for that purpose, the only reason to do such a thing would be in the event of some sort of catastrophic failure; I guess not too dissimilar from the girlfriend scenario.

Like many things in aviation there are many controversies about the best way to ditch an aircraft, and even which are the best airplanes to ditch in, as if you had a choice.   People argue about whether a high wing or low wing airplane is easier to ditch, and how to best approach a series of waves.

There is relative agreement about the fact that when ditching an airplane, you want to be going as slowly as you can, although not so slowly that you stall and pitch the nose down.   I suppose you do ditch an airplane the same way you might ditch a lover; go slowly and keep your nose and head up all the way down to the splashdown.

I am somewhat embarrassed to say that in the ten years since I first learned what the word “ditching” meant in its aviation context, I never knew its origin.   If you guessed it comes from the concept of digging a ditch, perhaps for your own grave, you would be wrong and probably in need of antidepressants.  The word, it turns out, originated in the Royal Air Force.   The English Channel was colloquially known as “the ditch,” and if you couldn’t make it across and had to land in it, well of course that meant you were “ditching.”

I don’t know enough about British English to know if you can ditch school there as well, and if that means you go hang out near the channel, or if ditching a girlfriend might mean…. No, don’t think I’ll go there.

Giving Thanks

images-5I didn’t get to fly this Thanksgiving weekend, but being with my family was even more precious.  I have certainly been blessed to make it this far, to have an extraordinary family, and to have the ability to occasionally take to the sky.

I will most likely not have an opportunity to climb into my DA40 and continue my IFR training for at least a few weeks, because business travel will put me in the “back seat” of some heavy metal.   Nevertheless, I do look forward to planned trips to Mexico and Vietnam, hopefully garnering window seats if I can.

On my last commercial trip back from Mexico, I witnessed the most spectacular thunderstorms I had ever seen.  At 30,000 feet, the lightning show was occurring directly across from us.   The pilots of the Embraer 140 clearly chose not to divert, as the ailerons outside my window refused to budge the entire way.   Although it was difficult to judge distances at 30,000 feet, the airline either did not have a 20-mile safety margin from thunderstorms or the pilots decided to ignore it, as we skated along what appeared to be just a mile or two to the side of the massive string of cumulonimbus clouds that itself appeared to stretch outward infinitely.

The magnitude of nature’s constructions was thrilling, but I was also afraid that our relatively little airplane would become incapacitated.   Holding the sadness that sitting in the cabin 20 rows behind the front office meant there was no way I could have any control over the decisions being made there, I settled in for the show.

I love to fly, and although I much prefer sitting up front, I am also happy to be chauffeured, where I can relax, read some (usually flying-related) magazines, and look out the window.    Although it is by far not my favorite airline, I look forward to flights on United so I can tune in channel 9 and listen to air traffic controllers.   This time I will be on American to Mexico and Asiana to Vietnam, so there will be no ATC for me to cuddle up to.

While flying breaks no laws of physics, from the flesh and bones perspective of mere humans it feels as though we are at least bending those laws.   Like speaking Hungarian, it shouldn’t be possible, but somehow people manage to do it.

There is so much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving, and although I hope to be flying for many years to come, I am certainly grateful for all the time I have been blessed to be able to stretch the law of gravity, whether in the cockpit or in the cabin, and have such an amazing family to come home to.