Category Archives: Flying

Altitude is Your Friend

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images-5I made a few mistakes when taking my private pilot checkride, that crucible that determines whether or not you get the privilege of taking to the skies and risking life and limb.     After showing the examiner that I could find my way from point A to point B without getting too lost, and that I could make the airplane go up and down, handle a loss of power and a few other tricks, he asked me where I wanted to “do my landings.”   At that moment, we were flying almost directly over the town of Santa Paula, with an airport conveniently right below us.  I told him I wanted to do my landings in Oxnard, some 13 miles away, which was one of several surprises I had for the examiner that day, because he was expecting that I would choose the airport right below us.

I chose Oxnard because it had once been a military base and the runways were long and wide, and really hard to miss.   My checkride hadn’t been going so well up to then, and I wanted to give myself plenty of room for error, and landing in Santa Paula, even though I had already done it often, was like squeezing into the proverbial sardine can.

I had also landed in Oxnard many times, and each time I did my instructor had me begin my descent into that airport at just about where I happened to be at the time the examiner asked me where I wanted to do my landings, 13 miles away over Santa Paula.

As I began to descend, the examiner urgently asked me what I was doing.  I was obviously doing something wrong; I just didn’t know what it was.  I responded that I was beginning my descent into Oxnard.   He impatiently growled at me something I have heard many times since then: “Remember– altitude is your friend.”  He told me to climb back to my previous altitude, and not to descend into Oxnard until I absolutely had to.   “You’re safer up higher.   Down lower is where helicopters hang out.  You’re in an airplane.”  I’m not sure about my memory here, but I think I also heard him mutter, “For god’s sake, you’re not a crop duster.”

Of course the examiner was correct, and I have always tried to remember the phrase that “altitude is your friend.”   Altitude keeps you safe because it gives you more time to figure out what to do if an engine quits, and more time to maneuver to a safe landing spot.  But also, there are far fewer things to bump into the higher you go. “Controlled flight into terrain,” as it is officially called, is one of the biggest killers of pilots and their flying companions.   Another reason we like altitude is that the higher you go the more you see, and it is therefore more difficult to get lost.   Pilots learn “the three C’s” of what to do if lost while flying are to confess, climb, and communicate.   You climb in order to be able to see more of what is around you.

Good management, whether it concerns an airplane, a business or one’s self, has a lot to do with the dance between immersion in the details (descending, if you will) and pulling up (climbing) to see the big picture.   If, after all, the devil is in the details, perhaps the sky is where the angels reside.

It is not a matter of whether managing details or seeing the big picture is the best approach, but the ability to move between them that is important.   Getting stuck in either the details or the big picture can be a recipe for disaster.   In companies, it is often the CFO who is charged with mastering the details, while the CEO is typically the big picture person, but someone needs to make the final call, and that person is usually the CEO.   It is too easy to miss the forest for the trees, and the best way to see the forest is from high above it.

Brandy Lovely, a Unitarian minister in Pasadena, used to tell a story about an argument he and his wife had over a small detail.  He knew he was right, but the argument went on and on for hours as each of them dug their heels in.  Finally, his wife said to him, “Look, do you want to be right, or do you want to be married?”  Sometimes the big picture has to be forced upon us, and as my examiner reminded me, finding a way above it all can be our best friend.

Miso Aviator

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imagesI’m sure every profession has its way of distinguishing the amateurs from the professionals.   In aviation, the lowest rung of the ladder is “airplane driver.”  I heard it more than once in my training, typically when I did something wrong: “You don’t want to be a driver, do you?”

The next higher level is the pilot, the one who has mastered the technical aspect of flying, the one who finally makes the shift from the two dimensional steering of the driver to the three dimensional flying of the pilot.   But there is yet another level, one reserved for the masters of flight.  These are the aviators.

They are, of course, somewhat artificial and arbitrary distinctions.  Yet, just as Justice Potter said about the difference between pornography and art, “I know it when I see it.”

The aviation writer Budd Davisson describes the difference between a mere pilot and an aviator this way:  “The difference is that an aviator is the airplane, and they move as one, while the pilot is simply manipulating the proper controls at the appropriate time and sees the airplane as a machine that he forces to do his bidding.”

I have flown with a lot of pilots, and the best pilot with whom I have ever flown was my first instructor, Floyd Jennings.  I witnessed Floyd’s flying on several occasions, but the most memorable was on my second flight as a student.   The first and only time I had ever felt nauseous in a small airplane was on that flight.

The nausea, which seemed to come from out of nowhere, was so bad that I knew I wouldn’t make it down to the ground without creating an embarrassing mess in the cockpit.  I was sweating profusely and my face was pale as I was trying to hold back.  I finally told Floyd that I couldn’t hold back any longer.  He glanced over and saw the sweat on my face and my normally pink Polish skin shift to a whiter shale of pale.

We were about halfway through the downwind leg of the pattern in Santa Paula, which means we were flying parallel to the runway, but pointed opposite to the direction needed to land.  Floyd took control of the airplane.  In what appeared to be a single movement, he looked from side to side, cut the power to idle, pointed the nose down, swooped down and around, and in a matter of mere seconds, the airplane kissed the ground sweetly and almost imperceptibly.

Whenever Floyd took control of the airplane, I had the distinct feeling that he and the metal bird were one.  Though he was a grizzled, curmudgeonly character, his flying was seamless, effortless, like wearing a comfortable shirt.   When he moved the airplane moved, when he blinked the airplane blinked.  He met Budd Davisson’s definition of aviator to a tee.   This was sadly in contrast to my flying, in which I often felt that I was wrestling with a metal beast.

I am currently working on a collection of poems I am calling “One With the Miso.”  It’s just a whimsical, silly title, but I like it because on the one hand, it sounds meaningless, but on the other hand, it expresses something bigger.   We can eat or drink the miso (that is, be a pilot), or we can become one with it.   Whatever our behavior, be it simply brushing our teeth, drinking soup or flying an airplane, we can get to the point where our sense of self as separate from the universe disappears, and the thing that we do and thing that we are becomes one.

The 80/20 Rule

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Unknown-2I thought I understood the 80/20 rule pretty well when I first read about it in a management book I was reading.  The author suggested that 20% of a company’s customers took up 80% of the company’s time.  If you got rid of those demanding customers your time would be spent more effectively.

Since then, I have heard or seen several other definitions of the 80/20 rule.  LinkedIn, for example, phrased it this way:

Did you know that only 20 percent of what you do each day produces 80 percent of your results? Eliminate the things that don’t matter during your workday: they have a minimal effect on your overall productivity. For example, on a project, systematically remove tasks until you end up with the 20 percent that gets the 80 percent of results.

This is kind of a reverse way of getting to a similar place.  The basic idea is that one shouldn’t waste one’s precious time on things that don’t have a proportionate yield.  My own thinking about this is that in a life and death endeavor such as flying, it’s the little things that can kill you, so neglecting them may not be such a good idea.

While nearly all accidents occur as the result of a series of mistakes or bad decisions, some of them occur because of neglecting a single detail.

A flight instructor once told me that 80% or more of accidents could be traced to a poor pre-flight inspection.   I’m not sure if that’s entirely accurate, but because it only takes one accident to ruin your day and perhaps all future ones, it is clear that one should never cut corners on a pre-flight.

I just read an accident report where a newly minted pilot killed himself and his parents because he simply neglected to retract his flaps on takeoff in an unfamiliar airplane.   When his airplane refused to climb, he turned back and spun into the ground.

In the business world, it is often the small things that differentiate between those who get where they are intending to go and those who don’t.  Cold calls, as an example, are tedious and ridiculously time consuming, but they are a necessary part of nearly every sales job.

Investing in the least likely scenario, that is, spending time on the 20 percent, is important when the stakes are large.  In poker, the odds may be 11 to 1 that your flush is going to come up, but you will stay in the hand if the pot is big enough.

For me, investing in the least likely scenario has paid off often enough that I really can’t imagine getting anywhere if I didn’t.  Given the odds, I certainly wouldn’t have had the nerve to start a conversation with that pretty girl in Innsbruck who eventually became my wife.

So perhaps the 80/20 rule is just like all the other rules of The Game; they work most of the time, but are made to be broken.

It’s a Drag, Man

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images-3Every budding pilot learns the four forces that act on an airplane in flight:  the upward force– lift, the downward force– weight (or gravity), the forward force– thrust, and the backward force– drag.   There are many different types of drag.   One of these is called parasite drag, which occurs partly due to friction on the airplane’s skin, and partly due to interference of other objects, such as ice.   The best way to demonstrate drag is what happens when you put your hand out the car window as you are driving.   If you face the palm forward, you expose more of the surface to the wind and your hand gets pushed back.   Unless you want to fly backwards, drag is, well, a drag.

I have been lucky in my life to not have too many stories to tell about parasite drag, either the kind that interferes with flying an airplane or the kind that interferes with navigating through life.

There was the time, however, when I allowed a woodworker to crash in my workshop for two weeks, as he was between places to stay and needed a temporary shelter.   The two weeks turned into nine months, rent-free.    My patience having run out, I did my best to politely evict him.  Even with my considerable charm I was unable to convince him to leave my workshop, so I eventually invited the police to assist me.  Unfortunately, they were no help at all, informing me that I had to go through a legal eviction process to get him out.   That would have cost me a lot of time and money, so out of sheer frustration I eventually resorted to dubious legal and somewhat primitive methods of evicting him, which ultimately did prove effective.  Although it did not exactly come to blows, one could say, I suppose, that enough thrust was used to overcome the parasite drag.

The lesson learned from this misadventure is the same one that aviation textbooks have been advising for years:  the best way to avoid parasite drag such as icing is not to get yourself into that position to begin with.   At times that is difficult to do, because sometimes you don’t see it coming.

While my life hasn’t exactly been like a box of chocolates, there were many times that my life has been a bit like being alone in the cockpit of an airplane with ice forming on the wings.   If I were to let it build up, the parasite drag could have killed me.    For all of us, in those situations the struggle is to find the “warm air,” the place where troubles melt away.    It may or may not come in the expected place, and it may not come right away, but staying where you are is usually not a good idea.

There used to be two small islands southeast of Ireland that have long since disappeared under the rising ocean.   One of them was called “Hook” and the other was called “Crook.”   Once, when Cromwell was asked how he was going to invade Ireland next time, he allegedly said, “By Hook or Crook.”   The phrase stuck, and now we say it when we are determined to get someplace without necessarily knowing how we’re going to get there.  The important thing is to know when enough is enough, when staying where we are is likely going to kill us, and start searching for warmer air.

The Golden Rule: Leave Yourself an Out

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images-4Most of us were taught that doing unto others what you would have them do unto you was the “golden rule.”     The well-known aerobatic pilot Patty Wagstaff once said that for pilots the golden rule was these simple four words:  leave yourself an out.

Pilots get into deep trouble when they forget that rule.   They fly into canyons not knowing what might greet them around the corner (such as a transverse mountain boxing them in).    Or they fly into bad weather because they failed to locate an alternate airport.   Or they fly through a hole in the clouds not knowing what will greet them on the other side of the hole.  Failing to leave oneself an escape route, an alternate way out, can end in disaster.

I used to think of it as slightly awkward when behavior therapists define the goal of therapy as increasing one’s access to reinforcers.   It sounded superficial, but as is often the case, it turned out to be more profound than it sounded.   (A reinforcer, for the uninitiated, is something that will increase or decrease the likelihood of engaging in the behavior that came before it.) Increasing one’s access to reinforcers can be thought of as simply being able to make more effective choices in life.   It means giving yourself as many “outs” as you can.

Andrew Solomon once wrote that every person who suffers from deep depression has one thing in common:  they feel trapped in one way or another.    Whatever their situation, they believe they have no choices left, no “outs.”  When I work with depressed clients, I often try to uncover the source of the trapped feeling, if it isn’t readily apparent.  Helping someone to find an “out” by exploring possibilities that may not have been considered can be a great relief.

Leaving yourself an out works in business negotiations as well.   Every negotiator knows that the first step in negotiating is to not allow oneself to “need” the deal.   One must always be able to visualize and get comfortable with the idea of rejecting the deal altogether. Leave yourself an out.

It may be sheer insecurity or claustrophobia that causes me to check where the exits are every time I go into a movie theater or crowded place.  I even look at the ceiling in elevators and try to discern how to unlatch the top in order to access the roof in the event of getting caught between floors.  Maybe I take aviation’s golden rule too seriously, but then again, experienced aviators have decided to take this idea and plate it with gold.

I have, in my time, met a few pilots who seemed to have merged the two goldens, devolving into the attitude represented by “Do unto others, then run like hell!”  Perhaps it works better to keep them separate but equal:  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and always leave yourself an out.  Works for me.

 

KISS Me You Fool

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checklistSheila got out of bed on a bright, CAVU morning, checked her METARS via DUAT, saw that  there were no TFRs or noteworthy NOTAMS that might discourage her, dressed and made her way to the FBO.   Once in her airplane, she checked the ATIS, dialed up ATC, and was on her way.   Once in the air, she asked for VFR flight following, and navigated with her GPS from one VOR to another on a VICTOR airway, just for old times sake.  On her way to her destination, she kept her eyes glued to the PAPI as she gently descended to earth, but not before going through her final GUMPS.   And by the way, did I ever tell you the (true) story of the time I went NORDO on my way to SMX?

If you are a pilot, you understood every word I didn’t say.   Every trade has its shorthand.  Flying is replete with them.   Pilots live or die by them. The idea behind mnemonics– be they abbreviations, acronyms, or short phrases, is to make complex things simple.

One acronym everyone knows is KISS, which, in case you’re not one of the every, is short for “Keep it simple, stupid.”   That isn’t particularly aviation-related, although I have heard it more than a few times in that context.   KISS is what it is all about; if cleanliness is next to Godliness, then simplicity is next to cleanliness.

Complexity, of course, is merely a lot of simplicity all tangled up.   Understanding complex interactions is merely a matter of disentangling, disambiguating, or to use the popular word, deconstructing interactions so that we understand each component and how it builds on the previous one.   I could not have gotten through graduate school without a host of mnemonics– some of which were taught to me and some of which I made up myself.  Whenever anything seemed difficult to remember, I would construct some sort of abbreviation that made sense to me.  Ask me Freud’s psychosexual stages or the four subtypes of schizophrenia and I will tell you in a flash.   Go ahead, try me.

One form of mnemonic is the checklist.   Checklists are used religiously in aviation, and some believe that it is the procedure that has contributed most to the increase in aviation safety. (Atul Gawande writes about the importance of using checklists in surgery in “The Checklist Manifesto.”)   I have yet to need the checklist I have committed to memory for a major emergency, but it is designed to make sure that I not only do what I need to do, but that I do them in the right order.    The mnemonic is ABCDE, and it applies to all airplanes at all times.  If you are a pilot, you probably know it.   If not, you don’t need to.   If I had to remember to trim to the best airspeed (A), look for the best field (B), run through my systems to try to solve the problem (C for checklist), declare an emergency (D), and then, finally, grab the emergency landing checklist (E), all in exactly that order, I might get flustered.   But simply remembering ABCDE and applying each item in order makes it all simple, and perhaps with a little bit of luck or Divine intervention, that is one KISS that might save my life.

 

 

Air Hollywood: Flying the Friendly Skies

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brace positionThe tagline for this blog begins with the words “aviation” and “autism,” and to say the least it is difficult to find ways of integrating the two topics.   A company called “Air Hollywood” has now made it easy.

Air Hollywood is not an airline per se; it is, as their name might suggest, kind of a fictitious, Hollywood airline.   Their business focuses on providing sets for the entertainment industry, including interiors of any kind of airplane you can imagine, cockpits, terminals, gates, etc., as well as stock footage and almost anything imaginable that is needed for movies and is aviation-related.   You have seen their work in films such as “Flight,” “Wolf of Wall Street,” and “Kill Bill” as well as hundreds of others.

Recently, Air Hollywood took on a new project.   They have decided to offer classes on preparing children and adults for the entire commercial-aviation related gamut of challenges that face them.    Over-stimulation at check-in areas, fluorescent lights, airport waiting areas and queues, boarding airplanes, and sitting in a confined airplane, all can pose challenges to those with autism.  They call their program “Open Sky for Autism,” and it is being offered for free.  It promises to help acclimate those with autism by using supervised repetition during simulations of airport arrival, ticketing, check-in, baggage check, TSA screening, boarding, in-flight simulation, and deboarding.   They even do one better than the “real” airlines, and offer complimentary lunch and refreshments!   Their opening event is scheduled for April 5th.  Here’s the link:  http://airhollywood.com/opensky/

If you have been following either this or my last blog for a while, you know that I am more than intrigued by people who do good things when they don’t have to.    I don’t know the folks at Air Hollywood, but I do know that for whatever their reasons they have decided to do something good for a chunk of humanity that needs it, something that is frankly difficult to do and outside what a typical therapeutic agency or clinic has the means to do.

Every religious tradition with which I am familiar preaches charity.   Growing up, I learned that the yields on the corners of each of your agricultural fields should be left for the hungry and poor.   I applaud any company that uses its resources to do good.

 

 

When Less is More

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Mies van der RoheTwo years ago, I began writing a post titled “When Less is More,” but never finished it.  I suppose I couldn’t figure out a way to get my point across in a short enough space for a blog post, failing miserably at making less more.

But last week I came across a post written by Greg McKeown of Stanford Business School.  Turns out he recently published a book called “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” which I will undoubtedly add to the queue of 35 books by the side of my bed.  In the meantime, in the spirit of “less is more,” here is a link to a short video summarizing his ideas:

http://youtu.be/T9x6D09AKBU

The point I was trying to make in my unpublished blog post two years back was that doing a little to help others often makes the biggest difference.  I told the story about a family therapist who recounted that in the early years of family therapy big changes in family structure were often wished for and expected, but it rarely turned out that way.   The irony was this: family members who experienced very small changes in their family’s functioning often perceived those changes as having huge consequences.  Less is more.

Behavior analysts working with children with autism or with any complex, daunting set of problems, systematically break complex challenges into their smallest teachable components.  Good flight instructors do the same. Perhaps one element of being a good instructor in any field is learning how not to let knowledge of complex phenomena get in the way of teaching the most fundamental, simplest elements.

Whether it is the journey of a thousand miles that begins with the single step, or losing 40 pounds a few ounces a day, or building a small house in which to fulfill big dreams, as Mies van der Rohe proclaimed many years ago, less is more.

 

 

Pilot in Command, or Directing the Dream

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demonsI had a recurrent dream when I was a child that I was being chased by faceless, flying demons wearing black capes.  I frantically flew away (without benefit of airplane or wings, Superman-style) trying to escape them, and managed to wake up just before they destroyed me.  I woke up sweating in fear nearly every night of my childhood.

A psychoanalytic dream interpretation book I bought at a supermarket checkout stand diagnosed the dreams as symbolic of a sense of impotence, a helplessness and hopelessness to have an impact on the frightening world around me. And later, when I heard a late night talk show psychologist say that one could control one’s dreams just like a director directs movies, at about age 18, I turned around and faced the demons, daring them to expose their faces, and they all at once disappeared.  I never had that nightmare again.

We each fight our own unique demons throughout our lives, and learning to fly was for me a symbolic way to overcome a life rooted in fear.  I don’t know how many other pilots share that motivation, but I do know that nearly every pilot with whom I have ever spoken shares the quickening of the heartbeat and chill down the spine that comes the moment one loses the chains of gravity and launches into sky, leaving the earth and its accompanying worries below and behind.

Flying, like directing my teenage dreams of being chased, is one way some of us attempt to manage fear.   The term that every pilot learns immediately when taking flying lessons is that he or she is the “pilot in command,” a way of drilling deeply into one’s psyche that the ultimate responsibility for making the decisions and taking the actions that will keep you and your passengers alive is yours, and it is a responsibility that doesn’t cease until all occupants are safely off the airplane.

Being pilot in command means that you are in ultimate command even when a controller tells you what to do, that no matter what anomaly or distraction threatens you, you are where the buck always stops.   It means, ultimately, that no matter how frightening the demons are that are chasing you, you must turn toward them and face them.   And that is the only thing that will make them go away.

Dreaming appears to be a fairly ubiquitous phenomenon, shared by most animal species on earth.  (New book title: Do Plants Dream?)  Whether dreams are simply the “residues of the day,” whether dreaming is a form of catharsis or working through of conflicts, most dreams probably don’t need a conscious director.   To beg the aviation metaphors a bit, they probably do just fine on auto-pilot.   But when the content of our dreams become disturbing to us, whether those dreams occur during sleep or wakefulness, it is time to find the pilot in command within us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Driven to Distraction

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Distractibility has always been a sore spot for me. It is one of the three cardinal symptoms of attention deficit disorder (along with inattention and impulsivity), which I have been convinced is an apt description for one set of my struggles ever since I first learned about it in grad school.

distraction01

Over the years I have developed a series of “procedures” designed to manage my distractibility, little games such as “touch next,” in which I touch a random object and pursue its completion, then touch another random object and do the same. Or a game I call “subvocal lists,” in which I silently repeat a small list of tasks until each one is finished. These little things and others are designed to facilitate forward movement rather than linger too long in the stultifying effects of distraction.

Distraction can be deadly, as recent experience with cell phones have demonstrated. The horrendous train crashes in Spain and Burbank were likely cell phone related, and in an issue of Flying magazine Jay Hopkins mentioned that the Colgan Air crash near Buffalo, the crash of American Flight 965 in Cali, Columbia and many other incidents and accidents were very likely also distraction-related. The Cali crash and other incidents led to the development of the “sterile cockpit” rule, which unfortunately isn’t always used. But for those of you who may not be familiar with this rule, it is designed to limit all conversations in the cockpit to only that which is essential during the takeoff and landing phases of flight. That typically translates to the first (and last) 10,000 feet above the ground. So for those of you on commercial flights, when they tell you to keep all your electronic equipment off during the takeoff and landing phases, they are doing that not because they are worried about the equipment interfering with their sensitive flight instruments, but because they want the passengers attentive in the event of an emergency during takeoff and landing. And they too, in the “front office,” are keeping things as sterile as they can.

The trio of symptoms that comprise ADD are interesting bedfellows. (The fourth symptom—hyperactivity, goes in and out of fashion as a cardinal symptom.) While the syndrome is named “attention deficit,” when you think about it, distractibility is not an attention deficit at all. In fact, it is an attention excess. Why the folks who dreamed up the name for this constellation called it what they did is a mystery to me; clearly it should have been named “attention regulation disorder,” because that is what it actually is. In fact, it is likely that the inattention found in ADD is actually a result of the underfunctioning of those parts of the brain responsible for filtering information (the reticular activating system: RAS). With a poorly functioning filter, the normal bombardment of sensations is experienced as distractibility. Impulsivity is the result of the inability to select just which information warrants acting upon and which is best filtered out.

By the way, the reason that stimulants, such as Ritalin and caffeine, appear to work so well for those with ADD is because stimulants enhance (stimulate) the RAS’ ability to filter information, resulting in an increased ability to focus on what is relevant.

I think I hear the phone ringing. I’ll be right back.