There but for Fortune

Posted on January 16, 2024 by iraheilveil

I have often been accused of being too literal, and so please understand that when I use the phrase “dumb luck” I have no intention of insulting anyone, but instead I use the phrase because, quite literally, luck itself cannot speak. It has no message, no meaning. It doesn’t know where it comes from and it doesn’t know where it’s going. It’s a meandering ghost lurking behind every tree and under every stone and in every breath we take and even those we don’t.

Pilots like to believe that they are in control of their destiny. It’s important that they believe that, because if they didn’t, they likely wouldn’t step foot in a cockpit and advance the throttle. Flying is certainly more dangerous than staying at home and watching TV, and that is because there are more opportunities for something unlucky to happen. “Fate is the Hunter” could not be a more apt title for aviation writer Earnest Gann’s autobiography, along with a 1964 film starring Glenn Ford and Suzanne Pleshette. Shakespeare said it best when, no doubt while sitting on a pubstool, he said, “Shit happens.” Good thing there was a bumper sticker writer around to write it down at the time.

I have found it fascinating over the years to listen to pilots discuss a recent deadly accident—any recent accident. One might think they would be kinder to fellow pilots, but most often they are angry and critical of the pilot who died. Even before knowing a detailed explanation, they blame the pilot for doing something stupid to cause their own demise. “Pilot error” is in fact the cause of over 75% of fatal accidents according to the NTSB, but there’s a big percentage left over. And that’s where the hunter comes in.

Dumb luck wields its unwitting existential sword in all directions. It kills and it rescues. Take, for example, my bout with stage IV cancer. I don’t exactly feel lucky to have survived this far, now seven years after my cancer diagnosis. Instead, I attribute my survival primarily to modern science and the physicians who have mastered their art at City of Hope. I never had much hope, really, nor did I have much faith. What I did have in copious amounts was resignation and compliance. And in the end, I think it was entirely them, the physicians, who were to blame for you reading these words. I am deeply grateful, even if you’re not.

But that too involved not a small measure of luck. I had a protein, labeled simply P16, residing in my squamous cell carcinoma that was particularly responsive to the chemotherapy and radiation that killed, or at least postponed, the tumor’s metastasis. That was lucky. And I was lucky to have found that team of physicians who practiced their art form flawlessly, as well as a profoundly supportive family to monitor and shield me from contextual harm.

And yet, there are those whose bodies end up downstairs, in the basement morgue, refrigerated until claimed by their loving and supportive families. Many of those had copious measures of hope and many of those even had sublime faith, but the mortality police came and snatched them anyway.

The thing about dumb luck is that, by definition, it is out of our control. We can hope and faith our way through the vicissitudes of this churlish life all we want, and the freaking plane might still crash, and the wayward car might run the light and smash us to smithereens. These are hard realities, and not incidentally, it’s the anticipation of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that is the definition of anxiety and the chief reason why pharmaceutical companies remain a good investment.

What remains out of our control can plague and preoccupy us, or we can choose the path of optimism, with the caveat that optimism when blind becomes ignorance, and ignorance causes a lack of the kind of healthy vigilance that keeps us relatively safe. Going with the flow I sometimes think can be fun in a kayak, but it can also smash the kayak into a boulder and ruin our day.

Optimism, I suppose, is simply the idea that luck strikes disproportionately on the positive side of things, giving more than it takes. The balance of probability, as Conan Doyle’s Holmes would say, certainly leans in that direction. Plane crashes happen every day, but proportionately to miles flown, that’s still very little. When they do, it’s usually the pilot’s fault, but usually isn’t always, and there’s still more than a smidgeon of fate involved. So, to paraphrase the brilliant folk musician Phil Ochs paraphrasing everyone else, there but for dumb luck go you or I.

This Blog’s Title

Posted on January 9, 2024 by iraheilveil

In the many years I have been writing this blog, no one has pointed out that its title, “Clear for Takeoff,” is a misnomer. Frankly, I thought I would be busted early on, because people in the aviation world like to be know-it-alls. Trying to come up with the title, I thought it made sense to use something pilots hear in their headsets just before departing the earth. But controllers don’t actually say “clear for takeoff” (though for years I did think that was what they were saying). Instead, they say “cleared for takeoff,” prefaced by your airplane’s identifier. I am not certain of the grammar of it, because they are both sentence fragments, spoken undoubtedly with the assumption that the first half of the sentence is extraneous.

In my headset, before nearly every flight at a towered airport, I hear the words: “Diamond Star One Romeo Alpha, Cleared for Takeoff.” It’s my cue to look for traffic, advance the throttle, roll past the runway hold short line, turn to the center line, angle my ailerons into the wind, tease the rudder petals back and forth to awaken my feet, check that the flaps are set correctly and glance at the heading indicator, all within a few seconds, release the brakes and advance the throttle gently (but firmly) to the firewall.

This is the thrill that is paired, as Pavlov would have us say, with the words “cleared for takeoff.” If I were wearing my Garmin watch, I’m sure it would show a quick increase in heartrate as the old heart muscle flutters in anticipation, like a dog lifting her head and opening her eyes wide when she hears, “let’s take a walk!”

But “cleared for takeoff” as a title was someone else’s blog, I think, at least at the time this one came to fruition. And while I knew full well that I was violating any sense of accuracy, I did like the sound of “clear for takeoff,” as if the infinitive form of the word clear connoted something slightly more spiritual. Not at all a nod to Scientology, mind you, where going “clear” has implications of transcendence, as well as a significant capital expenditure. More like the allegorical lyric in reggae time: I can see clearly now; the rain has gone.

There are, of course, a host of other phrases pilots are accustomed to hearing on nearly every flight. Just as the heart twitters in excitement to hear the words “cleared for takeoff,” there is an incipient serenity, accompanied by an unwitting exhalation, when a pilot hears the words “clear to land.” Yup, you guessed it. I seldom if ever hear the parallel “cleared to land.” Maybe I have, and it just sounds like “clear to land.” I don’t think so, though. Why it is exactly that I am cleared for takeoff but am short two letters on landing I don’t know. (Maybe there’s a physics principle having to do with losing letters in proportion to fuel depletion.)

On nearly every flight in which you are talking to controllers at all (there is no requirement that you do if you are flying visually in certain airspace), you will inevitably hear the 3-word phrase “frequency change approved.” That, I imagine, might also be a great blog title, and probably someone has used it already, but I am at a coffee shop and too lazy to get up and get the internet code, so I will probably never know.

I am going to tell you something about those three words, “frequency change approved,” because I already wrote it and for now it’s right below these words on the screen. But the additional four paragraphs make this post too long to be readable in the short amount of time we all have these days to read anything, given how computers and Sesame Street and post-modernism has melted our brains.

So perhaps next week I’ll share those paragraphs with you, but presently I will pretend I am an air traffic controller and I have some say with what you do with your precious time, and tell you, somewhat wistfully and without entirely feigned kindness, you’re “cleared for the option.”

This Isn’t About Safety

Posted on March 19, 2018 by iraheilveil

You know that thing you hear all the time about the most dangerous part of flying being the drive to and from the airport? Well, it’s true if the flying you are doing is on a commercial airline. There simply isn’t a safer way to get from one place to a much farther away place than on a commercial airliner. But if the flying you are doing is in a general aviation airplane– the kind with a propeller or two in the front of it, well then, you’d be safer driving. Small airplanes typically crash somewhere between sea and shining sea at the alarming rate of several a day. Not that that is very much as a percentage of miles flown, but it is greater than the percentage of cars that crash to the whole of miles driven.

While it takes some statistical gymnastics to get there, the research on aviation safety concludes that flying in a small, general aviation airplane is just about as safe as riding a motorcycle. If you ride motorcycles, you know all about that. And if you don’t ride motorcycles, that’s probably the reason why. Riding motorcycles is more dangerous than driving a car not just because there is little to separate you from the environment, but also because they slip, slide, bump into things and are harder to see.

In spite of their danger, many people in the United States ride motorcycles, and many more people throughout the world ride motorbikes, sometimes, as one often sees in Southeast Asia, with whole families, infants, pets, laundry, and lumber precariously balanced over two wheels traversing pothole-ridden, detritus-laden roads. They do so primarily because it is a cheaper form of travel, and gives you greater access to places than cars. But some, I imagine, do so because riding a motorcycle is thrilling, not unlike flying in an airplane with an open cockpit. My cousin Peter flies an open cockpit Raven, and I can assure you it is much like riding a motorcycle in which you not only own the lateral dimension, but the vertical as well. His only speed gauge, he told me as we were flying, is the feel of the wind on his face.

But what you’re reading right now isn’t really about safety, because I am superstitious and a friend of mine died in a horrific aircraft accident not long after his safety-oriented article appeared in a magazine. He was—I believe, a safe pilot, but sometimes the forces of nature are just too powerful compared to the meagerness of the best human ingenuity. Yet, glancing over at the other hand, perhaps most everything—to some extent, is about safety. It is just a matter of how far one can stretch a metaphor. I suppose if you carry fear around with you at all times– and if you aren’t I’m not sure you’re worthy of being released on your own recognizance, all things are, more or less, about safety. Once ejected from the relative safety of the womb, we each land on a planet with wild winds, earthquakes, tsunamis, guns and white bread. That is why some really sensitive people don’t ever venture outside of their apartments, but still manage to get electrocuted in their bathtubs.

Nevertheless, some who do venture out inevitably crash and manage to simply dust themselves off, walk away and collect insurance. What makes one person see danger as a mere inconvenience and another see the same danger as a tragedy is certainly a combination of genetically determined temperament and early experiences. It is, I imagine, a parent’s ability to sensitively manage an infant’s fear and provide a safe environment that goes a long way to equip innately fearful children to steel themselves against life’s inevitable challenges.

Most pilots with whom I speak don’t admit that they feel the least bit frightened when they fly. They also think that being fearless is a good thing. And apparently, according to a poster I saw hanging on the wall of a yoga studio, fearlessness is the number one characteristic of a yogi. I don’t think that would be hanging on the wall of the yoga studio unless someone else also thought that was a good thing. I don’t think it’s a good thing; in fact, I think it’s a really stupid thing. To me, fear is the friend who accompanies me everywhere and teaches me how to calculate that risk-reward ratio that defines life outside the uterus. Without it, I suspect I wouldn’t be here, nor would you. In all fairness, I don’t think that what a yogi or yogini says when he or she refers to fearlessness is exactly the same thing as what I mean. There’s only so much you can explain on a poster, or only so much people who read posters want to know as they are doing warrior two. Fearlessness to a yogi likely has more to do with a certain amount of comfort or acceptance of fear rather than the absence of it, and if I’m wrong about that you should probably switch lamas.

I take my friend Fear with me every time I fly, from the moment I get into my hangar and eye that beautiful beast of mine to the moment I leave the hangar and feel grateful the big hangar doors didn’t land on my head and crush me. It is also why, safely on the ground, I feel a sense of mastery and exhilaration when it is over. And it is also why, if I want to be as close to absolutely certain that I will make my friend’s daughter’s wedding in Paducah in one piece, I will fly commercially, and hope the ceremony isn’t too far from the airport.

The Flight of the Enchilada

Posted on January 22, 2018 by iraheilveil

I don’t eat Mexican food too often, but when I do, I usually go for the chile relleno. There’s something wonderful about the balance between the spiciness of the chile and the softening effect of the cheese. And even though most Mexican restaurants serve generous portions of everything, if the relleno came with only half a chile, I would likely be annoyed. Like an enchilada, there is something unsettling about half a chile, half a dictionary, half a blog post, half an airplane, or half a flight to anywhere.

One can leave most things half-completed, but flying is something that essentially requires the whole enchilada. You can’t really stop flying mid-air between San Francisco and Houston, although you could always land and call it quits, and spend the night in a roach-infested motel in Gallup, New Mexico. But in order to be a whole enchilada, or a whole anything, you are going to need more than the sum of its parts.

In order to get off the ground, you need just the right ingredients mixed in just the right proportions. Lift alone won’t get you anywhere, thrust won’t necessarily get you in the air, and drag—needed to keep you from going out of control, is actually designed to get you nowhere, which is why drag is a drag. You need the whole enchilada, ingredients mixed just right, to achieve the alchemy of controlled flight.

I had a professor in college, whose name for reasons I would prefer not to mention, I don’t recall. (I give in– he slept with my ex-girlfriend, and even though she was an ex, it still bothered me.) He was fond of saying, half-jokingly I hope, that when he died he wanted the definition of “gestalt” written on his tombstone. It was a silly thing to say, but as a mnemonic device it worked well because I remember the phrase now, more than 40 years later. A gestalt, Dr. Whatshisname said, was the “ongoing, contingent, sociobiological organization of attention and action.”

We experience life in chunks—in organizations of attention and action, and each chunk is not only ongoing, but it is also contingent on what comes before and after it. The “before” part is obvious, but the “after” part was something illuminated by behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner, who insisted that what we do is often determined by what immediately follows it.

Contingency is important, because it is how things are connected, how we are all interdependent, and why if a tree falls in the forest we may not hear it but it will still scatter the ants beneath it.

As long as you keep cutting the enchilada in half, and realize that you still have an enchilada, then each half becomes a whole unto itself, especially if you keep eating it. You’ve just created smaller enchiladas. That is why in order for something to really be whole, it needs to be something greater than the sum of its parts. If, on the other hand, you were able to break down the enchilada the way I remember breaking down water in chemistry class into hydrogen and oxygen, interesting things begin to happen.

Enchiladas require tortillas, which require flour or masa, and water. To make the cheese you will probably need some milk, rennet, and maybe a starter culture. You might even add some salt to be adventurous. Then there’s the chile pepper, and maybe a little guacamole. None of those things on their own look or taste anything like an enchilada. But, mixed together in the right proportions and under the right Mexican sun, something greater than the mere sum of its parts begins to emerge.

It is, of course, alchemy when we mix ingredients to create something transformative. It is alchemy when we mix lime with sand and water to create concrete, which by some magic of physics or chemistry becomes the building I am writing this in, and alchemy when you add rice to salmon roe and quail eggs to create the transcendent mixture of earth, sea and sky we call sushi. It is alchemy when we fall in love, and even greater alchemy when we remain in love. It is alchemy when we fly an airplane. It is alchemy that is the foundation and the very substance of the feeling of awe, which so many have equated with a sense of holiness, numen, or spirituality.

Flying, as is true with everything we do, is a gestalt—a contingent organization of attention and action. To be up high, beyond the realm even of happy little bluebirds, is an alchemical miracle. As is true for love, good food, and those things that we value most, it is the transformation of disparate elements under the right conditions—a series of intentional acts that taken together exceed the mere sum of its parts. It is, dare I say, the whole enchilada.

The Raven Over our Shoulders

Posted on August 21, 2015 by iraheilveil

I recently read an accident report in which a pilot lost power on the rollout, and then when he heard the engine surge back to life, resumed his takeoff. Just after leaving the ground, the pilot retracted the landing gear, the engine quit again and the pilot died attempting to make the 180-degree turn back to the airport.

In a matter of a very few seconds, the pilot had some important decisions to make. If he had made the decision to abort the takeoff the first time his engine lost power, he would likely be alive enough today to have learned that his fuel was contaminated with water. But perhaps buoyed by the engines roaring back to life, he decided instead to climb out. That was his first bad decision. The second bad decision was to retract his landing gear before reaching the end of the runway. The third was his attempt to turn around rather than find a place to land in front of him. That was the one that sealed his fate.

I don’t fault the pilot for making the decisions he made. We all make them, even the most experienced pilots. But I suspect that once he heard his engine quit as he was advancing down the runway, he may have found himself struggling to manage his fear. We will never know if the pilot panicked, thus preventing him from thinking clearly, or if he calmly made the decisions he thought were the most rational, or most likely, something in between. But if it is fair to say that what killed him was a series of bad decisions, then I think it is also likely that (especially given his instructors’ statements that he had been a thorough and safe pilot) managing fear is a prime suspect in what may have led to those decisions.

There, I suspect, but for the grace of God go all of us. I fear all sorts of things, from germs to failure to success. But I am nothing if not tenacious, and I have learned over the years to try to welcome fear the way Abraham Lincoln is said to have approached his enemies. While some have said that he borrowed the line from a Roman Emperor, when an elderly woman chastised him for not calling Southerners irreconcilable enemies who must be destroyed, Lincoln is reported to have said, “Why, madam– do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

Making friends with our fears is the way to master them. But mastery of our fears does not mean that we eradicate them—it just means that they begin to work for us as opposed to the other way around. I often think about fear as Carlos Castaneda’s raven of death, which constantly flew just behind his shoulder. Death cannot be run from. It will assuredly outfly me so running away from it is a pointless endeavor. Instead, while I often fail, I know my job is to welcome it into the house, feed it, get to know it. If we blindly advance the throttle on takeoff without fear of engine failure, it is more likely to take us by surprise and potentially overwhelm our decision-making ability.

The Annual

Posted on July 10, 2015 by iraheilveil

I returned home from Saigon last week with my airplane’s annual inspection nearly completed. A backup battery was replaced, along with a set of three new tires, bearings greased, airbags and their control device replaced, and a half-broken door release handle fixed.

Owners of airplanes typically have mixed feelings over Big Brother’s requirement that we subject our airplanes to annual inspections. The negative side of the equation is obvious: inspections cost a lot of “aviation units,” a term invented by pilots who prefer not to disclose exact dollar amounts to their spouses.

On the other hand, the benefits are equally as obvious. The fact that the airplanes flying above us are thoroughly inspected by licensed mechanics at least once a year undoubtedly makes those flying inside them and those on the ground below them a lot safer.

When Wednesday rolled around, and my calendar reminded me that I had to fast from 9pm that night until my appointment with my physician the next morning, I couldn’t help but smile at the coincidence that both my airplane and my body were being checked out simultaneously. The FAA requires that pilots over age 40 have a physical every two years, but since I turned 50 I have been getting my own physical annually.

I am not sure that my physician, who is about my age, enjoys poking into my orifices nearly as much as I enjoy looking under the cowling of my beautiful Diamond airplane. I do hope, and am more than reasonably certain, that he knows a lot more about the internal workings of human bodies than I know about internal combustion engines. Fortunately, just as one doesn’t need to know how a car engine works to be a good driver, one doesn’t need to know much about the inner workings of an airplane to be a skilled pilot.

Along with the annual, a pre-flight inspection is done routinely by all pilots, even those flying big birds, before every flight. They are, in effect, largely scaled-down versions of the annual inspection. I was once told that 85% of accidents could have been prevented by an adequate pre-flight inspection. I don’t know if that number is accurate, but it is a very high number.

I can’t imagine that 85% of diseases could be prevented by daily self-inspections. But even if the odds are reversed, and only 15% of diseases could be prevented by routine checks, it is probably still a good idea. Women are encouraged to check their breasts every day, because the earlier one catches any kind of cancer the better the odds of survival. We brush our teeth every day, not just for cosmetic purposes, but because the buildup of bacteria in the gums can lead to the heart and other vital organs. Fair skinned lads such as myself would be wise to check their skin regularly as well, on the lookout for early signs of melanomas.

I suspect the most important tool in conducting an annual inspection that a mechanic has in her tool shed is also the least expensive tool: the checklist. The mechanic runs through a series of items that are required to be dismantled and inspected based on the make, model and vintage of the airplane. A good physical examination does the same thing. The trained physician runs through a series of inspections based on a mental checklist learned through experience, in order to not miss something important.

Requiring that airplanes receive annual inspections by licensed aircraft mechanics is undoubtedly one of the reasons why flying small airplanes has gotten safer over the years. While pilots are required to have physical exams to maintain their flying privileges, fortunately, our government does not require any such thing for the rest of us. But maybe a peak beneath the hood every once in a while is a good idea.

A Note from Saigon

Posted on June 17, 2015 by iraheilveil

I am writing this today from a tea house in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 1, still referred to by many as Saigon. My business here is psychology and autism related, and the closest thing I am getting to aviation is the flight on the two miraculous jets that got me here– Airbus’ spectacular double decker A380, and Boeing’s stalwart triple-seven.

Vietnam is a beautiful country. It would be even more beautiful to see it from a small airplane at a few thousand feet above ground, but that is not possible today because there is no such thing as general aviation here. The skies are reserved for the military and commercial jetliners on flight plans.

To say that the fact that there is no general aviation in Vietnam is the result of communism is an oversimplification. One can say with confidence that when it rains in Vietnam the streets get wet, but it seems as though there is little else one can say with confidence about Vietnam.

Yet, there does seem to be a relationship between the fact that the two “mostly communist” governments in Southeast Asia, Vietnam and Laos, are the countries that have the least going for them in the arena of general aviation. Cambodia, which has been beautifully described recently as “vaguely communist” now has a flourishing albeit young general aviation community. Other countries in the region whose political-economic systems are ostensibly democratic-capitalistic such as the Philippines and Malaysia, have flourishing aviation scenes.

In a previous post I mentioned that growing up in the U.S. I somehow knew that when you wanted to chase another child off a swing you would shout “It’s a free country!” How interesting it is to be socialized (indoctrinated?) into believing in freedom. A private pilot’s license grants another opportunity to define and even treasure this thing we call freedom. Here in Vietnam, a country where flying your own airplane is illegal, and one in which the U.S. lost 60,000 of its children and the Vietnamese sacrificed millions of their own, it is difficult for me to not think about it.

It is fascinating to me what a difference a generation can make. My closest associates here are probably either one or two decades younger than me, and they have little consciousness of the Vietnam war. Vietnamese themselves learn about the war in school, but it seems that very few carry the deeply felt conflict inside them that I do. (Today, a receptionist here told me that she “sees it in my grandparents’ eyes.”)

I filed for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam war, although the draft ended before my paperwork could be processed. Clearly, I opposed the war at the time, but my filing for CO status was duplicitous if not downright disingenuous. I was against the Vietnam war, and I was against war in general, but I also believed that there was such a thing as a just war (such as the Second World War).

The more I learn about the Vietnam war, the more I believe that both sides were right, and both were wrong. Isn’t that true of damn near everything? The North Vietnamese had a legitimate gripe– their country had been arbitrarily torn in half and the south was dominated by corrupt, imperialist nations that had subjugated and tortured their people for generations. The South Vietnamese treasured their freedom and democratic ideals and were fighting the spread of communism. These were noble goals on both sides.

The dominoes did not fall when we lost the war. The Viet Cong did not commit genocide or even torture their own citizens when they won, although they imprisoned many and “re-educated” many others. In fact, it was the post-war unified Vietnamese that fought off a Chinese invasion and routed the genocidal Khmer Rouge from Cambodia. Today’s Vietnam is one in which the communist party is considered “irrelevant” or a nuisance by most Vietnamese. There is no free press here, but there is widespread Internet access. It is a system rife with corruption, as is the case with governments throughout most of the world.

One of the reasons I love to fly is because I feel a deep sense of freedom when I do it. I don’t know how to explain that phenomenon. It just is. And, perhaps coincidentally, flying one’s own airplane is also a symbol of freedom. As Vietnam continues its gradual path toward openness, I suspect that general aviation will emerge. Laos, closely aligned with Vietnam, has its very first flying club, and perhaps that will serve as a model for Vietnam.

Although I see faults in the American system, as deep as those faults can be, it remains one of the few places in the world where I could get in my airplane, start the engine up, and legally fly from one end of the continent to another without letting anyone know about it. I can even do it legally without turning on my radio. Sure, Langley will have me on its radar and will be watching every move I make, but as long as I don’t stray too close to Disneyland or Washington DC, they are going to leave me alone. That is freedom, and that is noble.

Diversions

Posted on May 26, 2015 by iraheilveil

Flying my Diamond DA40 home from a conference in Las Vegas with two colleagues on board not long ago was uneventful, until I came to the formidable mountains that comprise part of the Transverse Range. While most of the flight from Las Vegas is over the wide Mojave Desert, my home airport in Santa Paula is tucked in a valley on the other side of those mountains. The tops of the mountains were obscured completely by a line of clouds that extended as far as I could see in both sideways directions, and the tops of the clouds were higher than my normally-aspirated airplane could climb.

For an instrument-rated pilot this would present no problem, but I have yet to get that rating, so for me it was a challenge. It wouldn’t have been difficult, mind you, but it would have been entirely illegal, and certainly unsafe for me and the passengers on board given my lack of “actual” (as opposed to virtual) time in the clouds.

After looking in both directions, it became clear that I immediately needed to alter my flight plan and make a diversion. I disconnected the autopilot, and started a slow, wide turn to the left, with the intention of doing a wide circle while I figured out my next move. I informed the passengers that there might be a delay getting home, and then called ATC to let them know that I was altering my planned route due to the line of clouds in front of me. The composed voice came back with the query, “Are you instrument capable and qualified?”

I answered quickly that I was capable but not qualified, which means I have the appropriate instruments on board but was not certified. The business-like voice simply said, “OK.”

I was considering diverting right or left to see if there was a clearing in the line of clouds that I couldn’t see yet, and what airports lay in wait below or just behind, and what the best place might be to spend the night, when the controller came back on the radio. “One Romeo Alpha, it looks like there’s an opening in the clouds about 10 miles to the north.”

At about 150 miles an hour, that’s a pretty short diversion, so I thanked the controller and headed north. Sure enough, there was a nice gap in the clouds that took me over the mountains near Santa Barbara, and I was able to turn south and head down the coast to my home airport with only a short delay.

Most pilots hate diversions. Diversions make those aboard late, and usually create additional expense in fuel, time and lodging. But diversions are a necessary part of getting there safely.

I would like to believe that having to divert is one of the more wonderful things about flying. It forces us down a road that, if not less traveled, is certainly less anticipated. And it forces us to live in the moment, a skill I have never been very good at, managing to immerse myself in the nostalgia of yesteryears, or the expectations and fantasies of life downstream.

There is a wonderful story that has been circulating the internet for many years now about how being a parent of a child with autism is like expecting to take a trip to Italy and ending up in Holland. The point of the story is that if you live your life mourning the fact that you aren’t in Italy you’ll end up missing the beauty of Holland.

I do think that people who are good at accepting life’s diversions do so partly because they don’t allow themselves to get too attached to outcomes. Lao Tzu said it best when he said, “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”

I hate surprises, but I am convinced that surprise is where the adventure begins. If the original goal, the runway on which you intend to land, is suddenly unsafe, then it’s time to open the throttle and find another one.

When I think of that simple diversion required of me to keep out of the clouds, I think of some small things I might have done differently. It forced me to think under pressure, and later to review those decisions and therefore rehearse doing it better the next time. But we all arrived safely, and enjoyed extraordinary scenery along the way that we would not have seen otherwise: wispy clouds teasing the mountain ridges, the beautiful Pacific Ocean and the California Coast, and the rolling foothills accompanying us home.

When All Else Fails: Regulate

Posted on May 18, 2015 by iraheilveil

I don’t like the word “regulation.” It feels and sounds ugly to me. I suppose that is because when I think of regulations, I think about them as a set of rules foist upon us by politicians, designed to govern behavior externally– echoes of “make your bed, Ira,” or simply, “you have to go to school, Ira.”

But in my day job as a psychologist, the word “regulation” often appears with the word “self-“ preceding it, and that gives it a different connotation. Self-regulation means to be in control of one’s self, to have a smoothly operating thermostat capable of turning on the heat when needed and cooling down as the situation demands. It is a popular word today, perhaps because it is less theory-bound than the term “ego strength,” which essentially meant the same thing but was promulgated by those sex-obsessed Freudians.

Most pilots I know are like most people I know, and they hate regulations imposed upon them by the government. On the other hand, they tend to be in favor of self-regulation, especially when it comes to things such as determining what medical conditions should prevent them from flying.

As a pilot, I am aware of the fact that the vast majority of accidents are caused by something called “loss of control.” It can happen at any time, but it often happens when life offers up a surprise, such as a malfunctioning instrument or a sudden weather change. Accident investigations of such major catastrophes as Air France 447 and Colgan 3407 revealed that the pilots were “startled” by the events unfolding in the cockpit, and that the startle response may have led to a deterioration in the pilots’ reasoning ability.

Regulations designed to prevent such disasters are often aimed at improving training of how to recognize and respond to specific emergency scenarios, which is all good. But let’s face it, the whole point of the so-called startle effect is that, almost de facto, when faced with a real emergency, the human body is designed to flood the bloodstream with hormones that simultaneously have the effect of muting learned responses and instigating a primitive fight or flight response.

One of the oldest clichés is that a pilot’s license is a “license to learn.” I deeply appreciate the ongoing training I avail myself of, as well as the early training I received in which certain fundamentals were drilled into my head. One of those was the mantra that, above all else, one must “fly the airplane.” That mantra is there because, when the fit hits the shan, pilots and humans in general forget the basics. Whether panic takes over completely, or one concerns oneself so much with problem-solving that one fails to focus on the simple basics of flying, the failure to self-regulate can have devastating consequences.

“Flying the airplane” is a metaphor for self-regulation. When the unanticipated bill arrives from the IRS, when the person in the Escalade cuts you off on the freeway, when the process server knocks on your door, the first thing to do is to take a deep breath and simultaneously level your wings. Slow down if you’re going too fast, or speed up if you’re going too slowly. Above all, don’t let the airplane fly you. Self-regulation beats the other kind hands down.

Autism in Love

Posted on April 23, 2015 by iraheilveil

I am on a Boeing 757, sitting in the economy section, one of the few times I am grateful for having short legs. I am returning home from New York where a film I conceived and executive produced just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It is truly an honor, given the numbers: 6700 films were submitted and only 120 were selected for the competition. The film, “Autism in Love,” is in the “world documentary feature” category, competing against 11 others in its category for a coveted award.

One of the films in competition with “Autism in Love” is called “In Transit,” a beautiful and moving documentary interweaving stories told by real passengers (i.e., not actors) on the Empire Builder, an AMTRAK train whose route goes from Seattle to Chicago. The stories themselves are captivating, but I was equally captivated by the fact that the stories were told as the American landscape unwound behind it, creating a kind of metaphor within a metaphor. Each person seems to be in some sort of transition in their lives, moving internally as they physically move through the landscape. But on a train, the sensation is that it is the landscape that is moving, so that one’s internal movement is mirrored by the movement of the landscape. And of course, all that occurs on a screen projecting a “moving picture,” a medium that is, by definition, about movement.

I am doing the same thing now, traveling at 514 miles per hour, four-fifths the speed of sound, 40,000 feet above the ground. We humans, through the ingenuity provided by our cerebral cortexes, create and build machines that allow us to use nature in order to defy it. We build machines that move us from one place to another for many reasons, but ultimately we build machines that move us physically in order to move us emotionally.

The film I produced, expertly directed by Matt Fuller, follows the lives of several people diagnosed with autism as they navigate the waters of romance and love. Their lives are very different from one another’s, but they each live in the landscape others have called autism. I have lost any objectivity I might have had about the film, but judging by the reviews I have been reading, it succeeds in a message I was hoping for; that love is love and nearly anyone, despite having a label that others insist prevent them from loving, can teach us about it.

In college days I was taught that humans, by nature and physiology, are novelty seeking animals. That is undoubtedly what makes solitary confinement so punishing. But without the contrast of stability there could be no novelty, just as a figure disappears when the ground around it disappears.

So whether we find ourselves riding the rails of AMTRAK, sitting on a bus, or flying on a Boeing 757, we ultimately remain figures embedded in the world around us. We are moving, or being moved.

For more information on “Autism in Love,” see www.autisminlove.com, or better yet, see “Autism in Love” on Facebook.

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The Psychology of Flying

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