Category Archives: Aviation

Giving Thanks

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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.

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.

Inattentional Blindness, or Hide It in Plain Sight

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imagesI have been known to search for my car keys when they are in my hand, or nervously prance around looking for my glasses when they were perched on top of my head.  Worse than that, I have even looked for my glasses while I was wearing them.  After all, it makes it much easier to find them. If you want to hide something, they say, put it in plain sight.

In the 1990’s, a group of researchers coined the term “inattentional blindness” to refer to the effect of not seeing something due to one’s attention being focused elsewhere.  The research that evolved from this approach was compelling.

It turns out that inattentional blindness is not only common, but it can easily kill you.  I have heard it said, for example, that the last thing many motorcyclists remember seeing before an accident are the eyes of the driver of the car that plowed into them. The driver of the car looks right at the motorcyclist, but because he isn’t expecting to see him, he just doesn’t.

In one study, a group of people were shown a short film showing three people in black T-shirts and three people in white T-shirts dribbling and tossing basketballs among them.  The subjects were asked to count how many times the players in white shirts caught a ball.  In the middle of the film, a woman in a black gorilla suit walks onto the floor, stops, turns, and waves at the camera.  She then slowly turns and walks off camera.  When the subjects were asked if they had seen anything unusual, fully half of them didn’t report seeing the gorilla at all.  Even when they tried the exercise a second time, a large percentage of the subjects didn’t see the gorilla.

This sort of thing has been replicated many ways and with many groups, including pilots.  In the late 1990s, NASA conducted an experiment to see if commercial pilots would notice distractions while making landings in a flight simulator.  In the simulation, an object rolled out onto the runway just as the plane was landing.  One-fourth of the highly experienced pilots noticed nothing out of the ordinary and landed on top of the distraction.   Interestingly, untrained pilots who had no preconception of what to expect during a landing, always spotted the distraction.

One way to look at inattentional blindness is that it is just one point along the spectrum of attention and distraction.   In order to function, humans must constantly filter extraneous information, and in essence, go on autopilot.  Sleep is a kind of inattentional blindness, which is probably why it isn’t such a good idea to fall asleep while driving a car or flying an airplane.

This may all explain how it is that hiding something in plain sight makes it difficult to find.  Perhaps the act of “looking” for something is its own form of distraction; we are engaged in the looking and not the seeing.   Seek and ye shall find may be a truism, but perhaps if ye seek too much ye shall find nothing at all.

At Onement

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images-3Perhaps the most solemn of holidays in Judaism is Yom Kippur, which has been translated roughly as the “day of atonement.”  Over the years rabbis I have known have pointed out that the English word “atonement” can also be read as “at-one-ment,” which is a slightly less than clever way of suggesting that atoning for one’s sins can also be seen as a way of being “at one” with God.

Being at one with another person can be viewed as the height of intimacy (or idiocy), and being at one with an activity can be described with that lovely term from the humanistic psychology movement as a “peak experience.”   The gestaltists described those experiences as transcendent moments of joy and elation– moments that float above and beyond everyday life.  Finding unity with God is perhaps the ultimate religious transcendent experience, at least during one’s corporeal lifetime.

Atoning, i.e., asking for forgiveness, is not automatic for humans; we must learn to forgive, because while erring is human, forgiving is not.  It is, as the saying goes, divine.  But on Yom Kippur, the task is not to forgive others but instead to ask for God’s forgiveness of our own sins.   It is repentance.

Now, the sins we are asking forgiveness for are the ones we have done against both God and humans.   God may choose to forgive us for those sins, but the people who we sinned against may not.   That’s up to them.   God’s forgiveness can only save our lives, but it cannot move others to forgive us.

So how does it work that being forgiven for our sins makes us “at one” with God?  I always assumed the word “sin” shared the same presumably Latin root as the Spanish word “sin,” which means “without,” as in “without God.”   But that is, as are many of my suppositions, completely off the mark.  The word translated to “sin” that is used in the Bible is the Hebrew word for what an archer did when he or she missed the gold at the center of the target (“het”).   Hence, at least one biblical view of sinning was to simply fall short of what you were aiming for, or missing the mark.

I tried archery in college, thinking it would be an easy “A,” but it was embarrassingly difficult.   I never got close to the target, let alone the bulls-eye.   So the metaphor isn’t a bad one.   Hitting the bulls-eye might just be one of those transcendent moments, those moments of being at one with God, like swishing a 3-pointer from 25 feet out.

What atonement does, according to tradition, is wipe the slate clean (assuming, of course, that you have done the necessary penitence.)  It puts more arrows in your quiver so that you can go out, take aim, and continue to miss the mark.   That is what it means to be human.

But that is no small thing.   Running out of arrows, missing the mark too often leaves us shy of arrows, whether from guilt or sheer exhaustion.  And shy of arrows, we are in it deep when the inevitable bull’s eyes of fortune come charging toward us.  I don’t like Bob Dylan, and I don’t like quoting him, but he had it right when he said “you gotta serve somebody.”   Getting right with Whom or Whatever You Serve can be transcendent.

 

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.

Brother Gerald and the Vending Machine

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images-5As an intern at Metropolitan State Hospital in the late 70’s, I remember being surprised to see a Catholic cleric on the wards where I worked.    Because so many of the patients had perverse religious ideas associated with their psychoses, such as believing that they themselves were Jesus or that they were possessed by demons, I naively thought that having a preacher around could only make things worse.

I never got to know Brother Gerald well, but we did take a few walks together around the grounds of the hospital.   On one of the walks I expressed my reservations about his being there, given the religious ideation of so many of the patients.   He responded, surprisingly, that religion didn’t come up that often.   Mostly he just acted like a friend, he said, someone to bounce ideas off of.

He explained to me that he had no formal training in psychotherapy, but there was no dearth of wisdom in the church and a lot of experienced people with whom he could talk.  At one point he said that sometimes he “prays with” his patients, which really perked me up, because to me that was a pretty religious and potentially damaging thing.

“What kinds of things do you pray for?” I asked him, trying to set a trap.

He looked at me a bit nonplused, and kindly said, “Oh no, we don’t pray for anything.  God isn’t a vending machine.”

To me, prayer was the thing that children did when they knelt by the side of their beds, put their palms together and asked God or Jesus to make their parents stop fighting with each other or for Daddy to stop coming home drunk.   So I asked Brother Gerald what he meant by prayer.

“Prayer is a state of gratitude,” he said.   “It’s an active way of thanking God for all that has been given to us.”

“You mean, if you’re sick you don’t ask God to make you better?  What do you do if someone is sick?”  I wasn’t giving up that easily.

“If someone is sick, your prayers are about being grateful for the strength that they already have to heal themselves.   If someone is afraid, your prayers are your gratitude for the courage they already have to face their fears.”

The affirmation of the aspects of one’s self that can be garnered to heal oneself is a key ingredient in the kind of psychotherapy I have practiced for many years.    (I remember the words of one of my first supervisors, a behaviorist, who used to say “Assume health.”)  But reducing Brother Gerald’s view of prayer to a psychotherapeutic ingredient does it little justice.

After a couple of walks with Brother Gerald, I remember feeling not only glad that he was there, but comforted knowing I could consult with him if I wanted to augment the advice of my supervisors.  Life before or since that internship has not been a bed of roses, but the advice of Brother Gerald has helped me to see and appreciate not only the roses that do appear but also the challenges and tribulations out of which roses might eventually emerge.   For all of that, and for the walks with Brother Gerald around the hospital grounds, I am grateful.

 

 

 

Standing Up to Authority

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Unknown-1In 1978, as United Airlines flight 173 was approaching the airport in Portland, Oregon, the captain noticed an abnormally loud thumping sound, along with an unexpected vibration and a yawing motion to the right.   The captain aborted the approach and began to circle the airport while trying to solve the problem.   Steeped in thought, he circled the airport for an hour, just long enough for all the fuel on board to be exhausted.   The first officer casually mentioned the low-fuel condition to the captain, but the captain was too entrenched in problem-solving mode to heed the warning.

The “good news” was that only 10 of the 189 people aboard died from the resulting crash because the lack of fuel on board prevented a fire on impact.   And as a result of the accident new recommendations were put into place that led to what is now called crew resource management.   This is a set of procedures pertaining to how members of the crew are to relate to one another in order to prevent confusion.   One of these procedures has come to be called the “sterile cockpit rule,” in which no idle chatting is permitted below 10,000 feet (i.e., on takeoff and landing).  Another pertains to the importance of speaking up assertively in the face of authority until a problem is resolved.

When I ran my own company I encouraged my employees to reveal to me any inadequacies they saw in the company.   One of my supervisors sent me an email in which she outlined, in detail, all the things she thought was wrong with the company.   When I received the email, I called to thank her and ask her permission to share her email with the other supervisors.   I heard her take a deep breath, after which she said that she thought my phone call was going to be her termination notice.  I told her that I admired her courage, and that I wanted to not only address her concerns, but to encourage other supervisors to emulate her.

Before I ran my own company, I worked for two non-profit mental health centers.  In both places, I climbed the executive ladder quickly, moving from therapist to assistant clinical director at one agency in a matter of two years, “climbing” over others who were in some cases twice my age.   Even in those days, I knew the “trick” was to meet with the people running the show, and respectfully tell them how they could do their jobs better.   Though I knew I could be fired because they thought I was an egotistical upstart or gunning for their job, I had the good fortune of working for leaders who were not intimidated and did what James Collins (in the classic management tome “Good to Great”) saw as a hallmark of a great company– actively breed and nurture leaders who would ultimately take their pace.

In my private pilot checkride,–the crucible that determines whether or not you earn your ticket to fly, there were three instances in which the examiner raised his eyebrows because I made decisions that were contrary to his expectations, but proved to be in the best interest of safety.   Technically, the student on a checkride is acting as “pilot in command,” but most students emphasize the “acting” and will defer decisions to the examiner, who has the authority to determine your future ability to fly.   It turns out that I made a lot of mistakes during my checkride, and was fully expecting to fail, but when the examiner told me I had passed I looked at him nonplussed, and he said to me, “You earned it.”   I suspect it had a lot to do with the decisions I made to unabashedly yet humbly defy his preferences.

Several major aviation catastrophes later, a lack of standing up to authority has been cited as a potentially critical link in the accident chain.   Without a doubt, leaders need followers in order to lead, but the best leaders know that the best followers are the ones who can be counted on to speak up, even at the risk of being punished for doing so.

 

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.