Category Archives: Flying

In the land of reverse command

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There is a beautiful, white and yellow-breasted bird trapped in my office. He keeps flying into the transom, nearly knocking himself unconscious. I opened the door for him to escape, but he doesn’t appear to understand that he needs to fly downwards in order to get free. I suspect it isn’t natural for a trapped bird to fly earthward when frightened.

Last week I read the following from the AP: (MOSCOW) — The pilots of a Boeing 737 that plunged to earth at the Kazan airport, killing all 50 aboard, lost speed in a steep climb then overcompensated and sent the plane into a near-vertical dive, a preliminary report by Russian aviation experts reported Tuesday. The Moscow-based Interstate Aviation Committee… said the plane’s two pilots had failed to make a proper landing approach on the first attempt and then began a second run. They put the plane’s engines on maximum power, raising the plane’s nose up at a sharp angle, causing a quick loss of speed. At the height of about 700 meters (2,200 feet), the crew then tried to gain speed by taking the plane into a dive but hit the ground at a near-vertical angle in a spectacular crash.

There is a critical notion in flying poetically referred to as the region of reverse command (also called “behind the power curve.”) It is a place you can find yourself when, in order to get the airplane to do what you want it to do, you have to do the exact opposite of what you normally do. When we find ourselves out of our comfort zone, we often do what our instincts tell us to do, but doing so can kill us, and as was the case for the Russian pilots, others as well.

Normally, pushing the nose of an airplane up and adding power will make it fly higher. But in the region of reverse command, pushing the nose up and raising the power actually makes the airplane descend. Being behind the power curve happens when certain types of drag exceed power resulting in the loss of that precious commodity called lift. It usually happens when flying slowly. In that case, should you decide you want to climb, you may point your nose up, add power, and end up spinning to the ground.

The solution to being behind the power curve is to do the reverse of what is intuitive, which is to put your nose down and add power, reducing drag. When I was a young psychology trainee in Kentucky, a client of mine had been hospitalized because she was weak and fainted in the cafeteria. She remained in the hospital for three days, refusing to eat. I was fortunate enough to have arrived to visit her at the hospital while a meal (meat loaf) was delivered. The client carried on about how horrible the food was at the hospital, and how she couldn’t eat such lousy food. I had just attended a lecture on paradox in my behavior therapy course, so I proceeded to describe in excruciating detail how horrible the food looked, the conditions in the kitchen where it was made, and what it undoubtedly consisted of (yes, I said it). As I was reciting this she became increasingly agitated. Finally she thrust her fork angrily into the meatloaf and shoved it into her mouth, eating for the first time in nearly a week. I did the opposite of what was intuitive, and what my patient expected as well, and I aligned with her symptom. If she wanted to defy me, just as she did with everyone who tried to get her to eat, she would have to eat.

When I was the CEO of my last company, I told our top administrators that our salaries were getting out of line, and we needed to reduce the average salary we were paying to our staff. Because I didn’t want to be a micro-manager, I didn’t tell them how to reduce salaries, but I gave them the number I wanted to see.  When I heard that in order to reduce salaries they instituted a “salary freeze” I was furious, because I knew this would lead to massive discontent. When I expressed dismay, I was asked how else but by instituting a salary freeze could we accomplish our goal. I said that all that needed to be done to reduce average salaries was to hire two additional staff at lower pay rates for every staff member who was given an increase. I don’t think the administrators were incapable of thinking out of the box. They just didn’t realize that even within the box, all you needed to do was to understand that sometimes you can go in one direction and still get to the other.

It is a little bit like the “Chinese finger traps” of childhood, in which you would place one finger in one end and a finger from the other hand in the other end, and no matter how hard you tried you couldn’t pull your fingers out.  If you wanted to release your fingers, you had to move them toward each other and not opposite each other in order to loosen the grip.   

I left the office to run some errands, and the bird finally found his way out. When we are overly stressed, we revert to what is natural. But when the bird gave up fighting its natural tendencies to fly upwards, and went “in reverse,” it escaped its dire predicament. Like the Chinese finger traps, sometimes we need to relax and go in the direction opposite to our intuition to find our way.

 

Why Do Pilots Fly?

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When flying out of busy airports throughout the country, pilots often have to wait in a queue of airplanes before moving up to the runway line. As a pilot, you sit in the cockpit, having completed all but the last few items on the pre-takeoff checklist, inch toward the runway, and wait for the tower controller to release you by calling out your airplane’s name (in my case, “One Romeo Alpha”) and uttering three magical words: clear for takeoff.

You release the brakes, key the microphone and let the controller know you were listening: “One Romeo Alpha, clear for takeoff.” Or, if you are in a particularly jovial mood, “One Romeo Alpha’s rolling.” You do the final few things on your checklist and then subvocally recite the mnemonic “lights” (all appropriate lights are on), “camera” (transponder is set, which allows you to be “seen” on radar), “action!” (all engine gauges are where they should be), you look to the sky to make sure you aren’t inadvertently rolling into an approaching airplane that the controller might have missed, cross the huge threshold marks on the runway, and line up on the centerline. The great moment has arrived. With your right foot on the rudder pedal you gently but firmly firewall the throttle. The engine wakes up, roars to its maximum, and the carriage in which you are blessed to sit rolls down the runway as you anticipate leaping off the earth in a single bound. Then, as the wings split the air unevenly, you lift off the earth, defying both the gravity of the earth and the gravity of life below.

It has been said that flying small airplanes is “hours of boredom filled with moments of terror.” But if that were all it was, none of us would ever climb up into another cockpit. There is a magic to flying not unlike the magic created by the best magicians. By craftily combining the laws of physics with the audience’s desire to believe in the impossible, magicians create awe-inspiring reactions. Indeed, awe is the feeling we get when we move into the transcendent space of doing that which by all rights should not be doable. Like magicians, pilots use their skills to do the thing that God or evolution did not grant us the natural ability to do. We don our mechanical flight suits and guide human crafted marvels of engineering to break the chains of gravity, allowing those of us fortunate enough to sit up front to see the world around us in an entirely different way.

By doing that which seems impossible, flying becomes a symbol of hope, a reminder that the obstacles in our path are only just that. It is a reminder that there are ways to break free of even the most daunting of challenges.

It is in just that spirit that I inaugurate my new blog, “Clear for Takeoff.” It will be about aviation, but I will continue to write about the things that have consumed my life and have interested me up to this point: autism, religion, writing, management, psychology and psychotherapy, photography, and whatever else moves me in the hope that it will move you too.

The “repurposing” of this blog imitates the repurposing of my life, so with the three liberating words that will be this blog’s moniker, let’s get off the ground and enjoy the limitless sky ahead of us. If you haven’t already done so, hit the “subscribe” button on the right, and join me for the ride.