Everything we do starts upstairs, and flying an airplane is no different than painting a Mona Lisa. It all calls for getting the brain in synch with the hands and keeping the connection refreshed and active throughout the exercise. Maybe that's why Michelangelo was lying on his back while painting the Sistine Chapel - he was resting between brush strokes.
When it comes to flying, many levels of the brain need discussing. The most obvious is the neuron stack that we call "skill." The less obvious brain tracks include things such as what condition our brain is in that day, and that leads to many other sidetracks, all of which have a bearing on how well we'll fly on a particular day, regardless of our skill level.
"Skill" works in one department of the brain and we have to continually monitor and train it.
"Mental Condition" is an entirely different department, but it's hardwired over to the Skill Department, where it adds to or detracts from what the Skill Department is capable of doing on any given day.
First, lets talk about skill and how we can advance it mentally.
Basically, flying is nothing more than knowing when to push and pull certain controls, knobs, and buttons. In its simplest, most elemental form, that doesn't take a lot of brain power. When flying gets complicated, it requires more skill and, therefore, more brain power.
For example, when the wind is steady, right down the runway and we have no turbulence we can cruise along using only a small percentage of our brain power, say 100K. Move the wind 30 degrees to the right, and we'll find ourselves asking a lot more of the Skill Department - much more. We may need a megabyte or better of brain power. Add wind gusts, some turbulence, and an airsick passenger, and we're probably making demands on our brain's Skill Department that are bumping up against the max available.
What further complicates this issue is the rate at which we can access the skill information we've stored. It's the access rate, the speed with which we can think and translate those thoughts into action, that determine how well we handle that situation.
Some people think that skill comes entirely from physically exercising it repeatedly. That's right - and wrong. Yes, we must exercise our skill, meaning our proficiency comes from doing. But that's not all there is to it. Proficiency is actually a question of how much of the skill developed during practice we retain, and that, folks, is a mental exercise, not a physical one.
Our brain's Skill Department is a big storage cabinet, a hard drive into which we stuff as much experience as we can. The question of proficiency and applied skill, nuances of the same thing, is how much of that information is still on our hard drive - and how fast can we can retrieve it.
What we do between flights can affect greatly both the quantity and the accessibility of what we call "skill."
Basically, if the only time we call on our hard drive to manipulate information we've stockpiled is when we're flying, then when we really need it, we'll find much of this information has wandered off to remote files, never to be seen again. Also, what information we do have won't be easily available because the access ports have become sticky with lack of use.
We've already shown that the hands that handle the controls are slaved to the brain, which tells us we should spend at least as much time exercising our brain as we do our hands. If we never think about it, we can't expect to remember how to do something. This is part of our past conversations about fighting brain drain.
Exercising our brain's aero-lobe may sound silly, but don't ever underestimate how well the brain reacts to nothing more than daydreaming. When we're fighting a hard crosswind, our brain will remember when we were thinking about that exact subject the day before, and it will be pre-programmed with all the parameters and conclusions we developed the day before.
If we meet up with that crosswind when our brain that hasn't thought "crosswind" since the last time we flew, we're going to have to ramp up the learning curve and try to access skill files that are heavy with dust.
Fortunately, this is where a training tool that we all have comes into play - the armchair. This also is where one of our most precious personal skills comes to our aid - daydreaming. Precision daydreaming is yet another skill we should strive to perfect for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that while we're daydreaming is one time that we're learning with no Hobbs meter running.
In case you're wondering, we can't log Daydream Flight Training - DFT - but it's so valuable, we should be able to.
The basis of DFT is simply putting your mind in the cockpit a few seconds at a time and trying to direct those thoughts, rather than letting them run around aimlessly. Daydreams are normally pleasurable escapes from reality with no particular goal in mind. This time, however, we're going to focus on given flight maneuvers.
We can make a DFT flight anywhere at any time, but we should avoid doing it while driving. Once we've gotten the hang of daydreaming about flying, it's amazing how it can take over the parts of our mind we need for what we're doing at the moment. Telling a traffic cop that you ran over the fire hydrant because you were practicing ILS approaches in your mind doesn't work.
DFT can, and should, kick into play the second we head out the door for the airport. We won't necessarily be trying to work out a particular skill, but we should, at the very least, visualize the cockpit we'll be sitting in. Visualize what we see out the windows on flare to landing, and where the various controls are located. What we're doing here is simply pre-conditioning our mind to the coming flight by putting it in the cockpit ahead of time. We're getting it warmed up, as it were.
Formal armchair Daydream Flight Training involves sitting down and removing ourselves from our present situation via the usual daydream mechanisms. We're putting our mind into the cockpit and actually flying it. Let's say it's the aforementioned gusty crosswind. We picture ourselves coming down final, and we're crabbing into the wind. Next, we ask how soon we should lower the upwind wing into the wind and use rudder to pull the nose around straight with the runway centerline. On this approach, just for the heck of it, let's do it about two-thirds of the way down final, so we're centering the runway with a wing down for the last bit of the approach.
Remember, we're daydreaming, so we don't actually have to continue the approach. We can rewind and reset our mental projectors at any time. Fly this approach almost to touchdown and press the reset button.
Let's fly the same approach, but this time we won't add the crosswind correction until we start to flare. When we visualize that, we realize that we're working at dropping the wing and pulling the nose straight at the same time we're starting to flare and hold the airplane off the runway while it feels for the ground. Maybe something tells us we're not comfortable with this. We're trying to sort out too many things at once. Even in our daydream we see the images start to fog over with complexity.
Hit the reset button again.
We'll fly the same approach in our mind's eye and do it the way we did the first time. We find it easier. Yeah, we say, doing the crosswind thing before flare does seem easier.
There, we've just made an important decision. We are too easily overloaded if we try to introduce the crosswind correction while flaring. Maybe later, when we're more experienced, we'll combine the two, but right now we'll separate them. Conversely, maybe while we play with dropping the wing during the flare, we noticed that all we really have to do is lean the airplane against the drift and keep the nose straight with our feet, then the elevator is free to handle the flare. Once we've noticed that, you feel more comfortable combining them.
Don't think a decision made in a daydream is going to leave us. Just the opposite is true. This was a conscious mental exercise where we came to a conclusion unfettered by the confusion of actually being in the air. It's likely to stay with us longer than the same decision made over the runway, where events that take place later in the landing overpower the conclusion.
Obviously, the next thing to do is try the conclusion in the air that day. The important thing, however, is that we'll have already run the mental part of the exercise and it's just a matter of trying it with the hands involved. We can apply the DFT approach to everything from putting fuel in the tanks to flying four-point rolls. Run through it a bunch of times in our mind and, when it comes time to do it for real, it's just a matter of fitting reality to the template developed in our imagination.
We're not inventing any new concepts here. It is an accepted fact that forethought will make any situation go more smoothly. No where is that more evident than when flying airplanes.
Earlier we mentioned that our brain's Skill Department shared some cable connections with the Mental Condition department. If there's anything we overlooked when preflighting an airplane it's our mental condition - and what it's likely to do to our skills. Actually, the subject of mental condition is almost a separate subject because it is so important.
Our mental condition is a gossamer, difficult-to-define assessment that can be based on many criteria. We'll only discuss a few of them. But - and this is important - we should never consider flying when a mental warning light flashes and says we're really not up to this flight.
How do we know that a warning light is aglow? For one thing, we may have a subliminal feeling that we're not really looking forward to the flight. Right there, our mind is trying to tell us something. Another warning signal lights up when we sit in the cockpit and "something" isn't right. Our hands aren't focused when they reach for a switch or a control. Or maybe we do reach for something and, at the last moment, realize it's not what we intended. That should really set off the warning lights and we should start asking ourselves if this flight is really necessary.
The checklists our Mental Condition department uses in accessing our state of readiness is long and convoluted, but here are the most obvious items:
The single most important thought about mental condition is simply to recognize that it's a factor. With that realization you'll know to look at yourself in a mental mirror and act accordingly. In the meantime, strap on that old armchair and let your mind wander off into the wild blue for a little Daydream Flight Training. The best part is, no one else knows you've just gone flying without them.
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