But there is something worrisome about this behavioral trend that seems to be developing. Is there a problem brewing that may also become big? There's a big chance that it will.
When we talk about flight training, most of the attention paid to personality traits that place a student in conflict with the cockpit curriculum focuses on shyness and uncertainty. Action that is too little or too late is dangerous when an aircraft is demanding the pilot's care now. Without getting psychological about it, achieving some positive results from assertive behavior, or doing some training dedicated to dispelling fear, usually cures any reticence to fly. For instructors, there isn't much mystery in how to deal with the problem; it just takes patience.
A rarer puzzle and one harder to piece together is the pilot trainee who tackles--almost literally--his training challenges. But once encountered, this kind of student is memorable. Many people are awed by big behavior, and flight instructors are no exception. If someone seeking to become a pilot (typically a high-powered professional or middle-aged executive type) goes through life moving and shaking the world around him and exuding an air of decisiveness, be sure that this personality trait will not be left outside the airport gate on training day. Of course such behavior could be a mask for uncertainty, but that's hard to spot (until flight training uncovers it, which it inevitably does, at which point the student reverts to the shyness described above). But in the other case, a flight instructor learns the hard way that big is not always beautiful; a take-charge person may be most ag-gressive when caution and retreat would be the choice of a more prudent individual. This kind of person can get both of you in trouble. Once a flight instructor has dealt with a few such students, wariness kicks in.
Students with this set of traits can be found at all levels, but it is often the already certified pilot pursuing additional ratings who develops a true and confident swagger around the aircraft. One such pilot, an affluent professional accustomed to his existence at the pinnacle of professional and social life, thought that his aircraft wasn't giving him enough respect during his pursuit of an instrument rating. His CFII was confused, the student thought. The instructor had the audacity to harp on minor lapses and even offered the opinion that the student was not yet ready for a practical test for an instrument rating. This the instructor illustrated to the unbelieving student by watching as he committed a number of errors that he should not have been making, and then requesting that the student salvage the blown approaches in the only safe, correct manner: executing a missed approach.
The student thought that missed approaches were a waste of his time, so he handled the conflict by going out on his own in his aircraft and repeatedly flying the procedures in question under visual flight rules, free of the distraction created by having an instructor on board. When he finally went for his checkride, his big behavior and condescending manner made the designated examiner uneasy. And when the fellow casually tuned and identified the navaid needed for his next instrument approach but failed to notice that he had tuned the radio to a similar but incorrect frequency, the examiner flunked him. The student complained to his CFII about the audacity of the examiner, harping on minor lapses like that. Clearly the cause of the failure resided in an external source: the examiner.
People like this can get you in quite a fix if you let them. The owner of a high-performance, single-engine airplane had an appointment 200 miles away along a mountainous route. A warm front was pushing through with rain, turbulence, and low clouds. Ice might be possible. It was early morning with no pilot reports available. The aircraft owner, not yet instrument rated, stewed in frustration at his instrument flight instructor's seemingly overcautious attempts to procure more information about the proposed flight--information in which the owner displayed little interest. Finally, he strode to where the CFII sat and protested: "Look, I'm a businessman. I know how to make decisions."
Truer words have never been spoken or remembered. But do the methods used by a businessman to make decisions translate to the cockpit where the risks are more immediate and irrevocable? The "go" decision, when it was finally reached, was made at the limits of the instructor's comfort, given the man, machine, and weather concerned. And even then, surprises lurked in the student's confident, impatient exhortations to fly the route. The surprises consisted of an inoperative electrically powered outside air temperature gauge--crucial in near-freezing conditions--and an intermittently bad nav radio, neither of which could be detected on the ground but complicating matters considerably in the air. Afterwards, if these gaps in the aircraft's suitability for such a flight made any impression on the owner, he never showed it. The instructor, on the other hand, vowed to be even more cautious in his future approach to pilots with big ideas.
Are you surprised, perhaps even relieved, that big isn't always beautiful in flight training? Sometimes the hardest thing for a pilot to do is to resist the temptation to get into a situation over his or her head. Check out the academic discussion of pilot personalities contained in Chapter 16 of the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge. It is the chapter on "Aeronautical Decision Making," and your ability to do just that will be fair game for testing on every flight examination that you take during your flying career. In a table of definitions in the chapter, ADM is defined tersely as "a systematic approach to the mental process used by pilots to consistently determine the best course of action in response to a given set of circumstances."
An equally terse definition is afforded the word personality. It is here where the warning signs of many future problems for pilots can be found, especially if it is by dint of that personality that the pilot has achieved the big successes in other parts of his life. Personality is defined as "the embodiment of personal traits and characteristics of an individual that are set at a very early age and extremely resistant to change." Apply the definition of personality to someone's willingness to practice the definition of ADM and see where the problem lies.
Obviously then, a flight instructor should assign Chapter 16 as reading material to a student dealing with an unduly aggressive approach to flight training, then sit down and discuss the material--perhaps supplementing the discussion with some examples of mishaps that occurred at the hands of pilots matching the profile? Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. An ironic footnote that could be tacked onto the PHAK definition of personality is that pilots who are most susceptible to this kind of problem are often acutely self-aware! That's right--they know what they are doing even while they are doing it. Some even joke about it and proceed to rattle off the names of friends or colleagues they consider even better examples of "the problem" than themselves.
One memorable student could even recite in detail how someone just like him died in a crash of a twin-engine aircraft because he pushed on into impossible weather rather than turning around. Listening to such recitals can be...eerie. Neither the flight instructor nor the student offering charming insights into the self should be disarmed by the humor, or lulled into thinking that awareness of the problem lends itself to increased safety. So what does?
Authority, more than anything. Fear of enforcement. Knowing that a former flight instructor, or an FAA official, or even just a closely watching local airport community, has its eye on things. It may be logical to assume that a survivable "bad experience" might temper the traits that led a pilot astray, but here the anecdotal experience observed by this flight instructor splits 50/50 and makes reaching conclusions difficult.
One fellow whose case comes to mind was argumentative but compliant when questioned on his methods; he had had a bad accident years ago and retained some humility from the experience, although even years later you could observe him fighting his innate impatience and struggling with the urge to do things his own way.
The opposite reaction is seen when an errant pilot merely decides that throwing money at the problem--buying better ice protection, a bigger engine, or more sophisticated nav gear--is the answer, as it might be when making decisions about life on the ground. But this new capability of aircraft and equipment inevitably emboldens the big thinking that started the original process in motion--and the cycle begins anew.
Dan Namowitz is an aviation writer and flight instructor. A pilot since 1985 and an instructor since 1990, he resides in Maine.
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Links to additional resources about the topics discussed in this article are available at AOPA Flight Training Online.
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