Poison in the classroom
Three of us dutifully recited our flying experience and current professional activity, and answered a few friendly questions from the instructor. Then it was LP's turn. (Initials for the nickname I secretly assigned him: Low Pressure. It seemed apt, considering the perpetual gray, gloomy cloud hanging over his head.)
LP began by revealing with a scowl that he had "washed out" of the Reserves. Hmmmm...not sure I would volunteer that info, I thought. Guess he's just being brutally honest. He went on to say that after the Reserves he enrolled in simulator-based regional airline training with a career-oriented flight school when they up and pulled the plug on the program, leaving him high, dry, and broke.
Whew, I thought, this is one hard-luck dude. Bitter, too.
Sure enough, in the space of a few hand-wringing minutes he managed to convince his fellow students and the instructor that he had been treated unfairly by the military and that flight school, the world was out to get him, and he hated people in general. A little while later, just to put an exclamation point on things, he repeated that he had washed out of the Reserves before earning his wings.
This guy had an attitude, a bad attitude, and it was apparent to everyone in the room that he was going to have a difficult time with the training.
Which he did. Every evening we got together to review the day's notes and puzzle through some of the more difficult concepts. LP spent the time complaining, mostly about himself. "I don't understand this. The instructor is going too fast. How am I supposed to figure this out if I've never done this stuff before?" And so on.
In class he asked for extra copies of a handout. It was a fill-in-the-blank memory aid covering limitations and emergency procedures for the airplane we were training on. "How many would you like?" the instructor asked. "Twenty," he said, raising eyebrows all around. "I learn through repetition," he explained, adding that by filling in the blanks 20 times he stood a better chance of retaining the material.
The instructor blanched, looked at LP quizzically, and then regained his composure. He'd never had such a request before--20 copies of a simple practice sheet--but hey, whatever works. "I'll get them for you," he said without a hint of exasperation.
I can't speak for the instructor, but exasperation is a pretty accurate word to describe what we students were feeling by then. LP's bad attitude and lower-than-low self-esteem had clouded the entire classroom and threatened to poison two weeks of training for all of us.
Attitude is one of those words that are hard to define when used in the context of a person's state of mind; you just know it when you see it. In a learning environment, attitude has to do with willingness to learn, work ethic, and confidence. LP had a good work ethic--he took copious notes in class, then read and reread them at night (along with filling in all those practice forms, of course).
What he did not have was a good attitude about actual learning in general, and himself in particular. It appeared to us that he carried a massive chip on his shoulder, apparently the result of his previous bad experiences with military flight training and the regional airline school. Sitting alongside the big chip was an LP Mini-Me who was constantly whispering in his ear. "You can't do this," Mini-Me would whisper. "You're not worthy of this training."
We couldn't see or hear Mini-Me, of course, but we knew he was there. How else to explain LP's constant disparaging of himself and his prospects for getting through the training successfully?
Aviation training isn't the easiest education around. Depending on what you're trying to learn, it may encompass arcane aerodynamics, obscure federal regulations, complex operating techniques and procedures, and in the case of aircraft, industrial themes like hydraulics, electricity, engines, and pneumatics. You have to be motivated to learn this stuff.
A bad attitude about academics, or about the specific subject matter ("I hate electrical systems!") just makes it that much more difficult to understand and absorb the material. LP seemed to relish his aggressively bad attitude.
Everyone has a bad book-learning day. When the first academic discussion of the classroom day fails to make sense, everything that builds on it just adds to the confusion. Bad days happen in flight training as well. The landings you could perform with skill just a few days ago now seem beyond reach. You've lost the feel for speed control on final, for timing the flare, for judging pitch attitude to make a main-wheels-first touchdown, and, man, is it frustrating.
Bad training days are normal, and instructors expect to see them occasionally in their students. We make steady, encouraging progress, and then we hit a plateau. The important thing is that when times get tough, we maintain a big-picture perspective, keep our eye on the prize, and press on regardless to cross that plateau and start climbing again.
The ironic thing about LP was that he was learning the material. When we quizzed each other in the evening, he would nail the right answers every time. Yet, he persisted in denigrating himself. "I can't learn this stuff," he would complain.
I concluded early on that LP's bad attitude was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even though he was capable of learning the material and in fact demonstrated it, his defeatist attitude would win out and he would fail. His two previous attempts at big aviation training goals had failed for one reason or another, and he seemed resigned to a life of failure.
I was partly right. LP got through the initial written and oral tests, but the intensive week of simulator training that followed provided him with a new opportunity to revel in failure. Sure enough, things started to go south. LP complained of an inability to hold heading and altitude. His instructor became convinced he needed additional training and rescheduled his checkride for a later time.
I completed my training and left before I learned of LP's fate. I want to believe that he got through it--the training organization, any aviation training organization, exists to see students complete the training successfully, not fail.
Even if he was successful this time, it looked like he was in for a rocky future. The class was his price of admission to a job as copilot for a business jet charter service. He was about to become a professional, and professional pilots train often.
How would the next event go? Was he over his bad attitude, or would it return to interfere with his ability to learn and progress to the left seat? For his sake and for the sake of his customers, his employer, and his future fellow trainees, I hope it's the former.
Mark Twombly is a writer and editor who has been flying since 1968. He is a commercial pilot with instrument and multiengine ratings and co-owner of a Piper Aztec.
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