Right Seat: Mind over matter

After you’ve struggled to master 50 stalls, 100 landings, and turns around that same red barn, you’re probably cursing poor hand-eye coordination for your struggles. Given that good coordination is needed to put the airplane where you want it to be, that makes sense.

But it’s our attitude, our fears, and our mindset that determine how well we fly and what we do with our certificate. Moving a yoke or stick to maneuver the machine is a matter of practice. Everything else is experience and mindset.

This is the reason most of us are completely ill-prepared to face the real world of aviation when we earn a pilot certificate. Flight training is great for teaching skills, but it’s terrible for making pilots. We spend so much time working on core skills and so little time on decision making, creating real-world experience, and combating challenges that we are forced to learn these things on our own soon after we earn a certificate.

That struggle between boldly jumping out and cautiously tiptoeing forward is partly what defines who we are as pilots.In this month’s feature “Continuing Education,” author Budd Davisson makes the excellent suggestion to invest in around 10 hours of training soon after getting your ticket in order to gain the confidence to go out on your own. Davisson focuses mostly on skills. He suggests drilling on crosswinds and emergencies, for example. Those are great ways to invest in your education. But I would add another, equally important, goal: Go somewhere.

I learned to fly with the benefit of youthful ignorance. Going a few hundred miles to see a friend, get lunch, or visit family came with a sense of adventure, not challenge. Later I made long journeys in a Piper Cub, and flew over water and dense forest without a second thought. That any of these trips presented a risk of getting lost, having to ditch, or getting into a survival scenario in a 500,000-acre national forest didn’t enter into the calculation. There were places to go, and I was going.

Add on kids, a mortgage, a good job, and people who rely on you, and all of a sudden you have more to lose. That 300-mile trip in a 70-year-old airplane without the benefit of weather information suddenly becomes something to worry about.

That struggle between boldly jumping out and cautiously tiptoeing forward is partly what defines who we are as pilots and what we do with our certificates. If you never push out of your comfort zone, you’ll miss wonderful opportunities to see the world as few can. But if you apply a youthful ignorance to everything you do in aviation, you risk hurting yourself and those you love. The balance between these two isn’t always obvious. Even those butterflies in your stomach can lie. Sometimes they’ll show up much too early and dissuade you from a trip that would be easy and safe. The opposite is true as well.

The best way to negotiate this difficult dance and build confidence is to explore. Go beyond the airport, beyond 50 miles, and occasionally beyond your comfort zone. Apply the skills you learned in training to build the confidence you’ll need as a pilot.