Perfect pilot people

"According to the report, the co-pilot had been at the controls when the aircraft, registration N497CA, was damaged on an aborted landing. The upset co-pilot apologized before departing the plane during the subsequent diversion.” (“Left the Plane Without a Parachute: NTSB Report on North Carolina Accident,” by Victoria Bryan, Aerotime)

This story is disturbing for all kinds of reasons, but mostly because when I heard it for the first time, I thought, yeah, I know the pressure he was feeling. One might think that a pilot’s worst fear would be crashing, bending metal, or not making it home, but that’s not really what keeps me up at night. And if you care enough to read an aviation magazine, to constantly think about getting better at flying, I bet you’re right there with me. For many, one of the worst aviation nightmares would be making a mistake and losing the respect of our peers. It often feels like making an error in an airplane is the cardinal sin.

Why is our aviation culture this way? Maybe it’s because we can’t afford to celebrate errors as learning opportunities the way other industries can; a mistake for us could mean bodily harm. And even if you aren’t hurt physically, that one mistake will stay on your record, and could mean losing your pilot certificate or a future job offer, right? Actually, this narrative we tell ourselves is not quite true. Most of us long ago made peace with the risk of injury in an airplane, and the FAA doesn’t typically revoke certificates for honest mistakes. Plus, having an incident on your record doesn’t mean that you won’t get that dream job. If anything, you might have a story to tell on your interview, a story about growth and improvement, of all things. I think the real reason we carry around this pressure of being perfect pilots is because it makes up our identity as a person. It gets to the very heart of how we measure our worth. But fellow perfectionists, here’s the truth of the matter: failure is not something you are; it is something you did.

One of my favorite authors, Brené Brown, an outspoken Texan with a doctorate in social work, puts it this way. “I define shame as the intensely painful feeling…of believing that we are flawed—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.” So, what is the antidote? In her book, Daring Greatly, Brown says it’s pretty simple: “Shame derives its power from being unspeakable. That’s why it loves perfectionists—it’s so easy to keep us quiet. If we cultivate enough awareness about shame to name it and speak to it, we’ve basically cut it off at the knees.”

So, what does that mean for us perfect pilot people? We need to talk to each other about more than horsepower and airspeed. We need to get real, so that when we make a mistake, we are comfortable talking about it. That way our flying friends don’t have to make the same mistakes we did. And they’ll know that when they do mess up, they’re in good company.

At one of our monthly instructor meetings, a CFI voluntarily told us all a story about his recent flight mishap. He was ferrying an airplane for a friend and encountered icing, but he didn’t realize the problem right away. They started getting error messages on the primary flight display and multiple instrument failures before the airplane embarked on a wild ride, getting way off altitude and airspeed. After an “Oh, $#@!” moment, they turned on the deice equipment and got the airplane back under control. When he finished his story, do you think we all whispered about him in the hallways thinking he was incompetent? On the contrary; that meeting went long because we had so many questions. We wanted to know why the temperature changed so quickly, what it looked like in the cockpit when the instruments failed, and how they figured it out and eventually saved themselves. We were curious and empathetic and wanted to use his experience to make ourselves more informed pilots.

That instructor gave us an incredible gift, speaking the mishap aloud like that, showing us that shame has no place among a group of people who are honestly trying to do their best. He could have carried that bad flight around with him, kept it quiet, and let us go on thinking that he was perfect—but he didn’t.

So, let’s talk about it all. Our failed checkrides. Our bad landings. Our unintentional deviations. That time the airplane, the wind, or task saturation got the better of us. And if you ever find yourself thinking that you’re alone in your flaws, don’t forget we all have something in common: We’re not perfect pilots...we’re human.

myaviation101.com