A gift, a life lesson, from a flight instructor

 Every rule in aviation is written with blood. Behind every regulation, some sensical, some pesky and oftentimes frustrating to follow, a life was lost as a direct result of flight. Flight training has evolved greatly since the Wright Brothers made their first flight near the turn of the 20th century; 80 years ago, you could simply purchase an airplane from a manufacturer (provided you had the funds), and legally operate it without any formal flight training. Today, the stipulations of flying an aircraft are much steeper, requiring a certain amount of logged flight hours with a proficient and certified instructor performing different tasks for the different degrees of licensing, each license awarded with the passing of a checkride.

For many, the checkride is the first time they have been evaluated one on one. Failure rates are not astronomical, about 30% for people taking their private pilot checkride (the very first license a pilot can receive), but the failure rates are consistent for each certificate at that same number; thus, with some simple math, only about 12% of people who earn their flight instructor certificate get to that point without at least one checkride failure. I am fortunate to have attained my commercial pilot’s certificate with no failures to date, some of which is attributable to training quality, some to innate ability, but also to the luck I have had with gracious examiners. In fact, on my commercial multi-engine checkride over the waters of Long Beach, I broke the altitude restriction during a maneuver that the examiner could have failed me for, but decided not to due to my performance during the rest of the checkride. Others are not so lucky.

So, given the failure rate, and also that each failure not only goes on your permanent record (and will need to be explained during an interview) but also on the record of the instructor, instructors do not tend to hand out checkride endorsements (the blessing that says “go forth and take the test, you are ready for it, my prodigal son of Bob Hoover). The stakes of a checkride infamously generate a sense of great pressure and stress on the student, regardless of how well they have prepared. It varies from person to person; i.e., if you are just after your private pilot’s certificate to fly around an airplane as a hobby in your retirement, you’re much less likely to feel as much pressure as a young individual who wishes to make a career in aviation, each failure being a ding on their resume. 

I fit firmly in the latter category; in today’s pilot market, competition is rigorous. Flying jobs that would have previously been easily attainable at 250 hours are now difficult to attain even when an applicant has 1,500 hours. A checkride failure is a ding on the record that can be the deciding factor between you and another applicant. My confidence in my own personal ability has always been subpar at best, even if my performance to date states otherwise. It is this fear which also leads me to be as prepared as I can be for each checkride.

I recently began training to fly a corporate aviation jet. It weighs 22 times what the airplane I train in weighs, flies approach speeds 2x as fast regularly (with a flap/slat failure, that number jumps to 3x as fast), has two engines, and extremely intricate systems for pressurization, hydraulics, electronics, redundancies, etc. It requires two people to fly rather than one, flies 85% the speed of sound at 45,000 feet, and can hop the pond from the US to the cigarette-laden Euroland to the east. Suffice to say that when I arrived in the classroom for the first training day, I felt a bit in over my head, being at least 20 years younger than the next oldest person in my class.

Classroom lecture and homework assignments lasted about a week and a half, with each lecture going from 9am-4pm on average. This was accompanied by studying in the hotel with a bubbly beverage in my evenings. As of this past Wednesday, my class of 5 graduated from the classroom environment, and moved to simulator training. If you’ve never seen one, google “level D simulator,” and take a look at the images. They cost around $15m on average, weigh several tons, and can move in any direction. Inside is the full, to-the-last-detail aircraft cockpit of whichever aircraft an individual is in training for. Everything works 99% the same as it does in the aircraft, and in most cases, it flies like the real aircraft. You feel yourself move as the simulator responds to your each control input. The control column is heavy, the amount of buttons and switches is initially overwhelming, and the motion certainly takes some getting used to (those prone to it often get motion sickness in the simulators). The seating configuration is as follows: instructor behind two pilots, setting up the various weather/failure conditions (like, giving you an engine failure on takeoff, for instance). In the left seat of the cockpit is the pilot flying, the captain if you will, and in the right seat is the pilot who runs the checklists and supports the pilot flying.

My first simulator ride covered a battery of maneuvers over the course of 4 hours, with two hours in each seat before switching with the other trainee. Take off into the fog at night, get a feel for the aircraft’s handling with a series of stalls and steep turns, as well as recoveries from unusual attitudes with no outside references, relying on only the flight display in front of me. I did not do well. I couldn’t separate the movement of the aircraft that I was seeing on the screen in front of me with the feeling I was getting from the simulator’s motion, and it led me to bungle and redo most of the maneuvers I attempted that day. I was not used to failing in the flight training environment, and it was a huge blow to my already lacking confidence. My instructors in the sim (simulator) were very knowledgeable, and, like most instructors, content with pointing out my errors with a “that wasn’t quite to standards, let's do that again.” The redos in the sim were followed by an hour long debrief in a small classroom, where the instructor covers each of your mistakes to improve upon for the next sim session. I had made significantly more errors than the experienced pilot I was flying with (which is to be expected).

There was nothing inherently wrong with the way that the instructors treated my shortcomings, as they would any experienced pilot in the sim, but that isn’t me. I already felt like an imposter, and I was failing to meet standards. Yes, I am a delicate flower, but I am not alone in this feeling; getting your first “type rating,” or license for a certain type of jet, is as big a jump from not knowing anything about flying to getting your private pilot’s license. It is a completely new environment. 

The second sim ride I did much better, but still had some errors. It should be noted that pilot’s are not known for their emotional capacity or empathetic understanding, and flight instructors are no exception: Here’s what we did, here’s what you did wrong, any questions? It is efficient, to the point, and somewhat sterile. If anything, in my experience, I have heard more stories about instructors bullying or harassing their students, or showing a lack of real care about their flight training, than those about truly good flight instructors. An instructor really only needs to give you the bare minimum training to pass your checkride. Well, today, on sim number three, I had an instructor unlike any other I have had to this date.

Sim number three is supposed to be the metaphorical “peak” of sim training, the introduction to the most difficult maneuver in type rating training: the V1 cut. To put it simply, the V1 cut is the scenario in which you lose an engine on takeoff at a speed of no return, where you’re going too fast with too little runway remaining to safely stop the aircraft. No matter what happens at V1, you’re going flying. Losing an engine, as you can imagine, changes things quite quickly. You have less acceleration performance, accompanied by a massive yawing moment into the failed engine side, and in some airplanes (including the one I’m training for), a massive roll moment in the same direction. You begin to wrestle the flight controls, fighting just to keep the airplane straight and away from the ground. It is difficult, and a lot of people really struggle at this point in their training: I credit today’s instructor, fully, with my success on that maneuver.

We did a plethora of other things, including single engine approach to land, single engine “go around” (ie, couldn’t land for whatever reason), a rejected takeoff (below V1), and some others I can’t readily recall. Arriving to the brief before the sim, I was greeted by my instructor. He was slow talking, very mellow and focused, no stutters, not in a hurry to do anything. My initial impression was that this fellow would be too slow-talking for my taste. Boy, was I wrong. He began to brief us on the V1 cut. He acknowledged that we had probably heard every day during our training about how monstrous the V1 cut is in the sim, as all the other instructors had fear-mongered the class into believing, and proceeded to dispel any fear around it: “it isn’t a monster. It is really easy to do as long as you understand the airplane. People come in with big muscles and try to muscle the airplane, and I have seen them fail. I have seen people come in with skinny arms and legs, and do flawless V1 cuts in the airplane.” He told us about how to conquer the V1 cut, and in many words was able to instill a new view in me that I was to respect the aircraft and it would respect me back.

Throughout the entirety of the brief, he stopped to listen to us fully when we had questions, never interrupting, explained things to a T, and was able to offer understanding at lacking in knowledge without patronizing. He had no hubris about him, or any kind of superiority complex (as most pilots, including myself, have let shine a time or two), and spoke to us as though we were peers rather than in a strict instructor-student dualism. He was not casual, but professional, yet still personable. He reassured me of the fact that this is still the training environment, and he wanted me to fail my way forward, rather than try to be perfect and minimize mistakes. He said that everyone struggles in this phase of training, and my experience or lack thereof would not generate any mistakes he had not seen before. I drew a large sigh of relief, with my lowest heartrate yet entering the simulator. I found myself adapting to his pace, slowing down in the cockpit (which he encouraged), whilst other instructors favored getting through quickly to get through all of the boxes they needed to tick for our training on whatever sim event we may have been doing. I made no errors in checklists, and my least amount of errors as first officer as I had yet by a vast margin. He was never frantic about any errors, briefed us thoroughly on every failure we would get before we got it, and for the most part, didn’t interfere with our learning through mistakes. 

When it got to be time for my V1 cut, my nerves had grown, and he briefed that should he see an imminent crash, he would take the sim off of motion and we could just reset it and do it again. No pressure to get it right the first time. Well, with my nerves at ease, I’m proud to say that I CRUSHED it on my first attempt. I drifted maybe 50ft off of center line, didn’t pitch the nose to high (which would result in getting dangerously slow), and climbed into the fog uneventfully.

I wish I could immediately recall and qualify all of the things he said to me, but I can provide a few main points that I think will make people better teachers, and generally better people to be around. In my late teenage years, I thought that the best traits a person could possess were outward confidence and a sense of humor that could make their peers laugh. Those things are important, but I know people who embody both of those traits and are really quite despicable people I wouldn’t want to be around for a second of my life. This instructor taught me in two hours those traits I admire and should truly strive to embody. Personability, humility, credibility, patience, relatability, sympathy, and kindness. Yes, it is cliche, but how often do you meet someone who carries those traits in abundance? He had almost no sense of humor, yet I would still share a drink or twelve with him over someone who carried only a fraction of his traits mixed with those I admired in my late teens.

Learning is not just about passing information from one person to another. We are not robots. To be a truly good teacher, you must create an environment conducive to learning. An environment that allows for and even encourages mistakes, that rewards them with kindness and stories of those who had erred there previously with mighty resumes behind them, sympathetic to the feeling of failing in a high-stakes environment. When your student is relaxed, feeling only the pressure that is naturally associated with flying the aircraft, rather than that of an overbearing or harassing or annoyed flight instructer, they feel a certain relief and freedom to make their own mistakes without flinching. They won’t stop to think to themselves “oh man, they just saw that mistake, what are they going to say about it in the debrief,” rather than can stay focused on the task at hand.They will learn faster, and they will learn better that way. 

In our own friendships and relationships, I hope to incorporate these traits in myself, creating a sense of warmth for those I call my friends, family, and partner. Not for the sake of myslef in getting people to like me more, but in that life truly is better for both parties involved when we live this way. It is virtuous and very rewarding. I will not forget the lessons taught to me today until the day that I die.