Let me admit up front that I’m the queen of brutal honesty. From, “The light has changed, dingus (delivered with a blare of the horn),” to, “The transmission needs work,” I am apt to say things that need saying but that the recipients don’t want to hear.
The hardest place to speak these kinds of truth is in the cockpit. And for good reasons, too.
In general, my view is this. If it’s true and it’s important to know, then!why!not!say!it? Case in point: When I was in college, my favorite Earth Sciences professor, Jackie Patterson, was giving a slide show on the geology of the Owens Valley. Jackie was an expert on this subject, and besides, she was brilliant and funny, and the subject was fascinating.
But there was one problem. It was Thursday and Jackie had given the same slide show on Tuesday. Same slides, same spiel, same everything. As we progressed through slides one, two and three, and on to four or five, the thing that began to interest me wasn’t why Jackie was doing this—everybody forgets stuff—but why no one was saying anything. As slides numbers seven and eight rolled around, it became clear. People didn’t want to be the one to speak up, to say that something was amiss because, help me out here, they were afraid of being noticed as a person who says stuff out loud?
Yeah, that’s not me. I raised my hand and said, “Hey Jackie, you gave this presentation on Tuesday.”
She paused, reflected very briefly and then said, “Why the hell didn’t anybody else say something?” My question precisely. Then and now. The best answer I can come up with is that they’re thinking that someone else will say something. I’m often that other person.
When I’m fifth in line at a green-light traffic signal that is all too short and comes around again only after an interminable delay, why am I the only one in line to let that first car’s driver know that the light is now green and they need to get off their blessed phone and pay attention to driving? Why isn’t every driver in line letting the lead idiot know that?
To wit, I love New York and New Yorkers. Rude? Not at all. “Real” is what they are. One of the things, speaking of traffic, that I love most about them is their approach to honking their horns. And this one is genius. At rush hour, when missing a light can cost you precious minutes, New Yorkers don’t wait for the person in front to be slow off the mark, thereby messing things up for every car in line behind them. As soon as they know that the light’s about to change (dunno!they have their ways), they start honking. Not one of them. Almost all of them. They’re pros.
It’s not because they’re jerks, but because they are realists. In aviation, and this all about aviation, you don’t assume the best case—that kind of thinking will get you killed—you ponder the worst cases. What will the missed approach look like? Not, “How soft a landing will I make?” The oil pressure gauge might be wrong, but if it’s right, the question is, what do I do? It’s not, we probably have enough fuel, but rather, it’s, “Where’s a close field with avgas?” Optimism isn’t bad per se, it’s just bad when it prevents you from confronting the truth, especially when that truth needs to be addressed.
It’s a calculus, sure, but it’s a critical one. Those New Yorkers know that there’s a good chance that the person in front will be snoozing, so they simply give them a helpful little beep of the horn, full weight on it, for no longer than seven or eight seconds. Count to seven. In New York, thats’ still firmly in the friend zone. Besides, those honking are not the ones being jerks. It’s the driver who didn’t go, or who might not go, when the light changes from red to green. Those honkers are being proactively friendly.
Back to me, and my being a jerk. On numerous occasions over the years, I’ve spoken up to tell a pilot I was flying with that there was something concerning about the flight. Once it was scud running around high terrain, another time, flying into our fuel reserves. I was glad I spoke up on both occasions. There have been a number of other times I didn’t speak up and wished I had. Once, in fact, resulted in a crash in which I was pretty beat up, but that could have been a lot worse.
The whole notion of hoping someone else will say something doesn’t work in aviation, because when we fly we’re often with just one other pilot. So there isn’t anyone to be that other person. It’s you.
And I know in flying there are seldom black-and-white, or red-and-green, situations. You need to consider the circumstances and make your call after doing the same kind of risk assessment if you were flying on your own. Then, if there’s even any doubt about whether there’s a safety issue involved, you simply have to say something. It’s doesn’t have to presented with horn blare-like alarm. But it needs to be said.
As a ride-along or as a pilot-rated right-seater, your opinion is likely a good one. And if it were you in the left seat, you’d want to hear that alternative point of view, right? If not, that’s a whole other conversation.
