I still have a Rolodex which, for those of you who might not know, is a rotating contact card organizer. I still have it around somewhere, not because I use it—I don’t. I have it because it contains the cards of friends who are no longer here, mostly friends who died in aircraft accidents. Even when I used it, which was a long time ago, there was no way I could ever take their cards out, and every time I spun the fluttering wheel to find a number, I’d go past the M’s or the T’s and think about them, even if just for a moment.
It’s also a great reminder that even highly skilled pilots, and they all were, can have bad luck or a bad day. So we mere mortals had better pay attention.
It’s hard for most pilots to read about crashes, not because they make us sad, though they do, but because we get what it was like in a way that non-pilots never could, about how might have happened and what, if anything, might have been done to save the day. We run the calculus of the accident without even realizing we’re doing it. A stall spin on base to final? Even if non-pilots know what that means, they can’t feel it in the seat of their pants as they think about it. Us? We can’t help but feel it.
Though we’re not alone in this respect, pilots have a complex and critical relationship with risk. Rock climbers and motorcycle do too, though neither of those things requires tens of thousands of dollars in training to get started doing it on your own.
The license to learn idea, that when you get your ticket you still have a lot to learn, is kind of corny, but like more than a few other folksy sayings, it also happens to be true. I didn’t always have a sensitive understanding of risk. I had to acquire it by flying and reading and thinking and talking with other pilots. It’s a lifetime endeavor, and every good pilot will die, hopefully of old age, with having so many things to learn about what we do.
When I first started flying, I was a kid and my ignorance was vast. And it showed. I took stupid chances, did risky things, put other people in harm’s way, flying too low and too fast, yanking and baking around terrain. I won’t lie. It was fun, and it was exhilarating. But crazy risky. Looking back, I realize that one of the biggest reasons I took such chances is that I didn’t know just how risky it really was. I mean, I knew that plane crashes were deadly. But I was a kid, full of a kind of self-confidence born of not knowing all those things I didn’t know.
It was a phase I survived, thank goodness, but probably only because as I grew to better understand the nature of flying, I felt less and less like pushing my luck. A dozen years later, by the time I was married with kids, things were fundamentally different. I had more ratings, a fatter logbook, far greater technical knowledge of flight and the aircraft we fly in, better stick and rudder skills and, I’d say most importantly, a much better understanding of where the risks were and how to be safer with that knowledge.
Some folks say that we shouldn’t talk about risk, that it will scare prospects away. I think the opposite. I think among the first things a prospective pilot should hear is that flying is inherently risky and the things they’re going to be learning are all about cutting that risk while increasing competency and proficiency. It’s a process we begin on our first day of training and that we never complete.
It’s in our nature to forget, once we’re good at something, that it was once upon a time really hard to do. Flying is a complex activity, one that requires a great deal of what otherwise might be thought of as arcane knowledge if it weren’t for the fact that such knowledge is often the only thing standing between you and your untimely fate. Spin recovery? I can do it in my sleep, because I had instructors who taught me that being able to do it without even thinking about it might one day be the difference between life and death. It hasn’t been, at least so far. But they had a good point. Flying is a life and death activity, and those who don’t get that are putting themselves and those they fly with at greater risk than they should.
Flying is the coolest thing most of us have ever done or ever will. After all these years I’ve learned that the fun will take care of itself, and that there’s a lot more where that came from, so long as we’re still around to enjoy it.
