A few years ago a pilot colleague of mine from my airline wrote a book to tell the rest of us dumb pilots how to be a high-class, well respected airline captain just like him.
Being that I was already a captain and also being that I noticed that the book had no pictures, I opted out of reading it. For all I know, the book was just the wonderful sort of thing that you guys would lap up with a silver spoon. Personally, I think even the title was a little insulting. It made airline captains look like elitist poodles.
Well, maybe we were –a little.
This is because, in the olden days of yore of the airline world, captains were held in high regard. They weren’t considered high cost unnecessary items on a balance sheet like they are today. Because we were held in such high esteem it led some of us to think that we were better than your average, run of the mill pipeline patrol pilot.
I’d be the first to admit this snooty sort of bias existed in me. It is true that not just anybody has the skill, training, and experience to pilot three hundred or more people at a time through bad weather and get it right every single time.
At the time of my very recent retirement from all that I was more than a little bit proud of myself that I hadn’t’ manage to kill anybody in over 18,000 hours of demanding jet transport flying. I’m not sure that record made me better than others – perhaps just luckier.
Hats don’t make the man or woman
My friends who are still flying in the airline world have recently told me that there has been a big outbreak of “hat discipline”. For those of you who have never worked for jerks, it goes like this: Your airline is losing tons of money. It must not be because of poor management. It has to be due to a lack of professionalism reflected by the fact that the pilots aren’t wearing their hats as much as they used to.
Wearing your hat is the sort of thing that people advising you on how to be a good captain always mention. They’ll say insipid things like “appearance makes the man” and “if you want to be a professional, you gotta look like a professional.”
It is the same in the general aviation world where companies insist that pilots wear airline shirts and the like while flying their Navajos and Skyhawks.
The way you dress does have a small effect on how you feel about yourself and how others see you but is it really that important in the grand scheme of things?
Hawkeye and Burns
Think way back to the ancient 1970s when the television show MASH ruled the comedic airwaves. How well did Hawkeye wear the uniform? How well did Frank Burns wear it? Which person would you want to do critical surgery on you?
I’m not saying you should show up at your next flight wearing a thong and carrying a bong. I’m saying that competence, not appearance, is the standard by which we should judge pilots. We rarely do this though. The pilots winging in atop a Lear get a lot more respect from us than that sweaty guy who just towed banners for five hot hours over the NFL game or beach.
Guess which pilots needed more skill and experience to get the job done? You can’t really, because you don’t know what kind of flight they’ve had. The banner tower may have had the more challenging day. What with cross winds, thermals, a full bladder, and an overheating engine. It may have taken all the piloting skill in the world to get that Super Cub back on the ground.
On the other hand, the Lear crew may have just had to deal with mountain wave, severe turbulence over the Front Range and an in-flight fire.
No matter how good a pilot looks, no matter how expensive his or her watch appears to be, and no matter what kind of expensive gadget gorged airplane is being flown you have to judge a “good pilot” by performance, not appearance.
You Can’t Learn This Stuff in a Book
It is unfortunate for book writers but much like snow boarding, ball room dancing, and chain saw juggling, you simply can’t learn how to be a good pilot from a book.
During a recent visit to my local airport I casually asked one of the student pilots there what he thought a good pilot was and did. He had quite a few good ideas, but the one that stands out for me is: “A good pilot always checks the weather the night before”.
Weather worrying is sometimes a good idea and I think somebody told me that this trait was in the how to be a good captain book. There are some reasons for pre-worrying the weather, but not many. For example, if you are planning on flying in to visit your Aunt Maude the next day and she is ordering the duck from a local Chinese restaurant (which requires 24 hours notice) for your visit you would worry if the next day’s weather included a level 5 hurricane.
Airline pilots and most professional general aviation pilots don’t do this.
We’re going anyway.
That’s not completely true. The pilot in command always has final say about whether or not a flight flies. All I’m saying is that since we were trying to run a scheduled airline, an air taxi or a corporate flight department we normally assumed that we were going to try and meet the schedule.
Granted, we had a whole department of concerned people in a big room with lots of computers dispatching our flights. They would make the global decisions for us, such as whether or not the weather was legal for us to fly in. They also made the economic decision about whether or not the flight was going to make enough money to justify an extra twenty thousand pounds of hold fuel.
You have access to the same sort of information either through for-hire dispatching firms or your friendly federal government. The information is great to have. Worrying about it a day before you can get the info is pointless.
We captains and you pilots in command get to decide if the weather is safe to fly in, but we really can’t usually make the decision until the day of the flight.
I spent part of my early career worrying about the weather the night before a trip but as far as I can tell, none of the worrying changed the weather outside one little bit.
Okay, smart guy, what are the traits of a good pilot?
I’m glad you asked that question, trusty reader, because I have a few things to say on that subject. Here are a few of the important ingredients to a professional pilot:
- Appearance doesn’t matter – attitude does. A good pilot always has safety in mind first middle and last. No amount of pressure from family, company or friends can make him do something unsafe.
- Professional pilots never run out of fuel. There is never a good excuse for running out of gas. The only possible exception to that would be if you are in the mid-Pacific and have a fuel leak. Simply don’t be the guy or gal who doesn’t have enough go-juice to keep flying. Every single flight you take over our great country goes over hundreds of places to land and buy fuel.
- Professional pilots know their stuff. No excuse either for not knowing everything you can possibly learn about the operation of your aircraft and the operation of the air traffic control system. Good pilots never pass up an opportunity to learn. Nobody is too good to learn more. That is why veteran astronauts train just as hard as the first timers.
- Professional pilots have slow hands. With the exception of being on fire, there is no excuse to do anything in a hurry in an airplane. Pilots who overreact and do the wrong thing in a hurry can ruin things much easier than if they simply took a deep breath counted to ten and then slowly did the right thing.
- Professional pilots use checklists. Airline pilots with 30,000 hours still get out the checklist every single time and run it. Our climb checklist on the 767 consisted of two items and we read it off of the cardboard checklist every time we climb through flight level 180: 1. Altimeters set to 29.92 and 2. Lights off.
We all know what is on the checklist but we carry the thing in our fist and read it anyway. Why? Because it is the professional thing to do and because some day when we are really stressed out by an ongoing emergency we’ll have the ingrained habit of doing it right.
A checklist on a Cherokee or a Cessna 172 is no less important. Always run the checklist and the NTSB hearing will go much smoother or you may never get there at all.
- Professional pilots admit mistakes. God help you if you are flying with a pilot who thinks they never make mistakes and know it all. You’ll run into people like this from time to time. Please don’t fly with them. Every pilot makes mistakes every single flight. If you admit to them you can correct them. If you don’t admit to them they can kill you.
- Professional pilots take care of themselves. If you think it is bad to run out of fuel think of how bad it is to fly drunk or stoned. No excuse on those either. I’m all for tolerance and twelve step programs and interventions and all of that, but if you cross that cockpit door and fly drunk, I hope God helps you because nobody else will.
There are other potential dangers just as dangerous as flying drunk. If you are having a really bad fight with your spouse or if you kid is in the hospital, don’t fly. Believe me; your personal life can affect safety and your professionalism like you would not believe.
- Finally, good pilots share their knowledge in a positive way. You don’t have to be a jerk to teach another pilot or passenger something about flight. You owe it to karma to pass along what you’ve learned to the universe.
That little bit of professionalism you pass along on the hotel van on the way to the airport might be just enough to make a person want to fly for a living. That is exactly what happened to me in Newark New Jersey in a TWA crew van in 1973. You just never know.
Set a good example and be a professional as you can every time you fly. That kid you take for a ride in your single engine airplane may be your corporation’s pilot in ten years.
