Imperfect is okay

Anyone who has ever taken an important test or participated in an interview that would lead to a much-wanted advancement knows what sweaty palms and butterflies in the stomach feel like.

Some accept these emotional distractions and press on anyway. Others let the discomfort dissuade them from making the attempt, preferring to rest on their laurels — even if they have few laurels to rest upon.

Of course, that nervousness, the sense that we have to perform at a high level or be considered a failure, is self-induced. The bar may be set high, but the goal we seek is not unobtainable.  It’s merely challenging. Something that requires focus and effort. 

In these situations when we push ourselves to reach the next level, if we set our personal expectations at perfection, we’re really working against our own best interests. The effort to give a perfect performance becomes counter-productive. This may transform a challenging goal into an impossible dream.

That’s not good. 

Aviation is awash in training, testing, inspecting, and verifying. Those decision points are critical to safety, of course. They should be taken seriously. The standards for tests and inspections are set down on paper, so there is no question about what constitutes passing or falling short. 

Knowing all that, failure doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of the game.

A given deficiency may be something that can be corrected.

Let’s consider a few examples. 

I once had the good fortune to work on the restoration of a P-38 Lightning. A technological marvel of its time, the P-38 was fast and sleek with long legs and impressive firepower.

This particular P-38 had served well, right up until the point where its pilot went one-on-one with a mountain. In a fair fight between aircraft grade aluminum and granite, granite will win every time. As a result, the forward section of the aircraft was a mess. The twin tail was in fine shape, however. It was my job to remove the elevator skins so we might inspect the structures beneath and make any necessary repairs.

An FAA inspector named Kimball stood beside me as I drilled out the last few rivets. The last rivet head popped off, the skin was gently lifted away, and right there on the main structural component beneath was a clearly legible stamp from Inspector 277. It read, simply, “REJECTED.” 

The story of how that piece came to be included in the build of that particular P-38 is lost to time, but it is not the first example of its type. During World War II, production demands caused many shortcuts and errors to slip through the cracks. Surprisingly, perhaps, many of those errors had minimal effect on the aircraft. 

While dismantling a B-17 for restoration I once found an entire row of rivets that didn’t match up to the wing-rib they were intended to attach the skin to. Many feet of useless rivets doing nothing at all to hold the aircraft together also did nothing to prevent it from flying. 

Neither situation is ideal, of course. Both should have been found and fixed before the aircraft left the factory. But both aircraft flew and flew well until totally unrelated issues grounded them.

Imperfect is not synonymous with failure. Not at all.  

Imperfection is common in the human element, too. A bump in the road for a pilot applicant might seem like the death knell for a fledgling career. Yet, it is not. Mistakes happen. Errors creep into our thought processes just as a bungled procedure or two might occur during a flight test.

It’s worth remembering in moments like these that perfection isn’t the standard the examiner is looking for. A capable display of Pilot in Command skills are the expectation. If you can do that, you’re moving on even if your performance was less than flawless. 

A good friend from flight school was scheduled to take his private pilot practical test with the same designated examiner I was scheduled with. My buddy was booked to take his ride the day before I was. I saw him in the dispatch office at the appointed time and he didn’t look happy at all. The next day I discovered why. He was 0.1 hours short on cross-country time. He didn’t qualify for the check ride and so they had to terminate. My buddy had to fly an entire cross-country flight just to pick up the six minutes lacking in his logbook. 

When he went back to take a second whack at the ride, he did a great job. He was nervous, no doubt, but he persevered, and found success. He’s a captain with a major airline now. That glitch did him no harm in the long run.

Another flight school friend whiffed in his first shot at an instrument rating. He didn’t make it past the oral portion, the examiner finding deficiencies in his knowledge of weather maps. Some humility, dedicated study, and a second shot at the practical exam proved to be just the thing. He, too, is a captain these days, flying big iron we could only dream of back then.

I’ve made my mistakes as well. While on a Part 141 Instructor’s check ride many years ago, the FAA examiner failed the engine on my PA-28 at altitude. For reasons that escape me, I immediately pulled the nose up and yanked in full flaps. Realizing that I’d done something colossally stupid, I pointed the nose down, reduced flaps incrementally, and ultimately made a smooth landing right on the spot the examiner requested. 

As we rolled out I said, “I have no idea why I pulled the flaps in up there.” 

The FAA examiner replied, “Yeah, I wondered about that. But you got it back. Nice job.”

Competence is a much better goal than perfection. For one thing, it’s actually obtainable. For another, it puts less pressure on us. If we just recognize our potential for fallibility does not override our capacity to correct for our shortcomings, we’ll be fine. 

Good luck to us all, in everything we do.