The Difference Between Anvils and Life Jackets

Every pilot on earth knows something another pilot could benefit from knowing.

That’s a bold statement, but a true one. Even the new flight student with no more than a handful of hours of instruction under their belt has made a connection. They’ve recognized something of value the student on their first flight could use to their advantage.

Sharing is caring, y’all. We should have learned that before we could measure our age in double digits.

Learning is an active process. We all do it. Even if we’ve been flying for decades, we can still experience something new. Something unique and impactful. Perhaps worrisome. Something we’ve never experienced before. And through that experience we learn.

Perhaps the most effective method of learning is to simply ask a question. Our CFI or the pilot flying beside us may have a professional responsibility to share their insight with us. If that’s the case, we have an authority figure to query when we encounter something unfamiliar or unusual. Something beyond our understanding.

If we are on our own, our solution is often to seek out those who are more experienced than we are to ask our question. To pursue an answer that will illuminate the situation in a way we can better deal with it in the future.

But what is more experienced? We might reasonably think that whoever has been flying longer or in more advanced aircraft is the more experienced individual. Surprisingly to many, that may or may not be true.

Consider the following.

A widebody captain with decades of experience in transport category aircraft may have no experience at all in operating single-engine aircraft from a non-towered grass strip. The high-time chief flight instructor at the academy your kid attends may have never logged a takeoff or a landing in a taildragger. The corporate pilot flying the latest and greatest airplane on the ramp may not have a clue about how to turn a seaplane downwind when taxiing in brisk winds.

These are all realistic scenarios — a fact worth considering since being highly experienced in one aspect of aviation may leave us barely even functional at another type of flying.

There is nothing inherently obvious about taking flight in a man-made machine. To those of us who fly, the multitude of major and minor tasks we must perform to fly safely may come easily. They may even be seen as second nature. But that’s only true after years of effort, study, practice, and testing.

Somewhere along the line we had to ask questions. Some of them incredibly basic. Some with answers that were well beyond our ability to comprehend at that phase of our training. Many served as a means of gathering bits of information in small, bite-sized chunks we could easily grasp and add to our growing body of knowledge.

The key was that we had the confidence to ask the question of someone who took the time to answer in a beneficial way.

Recently I’ve seen a disagreeable trend in pilot groups on social media that turns that simple exchange of useful information on its head. It’s the ego-centric answer to a perfectly reasonable question. A fellow pilot has taken the time to express their ignorance on a specific topic, asking for insight from other, hopefully more knowledgeable pilots. Their reward is to receive an arrogant comment of no value at all.

The answer that irks me most is “IYKYK,” which translates to “if you know, you know.”

This is perhaps the stupidest response under the sun. Because the individual posing the question has admitted publicly that he or she does not know. They want to know. They’re turning to us, the wider pilot population, to build their knowledge base. And some of us are willingly, intentionally, gleefully failing them.

Imagine the disappointment in reading such an answer to your own honest question. Would you be inclined to be so open with your curiosity in the future? Probably not. Did the respondent offer anything of value? Not at all.

In a vain attempt at self-aggrandizement, they’ve not only failed to provide useful insight, but they’ve also potentially caused a pilot with real interest in a topic to become more guarded and less open in the future. Less willing to seek insight from others. To become, unfortunately, less well educated due to the very human instinct to avoid embarrassment, mockery, and derision.

Would any of us consider that response to be acceptable from the CFI conducting our flight review? Is there a captain in the business who has ever responded in such a cavalier fashion when their first officer asked for advice?

Being a pilot is a privilege. A hard-earned privilege that comes with intense pride, a modicum of social status, and perhaps even a whopper of a paycheck. It strikes me as a dereliction of duty for any of us to intentionally denigrate the curiosity of another who wishes to learn.

It’s insulting, frankly.

While the Internet has given us perhaps the greatest learning tool in human history, it is incumbent upon us to be respectful, honest, and accurate when discussing serious issues. If you have nothing to offer, offer nothing. If you have insight of real value to share, share at will. When someone asks for help in an area you have expertise in, offer help.

For those who find joy in tossing an anvil to a drowning man pleading for a life preserver, your witty response is not nearly as well received as you might think. Nor does it reflect well on pilots or general aviation as a whole.

The long and the short of it is this; Be a mensch or be quiet. None of us got to the pinnacle of our existence on our own. This level of unwarranted negativity is detrimental to everyone concerned.