I once told a friend that my first passenger on earning my private pilot license would be my brother-in-law and not my spouse, because flying my spouse would put too much pressure on me. At least I knew that much about myself. So it was with that in mind that I queried NASA’s Aviation Safety […]
Human Factors
Praise for pilots
In the spirit the new year brings, I choose to dedicate this month’s column to the pilots and aviation professionals whose teamwork, communication and training helped set things right after things went very wrong. While this column normally offers its readers a chance to learn from other fliers’ mistakes, on this occasion, I’d like to […]
Are pilots lone wolves or domesticated dogs?
I recently read about a study involving dogs in homes, dogs in shelters, and wolves. The researchers rounded up 10 animals from each category and gave them each a puzzle box containing a food reward. The catch was that the box could only be opened with some persistence. Eight of the 10 wolves successfully opened […]
Knowing when to step in
Two guys I never knew once flew for my first airline. One was a training captain, the other a freshly minted first officer. They were best of friends for as long as anyone could remember, so it was natural that the training captain would successfully lobby to get his best friend hired. It also didn’t surprise […]
The dread of sharing the skies with drones
Whenever I tell a group of pilots that I also fly helicopters, there’s always one guy in the group who says he can’t stand them. “I hate those things,” he’ll spew. “They’re unpredictable when they’re flying in the pattern. You never know which way they’re going to fly.” Helicopter pilots learn early in their training […]
NOTAM like the present
Pilots and air traffic controllers think that they’re so different from each other, but they’re not. They’re really two branches of the same aviation family. And judging from the research I did for this month’s column, they all agree that they hate the NOTAM system in its present state. Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) are the […]
Batten down the hatches
Once I began flying the line, I rarely thought about seat positions and calibrations. At a certain point, takeoffs and landings in an airliner are all about holding a particular deck angle. That generally means eyes more inside on the artificial horizon than outside. Plus the time pressures we were under to run our checklists, […]
The greatest threat to aviation
I was once blinded by my best friend while flying at night. He was trying to help me read a map. We were out of KDAL, heading to KSMO. Inbound to KSMO, at night, over California’s high desert, the earth below looked black as pitch, the sky above a planetarium ceiling’s worth of stars. I’d […]
Navigating a box canyon
I once flew into a box canyon on purpose. A friend of mine lived in a canyon between Pacific Palisades and Malibu on the southern California coast. He’d introduced me to a powerful men’s weekend retreat and it course corrected my life. That one retreat helped me achieve the dream of becoming a pilot, and […]