Thoughts on safety
First I would like to thank the forum for not flaming a non pilot for posting. It would seem that my post was taken in the light it was given, something for consideration, to be used or discarded as one sees fit.
I could have done a better job of explaining the technique I proposed. Most all of us have seen the football reciever who thinks to run before the ball is caught. The result is a dropped pass, a lapse of mental discipline.
The important thing in reading an instrument is to move the raw information from the instrument to the brain, without making any translation or interpretation in the process. Once the mind has captured the raw data, then, and only then, should evaluation begin. See what I'm saying? Catch the ball first.
There are a lot of people who go to work every day at an occupation from which they may not come home. It might be a plane crash, a semi that missed the curve, a pile of logs that rolled unexpectedly, a construction trench that colapsed, or a farm tractor roll-over. Dead is dead.
There are some common traits to accidents that pop up all over, such as complacency and over-confidence. I characterize over-confidence as an absense of reasonable fear.
The career carpenter who loses his fear of the power saws he uses, cuts his fingers off. If you have met as many carpenters as me you have seen those missing fingers. I think of pilots as a pretty safe bunch of guys. If they made pilots out of carpenters no one in his right mind would get on a plane.
I own a big Craftman's table saw. I was afraid of it the first time I used it. Thirty years later, I'm still afraid of it. The thing can hurt you in the blink of an eye. From early on, every time I reach for the switch, I pause to ask myself "Are you sure you know what is about to happen?" Did I have my mind on the set-up, or was I just going through the motions? Do I feel good about this? Maybe I waste a lot of time re-checking things, but I do still have all my fingers.
Today I'm going to imagine that I am a pilot. One of the first things I'm going to do is adopt a philosophy that goes something like this: "I am the pilot. I may make a mistake. I might kill myself and a lot of other people too. But I am not about to let anyone else kill me. I am the pilot."
So I'm out on the runway, the SOP complete, ready to roll. Or am I? Start down that runway and in a matter of seconds I will be past the Point of Commitment, at which time the plane sustains flight long enough to go around and land, or I'm dead. If there is to be any reassessment of the situation. it has to be done before the roll.
So I lean back in my seat and say the words "T minus 20, fly or die." Why? Because I want both feet planted on reality. I may have done a hundred take-offs with this plane on this runway. That won't save my hide today. The only thing that matters is the situation today, right now. I might just take a minute to think things through. Or ten. Hell, I might sit here til they come tow the plane onto the grass. The decision to go or re-evaluate is mine. But the reality really is "T minus 20. fly or die."
One of my favorite quotes of Will Rogers ...
There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.