Flying by the numbers vs. being an artist
is a thread currently running in JB.
corsair
I too would have been a bit clunky, unnatural and overly cautious, sometimes a bit scared of flying. In fact when I let my CPL lapse and had to do a retest the examiner described my flying as 'agricultural but safe'. The fact I had only flown 1.5 hours in the five months before the test, forty minutes of which was the previous month, may have had something to do with it.
But that has changed. I'm completely comfortable with the aircraft I currently fly. That may be down to my natural talent should it exist or a combination of currency, practice and a bit of talent. It has become part of me as well it should when I've spent up to eight hours strapped in it's seat. Now it's not a complex aircraft so that helps. But I'm pleased with myself. Nevertheless how much of it is natural talent, I don't know.
But ultimately to be good pilot you really need a bit of both, plenty of practice and a modicum of talent. It's the same for most things. Raw talent helps but practice, practice, practice can make all the difference. It can also work in the most trivial of jobs. I worked in an office for the guts of 14 years. By the end I found I could pick up the exact quantity of sheets of paper I needed as long as I didn't think about it. It was the same in another job which involved quantifying a number of plastic gidgets by weight. It got so that I would get virtually the exact weight of plastic bits needed most of the time, quite often bang on the nose. Talent? No way just practice.
Still I like to imagine I have a certain raw talent as a pilot. This I like to believe, has lain undiscovered for my entire non career thanks to indifferent training, poor continuity, lack of money and never having had any form of mentor. Something I think is quite important in nurturing talent. Doing anything alone never quite works. With someone overlooking you, it can only help. The racing driver Lewis Hamilton may be a raw talent but without all the help he would probably be driving trucks.
(Apologies to corsair for slight editing of his post.)