concerning mistakes
 

Pilots have one tremendous advantage over the rest of humanity. They have an overriding interest in correcting their own mistakes! You can if you wish search articles on the psychology of finding out you are wrong about something you hold dear, and how hard it is to change.



So do pilots carry that particular attitude into other areas of their lives? If they do, they double the benefit gained from their expensive training. Thoughts?

Definitely; I always preflight my car properly before a long journey and check it thoroughly every weekend.

Must get a life.

As a pilot, I regularly read the accident reports, to try and prevent such accidents happening to myself.

I really wish the same type of reports were readily available for road accidents, so we could all better educate ourselves to the real dangers out there.

Depends upon what you mean by "mistake".

I often feel that in both my private and professional lives, people keep criticising me, or I keep spotting stuff that needs improving. I try to take that all on board, and deal with it - if only for a quieter life!

I sort of think that the people who do well in achieving difficult things - like flying for example, are those who listen and respond constructively to criticism.

Those who don't either aren't being criticised which possibly means they're perfect, but far more likely means that the rest of the world has given up on them and stopped bothering to point their mistakes out. Or they aren't listening. Or they don't give a damn what anybody else thinks, or the consequences of their actions.

So, yes, I think there's a certain mindset that tends to lead to success, and also tends to make you a good pilot.

G

If every generally careless pilot was quickly eliminated from the gene pool then I would agree with you. However, whilst professional pilots are probably selected to be conscientious by other routes such as failed checkrides, I'm not certain that the same is true for private pilots - all we have to do is fly reasonably consistently for the examiner, on one occasion early in our flying careers. How much or how little we do after that, is largely down to us. (I'm currently a student PPL)

As far as I can tell, the only defining characteristic of a private pilot is to be reasonably well off, which generally implies a pre-existing and reasonably high level of intelligence and discipline in our professional lives.

After that, as pilots we all enjoy flying, or wanted to do so at some time in the past. It may be that the original dream was doing slow rolls low over the countryside in a Tiger Moth, or zooming and booming down the Welsh valleys. The reality, as I experience it, is far more down to understanding how a multitude of systems work and interact - from carburettors to cumulonimbus clouds to navigation. I enjoy this immensely - the neuroscientist Simon Baron Cohen would definitely rank me fairly high as a 'systematiser'. As such, I dislike having gaps in my knowledge and try to fill them whenever I can. A reasonably high proportion of pilots seem to have technical jobs or hobbies - I know a fair number of physicists or programmers who are also pilots so I think this is a common and probably desirable characteristic, but not a defining one.

Finally, I enjoy making important decisions - sometimes under pressure. There's a degree of honesty about flying - if something goes wrong, you risk getting killed, whether or not it was you that made the fatal mistake. However, I often wonder how apparent this sense of jeopardy is to other people. I hurt myself mildly in a hang-gliding accident a few years back but look back fondly on my hang-gliding days. It was a very immediate way of flying - you're out there with the wind rushing past your face, and you're at a reasonably low level most of the time. Flying in an enclosed light aircraft is a very different experience. You sit there in a warm bubble, and although you see the scenery go by and know that you're flying incredibly high and fast by comparison, the sense of jeopardy isn't nearly as visceral. I do know a few pilots who simply don't seem to feel it.

So all in all, I'm not sure that it's so easy to pigeonhole pilots. On the other hand, as is probably clear I like to think that I have a better understanding of systems than many people, and a greater awareness of risk. As I read over my post, I have to admit there's probably a degree of self-confidence/arrogance there. But as the psychologists argue, humans are inherently incapable of honest self-appraisal, so whether or not it's warranted is another matter.

I have a job where mistakes can have dear consequences, though luckily never life-threatening, and I remember myself stating (with obvious self-importance) that every sysadmin should really take a pilot's training, always have a plan B, never take anything for granted &c &c

And as for I am sure I am often considered arrogant by certain members of my own team and much more from the teams we mostly work with, but not egotistical, the word being little known and even less used in this rural area.

The ability to look at your own performance in a analytical and considered way, and to recognise and accept your own mistakes, is certainly useful to a pilot. It's also useful in most walks of life.

However I don't think that there is much in private pilot training that makes private pilots more likely to be minded as such.

I also think that many people who feel that they are minded that way, might not be as analytical and clinical about their own behaviours as they believe themselves to be. But of course they can't see that :}

Words fail me!

Pilots, both private and professional, are no different from any other "intelligent life form". Some are good, some are bad, some are dangerous, some are safe, some are fat, some are slim, some are good company, some are boring as hell.
The only real exception I've noticed is that there aren't many young, good looking chicks with their own two-seat spitfire......:{

Pilots aren't a special breed. They are people. People that have spent their time on acquiring skills of timeliness, decision making, judgement, and co ordination. Nothing more than Joe Bloggs, just in a different environment. Do you eat or not? This is a life critical decision, as is do I pull now or let the aeroplane pile into the hill? In this sense pilot skills are just a specialisation like driving a fork lift or serving a meal in a restaurant. Money is the driving factor in private aviation.

Well... You'd think, but not always... Some two decades or so, when I was still a newer pilot, having about 1500 hours, the boss began to send me flying with clients in their rather "well off" planes. Certainly the clients were well off, but in terms of aviation (in some cases), it was well off with money, not so much experience. I began to realize that the well off client, who was flying his pride and joy 185 amphibian, really had little idea of how close he was coming to getting into difficulty sometimes. Assume nothing about piloting skill, based on life success!

A professional and successful business person, who reaches the point in life where they can afford to fly, cannot be assumed to have the flying experience to back it up. I present JFK Junior as an example of this....

Yeah, I've made lots of mistakes - as recently as today! In truth, many should have been fatal, but with little more than luck, the "swiss cheese holes" did not line up, and I did not fall through. I opine that the real skill in a person, is to not only recognize the mistake, but correctly place it in the context of why did it happen (so as to prevent a repeat) and what were the consequences. How would you do it differently next time, or more simply, what did you learn, and how will you apply it!

Bad enough something bad happened, or nearly so, but worse, you don't learn from it, and it happens again and again.

My job is to test and assess that a modified aircraft is compliant and safe. So I'm constantly trying to figure out how to design out opportunities for pilots to make mistakes. Still though, after having approved several hundred modifications, four pilots have still found a way to kill themselves in a modified aircraft I had flight tested, and approved. The design standards, and format for flight manuals and placards is intended to design out mistakes - if the pilot follows them!

But there's a more basic layer than that. Pilots, no matter how successful, must always remind themselves, that they are still a soft bit of skin hurtling through the sky, and if they are not skilled and cautious, the plane is going to kill them. The sly and the ground, don't know they are "successful"! Pilots must only venture far away from their skill set, under competent supervision.

I have to agree with you on reflection DAR.

There have always been a proportion of people who have got rich through a degree of personal arrogance, decide to take up flying, and are a menace to themselves and others because they don't take the attitude to their flying that it wants and needs.

In North America they often used to by Bonanzas, leading to its reputation as the "Doctor and Lawyer killer", which was unfair on the aeroplane - it was/is just a flying machine that needs a reasonably sharp and current pilot. Nowadays they're mostly buying SR22s thankfully, so we get lots of chute-pulls, but less dead lawyers.

The real danger however is probably where they keep buying medium sized helicopters. Those machines don't have an easy-out (well they do, land in a field and walk, but that goes against the moral grain of many of their pilots), and are relatively unforgiving of lack of recency and skill.

G

And that's a good thing? :ooh:

(Sorry, couldn't resist).

i would back what pilot Dar has said 100%. I have lost 5 friends to aviatiom and have also had swiss chease holes not lining up which makes me think "there for the grace of god go I".

We are a mixed bag of personalities and abilities as well as experience and it is so important to fly within your and the aircraft limitations.

More important to actually know what those limitations are and there lies the problem.

Pace

I think people who take the time to learn the skills needed to become a pilot are people who can apply themselves to a task and have a level of commitment and can take a certain amount of constructive critisisim.

Thus eliminating 100% of the xfactor 'give it to me on a plate because i saw Top Gun' fraternity.

I read every accident report i can, i think, i analyse, and i try to put myself in the place of the accident pilot and ask the 'what would i do' question.

For instance i now understand very well what frequency bias is after a routine 'take off' with full tanks and a larger than normal passenger, nothing focuses the mind than 50% of the runway gone and 50 Knots on the clock. I learnt a valuable lession.

In defence of the stereotype businessman learning to fly:

I've been a moderately successful businessman since 1978 and I think the often claimed idea of business/professional people refusing to take in instruction and getting killed in fast planes is more complex than it appears.

Sure some are arrogant but arrogance and aggression is sadly only just beneath the surface of modern society, at all levels of affluence.

Most of them are competent in getting stuff done. It's what they get paid for. So many people are so inept and useless (I spent much of yesterday talking to total d1ckheads in various finance companies on behalf of my mum who is in a care home) that I wonder who the hell recruited them. They also often pay c. £1000+/day for other forms of professionally delivered training. Then they turn up at the average flying school and what do they get? I know it varies but you get the idea. The schools are mostly set up to make a bit of money out of punters who are flat broke, and they mostly operate decrepit hardware which the aforementioned punter doesn't mind climbing into. They are not set up to deliver high quality training. So you get all sorts of problems. No wonder so many instructors so openly dislike business/professional people.

Also no bit of the civilian PPL training scene is set up to produce and support pilots who actually have the dosh to buy their own plane and go places in it. I was one of those back in 2002 and I never found an instructor who even knew how the KI-525 HSI worked, let alone the GPS, and you don't get much simpler than a KLN-94. The whole business hangs together only because the vast majority never do go anywhere. The RAF, OTOH, does train pilots to do the job because they have to.

The Cirrus business, under huge pressure from U.S. insurers, has got its act together and is offering some sort of post-PPL advanced training. But historically this never happened. Kennedy getting killed on a night flight (which is IMC, on a real night) is a common thing; he just happened to be famous. A pity he didn't do it in a Cirrus, eh? :) There is nothing unsafe about a Cirrus; it's just that Cirrus opened up a bit of a new market and historically most of the people flying them were well short of the training actually required, which shows up in the inept reasons for most of the chute pulls.

Most of the PPL community struggles with very low currency figures, but most of them are smart enough to be aware of this and they stick to simple short flights. It is those who manage to drag themselves out of that scene who have the problems. They fly with virtually no support, and it takes a pretty dedicated (to the point of obscession) pilot to keep up the learning process, diligently use the checklist, etc. And a % of them do get killed, which is no suprise at all. There is so much extra stuff to learn, and nobody is training it. It is up to the pilot to realise the shortfall and dig the stuff out all by himself.

Damned good post Peter,

G

Looking at it from a new powered but old glider lag, I've always erred on the side of caution when flying. I know what I can do and I don't try to do things that I can't. If something crops up that I haven't met before I'll discuss it with an instructor which may be enough or I'll do a dual trip and get it ironed out with them.

I can't go along with the 'most pilots are successful and therefore can afford to fly' line of thought either. Most pilots I know have to give up other things to get their two or three hours a month in. I'm not financially successful (the subject of money and the aquisition thereof really does bore me to death, as long as I have enough to get by), I measure success by other parameters; and by my own measurements I've had a pretty successful and full life. I wouldn't say that I'm arrogant either, most people who know me think I'm laid back to the horizontal. I am confident though. I also don't lose if I set myself a challenge, such as doing the PPL. Failure is not an option as they say.

An interesting thread, I wonder if there is a personality trait that pilots share other than the peverse delight in seeing hundreds of pounds a month disappearing in exhaust fumes?

Surely a professional and successful business person, who reaches the point in life where they can afford to fly, should be assumed to have no flying experience whatsoever.

My point is simply that success in many walks of life - law, medicine, business - demands a degree of intelligence and application and this may be useful to them in their flying. Of course, there are exceptions such as people who have inherited wealth.

Anyway, the initial question was 'what are the characteristics of a pilot?' - not 'what are the characteristics of a good pilot?'

ABDG
It is not the case that the attributes which make a good businessman make a good pilot.

I know a superb busessman with an ultra detailed mind who is great as a pilot until overloaded when he freezes up.

A good pilot has a lot of spare mental capacity when loaded which isnt the same as having business mental capacity or ability.

I once had it described as a computer stored memory and a fast Graphics card with a lot of onboard memory.

Obviously the more information stored on the hard drive means less work for the graphics card but a poor Graphics card will bring the computer to a freeze if loaded with too much in visuals.

Its the freeze point that kills.

Obviously we all have different brains and abilities. racing drivers often make poor businessmen but it doesnt hold that an excellent businessman will make a good racing driver etc???

More important with our mixed bag of natural abilities and personalities is that we all fly within our own abilities as well as the aircrafts and never get into a brain freeze situation where we cannot cope, get behind the aircraft or situations and cannot pick up our game to meet a certain situation.

Pace

That's true, but it depends on how you got there, in terms of both that actual flight, and in your flying history.

A good pilot will prepare the flight, and execute it, in a manner which ensures (as far as possible) that his cockpit workload never becomes unmanageable.

For example I can sure fly my TB20 by hand in IMC, and have had to do so plenty of times, even getting video footage of the failed autopilot behaviour :) but I would not depart on a long flight with an INOP autopilot (unless I had a co-pilot) because an autopilot makes a ~10x difference to cockpit workload, and who should embark on a flight with both hands tied behind his back?

In the event of an autopilot failure enroute, one would not create workload just for the fun of it. One would not fly an NDB approach (in any kind of real near-minima wx) if there is an ILS 50nm away, and one would not fly a procedural ILS if one can get vectors. One would also tell ATC that in the event of a hold, could it please be above FLxxx (above the clouds), etc etc (helps with icing conditions too).

Every pilot will make more mistakes if pressed, and every pilot makes mistakes even if not pressed. I make some mistake on almost every flight. You hope that none of them are critical. Usually, with modern avionics, not one of them is alone critical. He says... 170A tomorrow, no autopilot, no GPS, for the most part :)

At the other end of the scale, you need to be a very good instinctive pilot to be good at aerobatics, I would think (not something I know anything about).

And you get all sorts of people in between, because anybody who can dig up ~£8000 and can spare 50-60hrs or so can get a PPL.

The advantage which a high earner has (assuming he actually has time, which most of them don't until they are in their 50s) is that he is not short of money, and like it or not that is very relevant in flying, because currency, and particularly currency on type, is the most important single thing.

The disadvantage which a high earner has is that he will p1ss off most instructors :)

The adege is the same anywhere, people that do, the high achievers, and people that do not, the majority. Only those that have run their own business for a long time, understand the constant drive, the constant hastle, the constant rollercoaster, that is being in business. Alan Sugar, alludes at times to this, but like X factor (we all wanna be famous - with zero talent in a lot of cases), people tune in to The Apprentice, and see the wide eyed and bushy tailed wanna be'es. Old eyes look on and say be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.:\

I think the aviation community (pilots) are the same. The ability levels, the commitments, the drive to learn and improve, is vastly varied. And like the business world, some succeed, and some fail, only the BIG difference is that you may well die in aviation failure.

Not all business people are bright - look at the boards of Royal Bank of Scotland, The Bank of Scotland, HSBC, do you want me to go on..........

Why should anybody dislike somebody who pays for them to log PiC in their expensive aeroplane?

G

Maxred

Even the famous Richard Branson was a dunce at school. I knew one guy who was genious at shifting surplus stuff and made millions but who tried to pay some one to take flying exams as he could not face any exams :{

This is the crux we all have talents in one way or another.

There are some who consider they could teach a monkey to fly and there is an element of truth there.

You can teach almost anyone to drive but you cannot teach everyone to win the world formula one championship.

You can teach almost anyone to fly but you cannot teach everyone to fly a complex aircraft in **** weather IMC with multiple failures, icing conditions and land safely at destination, one engine out with a failed autopilot and flight director to minima! All single pilot (there are some who can)

Fly within your own and the aircrafts limits and know those limits has to be the safe way?

Pace

Without digressing too much (shame eh :) ) I think you will find that most of today's famous enterpreneurs are very much men of their time, and could not repeat their lucky breaks over and over, especially in today's business climate where the internet is such a ruthless leveller.

Still, if you make a load of millions, the fact that you can't do it again is not going to worry you ;)
What I meant was that these customers insist on very competent organisation and training, which the average RF is not geared up for.

Anyway, few if any will be doing an ab initio PPL in a plane they bought beforehand.

Anyway, the initial question was 'what are the characteristics of a pilot?' - not 'what are the characteristics of a good pilot?'

The link began to diverge into 'high flying rich businessmen', 'A' type personality, high achievers, therefore drawn to aviation as a high achieving pastime/job/hobby/sport. It is not so simple. As said before aviation brings a whole host of 'types', some good, some brilliant, some bad, same as life, same as business.

A good pilot will prepare the flight, and execute it, in a manner which ensures (as far as possible) that his cockpit workload never becomes unmanageable.

However, a fair number of these good pilots, perish, because somewhere along the line, things go wrong. Preparedness, or not as the case may be sometimes just is not enough. Accidents happen. So what are the characteristics of a pilot? It is like asking what are the characteristics of a doctor - diligence, intelligence, I like doing it, my mum wanted me to be one??

1) Somebody who once had £8k
2) Somebody who had 50-60hrs spare

Taking the Q literally, that's about it :)

The vast majority of fatal crashes are pilot error.

I think the vast majority of those would not have been made by the same pilot sitting in his armchair, presented with the hypothetical scenario.

Is that really true? My impression is that the basics of actually flying are reasonably straightforward, but I know a lot of people who would be absolutely flummoxed by the practicalities of paper-and-whizzwheel navigation, and who simply wouldn't be able to pass the theoretical exams no matter how much tutoring they had.

I'll be blunt and say that my day job involves discussing mild to moderately complex issues with Joe Public, and that when I worked in an inner city area, I found myself pondering how civilisation continues, given the proportion of people who still had trouble with numeracy and literacy and the often relatively simple concepts I was trying to get over.

I also agree with the idea that academic intelligence isn't enough to be a good pilot, but whilst I can see that it isn't necessary to be a brainbox, I do think there's a basic minimum level of academic ability required. And perhaps application is even more important - there's quite a lot of material to cover for a PPL (even though much of it is not extremely complex) and I think that without a fair degree of drive most people would simply decide to do something else with their time and money.

Perhaps we have slightly different views on what constitutes 'successful' or 'rich'. Going back to my inner city clients - some of them were reasonably well off, but frankly they'd be in a small minority. A large proportion of them lived very tough lives. I used to work in nursing homes, for example, with women who worked insane hours doing an emotionally and physically hard job for the minimum wage (or thereabouts).

I regard myself as being rather well off on about £40,000 a year - the top 15% or so of earners. But the only reason I can afford to fly is that I used my savings to pay for the PPL course, and I don't own a car which means I have more disposable income than most. I still worry that I'm spending money that I should really be investing. I don't think anybody who can afford tuition at £130 an hour or more is anywhere near 'flat broke' - at least in the way I understand it.

Sorry guys. This is far simpler. We all make mistakes but mostly trivial ones. If we make a big mistake most of us would say, jees! I'll not do that again. We then analyse it.

We must push the boundaries or we never learn, but it should only be in small bites. Water skiing in a Robin. How do you take that in small bites?

The difference is not money, status or even training.

It is attitude!

D.O.

Sure there has to be a certain baseline IQ. No idea where it lies though; I recall one fairly dim chap (used to be a builder, and a bad one at that) who got himself a CPL last time I saw him, so he did the 9 or 10 exams OK. The exams took him ~2 years though.

Re RF setups, I think the PPL as a product is price sensitive, in that if you doubled the cost, and for that you delivered a very professionally produced training package, with nice new planes, etc, you would lose most of the business. But we will never know this for sure, because all the time there is somebody in your area willing to sit there from 9am to 6pm, unpaid, in a hut, waiting for a phone call for some pleasure flight booking, with a heap of a C150 sitting outside, he will get most of the business. He won't get the Alan Sugars, however.

That is a very good income. If you live in some cheap dig, and keep your trousers zipped up ;) so you don't pick up any major obligations, then you can do a great deal of GA flying on that income. Probably ~100hrs/year, if in a group.

Depends on your age, etc, but hey I charge for financial advice :) :)

I find that when considering piloting tasks, pretty well everything can be boiled down to the prime directive: Aviate - Navigate - Communicate. With the possible exception of the last, in certain flying environments, a pilot must otherwise have the capacity to keep the responsibilities of all three of these disciplines handled relative to the needs of the flight.

Aviate is the least tolerant of the three, if being ignored for any length of time, so we have to keep an eye on that one most, and foremost. That said, in a busy traffic area, Navigate will become very important.

I watch myself, and other pilots, deal with the workload demands of these three, and how they are balanced. Different pilots thrive best in one, but not all of these three disciplines. So, they are best to be well aware of their shortcomings in the others. In some cases, a pilot can avoid, or minimize exposure to certain flying environments, and thus probably not have to call upon those lesser skills. In the long term, that pilot should be focusing on improving the lesser skills, but in the immediate term, create an extra level of safety by recognizing the shortcoming, and making extra allowance, preplanning, flight manual review, or whatever is going to be necessary to keep the swiss cheese holes from lining up.

The problem can come when a pilot fails to recognize that an unexpected change in conditions could drive workload in one or more of the three disciplines, way up, fast. Does the pilot have the excess capacity to handle it? If you think you don't you put some mitigation in there in advance to help you out should the worst come to the worst.

For what I have seen, it's not so much the super skilled pilot who survives, but the super prepared pilot. No matter how much skill, something which you had never considered, or prepared for, is going to get you.

My three most common and scary have been icing conditions - so I stay out! Errors in weight and balance for aircraft I am to fly, but did not load, so I check those really carefully, and improperly accomplished maintenance, so I do really careful maintenance reviews and walk arounds.

JFK Jr. just did not imagine how little there is to see when you're pointed out over the Atlantic at night, and how fast that type of aircraft will build up speed when you fail to control your attitude. Neither condition would have been fatal, were the other one to have been very well handled. The third hole in the swiss cheese? Two women aboard who really wanted to get there, and no self discipline to say, "No"

Having had the rest of the day to think about this I think that the most competent pilots have good situational awareness and spare capacity to deal with unexpected events. Not just as in knowing where you are and where you are going but what you are going to do if x or y happens. If you have no plan what to do if x or y happens then make one. I suppose as you gain more experience then more possibilities of x and y occuring crop up; so you just carry more 'x and y occurring' plans in your head.

My head is fairly empty of x and y plans as I haven't had the experiences yet to realise the need for another x and y plan to carry in my head. Although they are gathering pace.

Personally I always prepare for the worst when flying, such as a fanstop etc, then when it doesn't happen I'm pleasantly surprised. I always have a landable field in view though. Gliding habit.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the old adage 'Superior pilots use their superior knowledge to stay out of situations that require the use of their superior skill'.

I think the OP has a flaw in his original premise - that pilots have an overriding interest in correcting their own mistakes. I think we have a greater-than-normal interest in correcting OTHERS' mistakes. We pore over accident reports and speculate as to what the incident pilot did wrong, say "There but for the grace of god", etc. But, when faced with direct criticism of our own actions, such as someone approaching you on the ramp after a flight, I think we take the feedback no better or worse than any other population - all based on the personalities involved in the conversation.

I like these threads they make me chuckle. 'The disadvantage which a high earner has is that he will p1ss off most instructors' Where does that leave the successful businessman who is also an instructor and examiner ?

Well, my girlfriend just asked what I'd been spending so much time on, so she read the thread. Her comments were:

* Much better spelling than on any of the forums I read!

* Oh dear, you're no good at multi-tasking...

* Hah! Too late.

Yes, thank you! It's an attitude thing.

Some of us harass those who either carelessly misspell words, or worse, slip into the laziness of abbreviating words with "u's", "r's", "2's" and "8's". But, of course, being aviation, acronyms are allowed (so there's lots that I still don't understand here).

Now, if only I could get the weather people to present their reports and forecasts with whole words!

That's a good one - I can see the justification when it all had to be sent by teletype or morse code, but in the days of the internet it seems an anachronism to me... unless anybody with more experience can point out a reason why things should stay as they are?

Pilot Dar

Into that also comes what you are actually using to post your messages!
If I am at home on the computer, its peaceful and im not hassled then my spelling is better than if I am out and about on trains or in cafes or sitting in the handling agents lounge awaiting PAX using my I phone! (prob 50/50 of my postings.
I will often edit or add! getting a message down quickly or in the case of the I phone correcting it on the home computer.
Some I noticed hardly edit while mine seem to be always edited :E

Pace

I have tried posting with an Ipad2 but it is just too painful. To make posts sensible one usually has to quote another post, and doing the copy/paste stuff with an Ipad is pure torture. I would simply not bother. On an Iphone it will be harder still. These devices are OK for just reading stuff.