flying

The message we should be hearing about masks: An aviation parable

October 24, 2020 By Greg Falken Leave a Comment

In a bygone time, I was a professional pilot, flying corporate and charter aircraft. At my home airport on the central coast of California, there was a senior pilot – I’ll call him Jim – who flew a six passenger jet for a locally based company. Jim had logged over 20,000 hours of flight time and was a mentor for many younger pilots, myself included. I have been thinking recently about a conversation I once heard him have with a rather inexperienced pilot, about our airport’s instrument approach.

For those who don’t know, an instrument approach allows planes to land in bad weather. It’s a skill that requires special training and licensing, and a thorough understanding of the published procedure for each runway at each airport. The procedures are developed, tested and documented by the FAA.

The procedure that Jim was being asked about is called a Localizer approach. It uses a radio signal to align the plane perfectly with the runway but doesn’t provide electronic guidance vertically. Most of this particular procedure took place over the ocean but once on final approach, the pilot must monitor the instruments to know when they have crossed the shoreline and can descend to the “minimum descent altitude” (MDA), which in this case was 460’ above the ground. If the runway doesn’t come into sight after a predetermined amount of time, the landing is aborted and the “missed approach procedure” is flown.

All of this is a long preamble to the question that Jim was asked by the young pilot, which was, “How much below MDA can you really go on the localizer approach?” To which Jim promptly replied, “If you go one foot below 460’, you’re gonna die.”

Now, I knew that Jim’s answer wasn’t strictly correct, and that there had been many a foggy night when his jet made it back to the field when other planes would have missed the approach. But because he knew that his advice would be respected and followed by less experienced pilots, he would never suggest deviating from the published procedure from the experts at the FAA.

The COVID parallel

Whether deserved or not, our elected officials speak with the voice of authority. Their words are heard and their examples followed. They are responsible for choosing the best advice to give for the well being of their community. In times as uncertain as these, they should be delivering the clearest, simplest recommendations for people to follow, based on expert opinion. And the message from the experts – epidemiologists and public health departments – has been remarkably consistent for the last several months: Maintain social distancing, wash your hands and WEAR A MASK.

These things are true whatever your opinion about the role of government or your political party preference. They are true regardless of which businesses are open, how many people are allowed to sit inside at a restaurant or whether our kids are in school.

Yet the message we get from most public officials is that all of this is optional. You get to choose which of these guidelines to follow and, who knows, maybe everything will turn out just fine. They make it sound like there is no expert opinion because the experts say things that they don’t want to repeat.

So how about this for a good, clear message, across the board from public officials: The best things you can do to protect yourself and your community from a potentially deadly disease is to wear a mask, stay socially distant and wash your hands frequently. Period, end of statement.

Sure, you’re unlikely to die from COVID-19 because you don’t wear a mask, just as you’re unlikely to crash if you sneak down to 300’ on the localizer approach. But those in positions of authority should be promoting the safest approach, not the riskiest.

The Go, No-Go Decision

October 15, 2013 By Greg Falken Leave a Comment

When I flew chartered airplanes for a living, I had to decide every day (sometimes several times a day) whether the job we were expected to do could be done safely. Weather was the biggest factor, because the single and twin engine aircraft we flew didn’t fly above the weather, they flew in it. I remember in particular a flight from Watsonville, CA (WVI) to Sacramento Executive Airport (SAC), a one hour flight in a six-seat Piper Seneca. The weather was lousy; low overcast and rain. As pilot-in-command, it was up to me to decide if the flight could proceed. A number of factors went into the decision to launch:

While the weather was rotten, it was above the minimums established by the FAA for both takeoff and landing.
The passenger’s company (a large construction firm) had a policy of always flying with two pilots, even though only one was required by the regulations.
I was very familiar with the airplane and had plenty of recent experience flying by instruments.
My expectations for the flight didn’t include anything that I or the airplane couldn’t reasonably be expected to handle.

We took off into the overcast and spent the next 50 minutes in the clouds and rain. The two of us who were flying stayed very focused on our position (this was in the days before GPS and moving map displays) and our procedures. We emerged from the clouds about 500 feet above the airport and circled to land on the runway in use. Our passengers spent an hour in the plane instead of four hours in a car and the charter company got paid. A successful outcome all around.

In business today, there is lots of talk about the value of saying no: Perhaps saying yes will take you away from your primary mission, or will cause you to lose focus, or the chances of success are simply too low. All of these are valid reasons to pull the plug on a particular project or task. Here are some useful questions to ask when coming to a go, no-go decision:

Can you proceed safely? There may be dangers (not necessarily physical) attached to this decision. Consider how they will affect you and the others involved.
How important is it to do this now? There might be a clear advantage or disadvantage to a delay.
What will the impact be on others? Keeping commitments is important, as is clear communication when they must be renegotiated.
If this isn’t done now, how much more difficult does it become to do later? Momentum is a hard thing to get back once given up.

By law, a pilot has have alternatives. Good decisions are based on awareness of a number of possible outcomes, which narrow to a single choice as events unfold. Just make sure that you can divert to an alternate if things don’t go as expected.

Cloud photo: Wikimedia Commons

Do by Learning

September 22, 2013 By Greg Falken 3 Comments

Note: This was one of the earliest posts on this blog, written almost four years ago. I think it is still relevant and useful, so I’ve moved it up to the top. -gf

In the early 90s, I was a flight instructor at Watsonville, CA (WVI), teaching primary students how to get an airplane off the ground, take it somewhere else and land again without bending anything important. For the students, this took a fair amount of effort, not to mention a sizable investment of time and money.

One of the things that I realized after a while was that very little learning was done in the airplane. It’s a high stress environment, in which (at least by the end of their training) the student needed to aviate, navigate and communicate simultaneously and there was no pulling off to the side of the road to sort things out. Because they were operating at full mental capacity most of the time, there was simply no space to absorb new information. So my mantra became: you learn on the ground, you practice in the air.

In my current life as a web developer and adviser to many people on all things Internet, I often find myself in mental overload and I know that at those times, my ability to learn and think creatively is diminished. I don’t have a solution to this, other than to recognize it and know that at those times all I can do is practice what I already know.

It’s clear to me that we need time away from our daily chores to create, generate new ideas, take the long view, to learn. A few things that I find help facilitate this process:

Spend some time focusing your attention on one thing, while not actually working on it. I often spend 15 or 20 minutes doing this before getting out of bed in the morning.
Spend time in the presence of something that inspires you. For me, this almost always involves music but it could be just about anything.
Talk with other people about Big Ideas. They don’t need to be put into action but who’s to say that they won’t be.

Of course, in most cases we want our learning to have a practical outcome. It seems to take a lot of switching back and forth between learning and practicing before we can produce something of value, especially something new. I’m very interested to know how you go about about finding the balance. Please leave your thoughts and ideas in comments.

Piper Tomahawk Photo by Simon Schoeters. [Note: I’ve spent a lot of time in Tomahawks, including during my own primary training at Santa Monica (SMO), where there was a tower controller who insisted on calling them “Tommyhawks”. Good times.]