11/01/2025
Flight Philosophy Matters
We recently asked our audience to send us articles that we could publish in this newsletter. Longtime SSA member Bob Whelan sent us this article that I would like to share.
Do you remember being taught in school how to think?
Me neither.
Maybe I missed it, but in 16 years of formal education I can remember being taught only what to think. A large part of learning the life-extending importance of learning how to think came from doing nothing more than reading – and dreaming – about piloting. ‘T’was insight gained several years before the possibility of taking up soaring entered my young skull.
How? Why?
For as long as I can remember flight fascinated me: birds, homemade hand-launched balsa gliders, reading about it. Grade school library “finds” involved aerial flight. Print aviation-oriented flying magazines were a college revelation, e.g., Flying mag. By then I’d learned dismal uncorrected eyesight ruled out military or airline piloting, so “sport aviation” became my focus. My favorite Flying mag reading was a shortish, reader-submitted, monthly column entitled “I Learned About Flying from That.”
Before graduation, from that column (and semi-frequent NTSB commercial airline final accident reports in Aviation Week & Space Technology), I’d concluded that how a pilot thought was crucial to Joe Pilot’s continuing PIC longevity.
Result? Personal Rule #1: avoid stupid pilot tricks! Further, K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)
What matters is how a pilot prioritizes actionable lessons contained in eye-glazing accident statistics. What easy-to-remember principles can be extracted from them for “automatic” implementation in the cockpit?
This seemed critical when applied to my soaring. Being a purely voluntary activity ostensibly serving no useful purpose - but a whole lot of fun and an enduring life-challenge - it quickly became a passion ... with one simple, overarching, goal, i.e., being able to pursue it tomorrow, in the same plane flown today.
This meant not killing myself or breaking the glider.
Those twin goals meant:
1) never (NEVER!!!) hitting the ground in any manner other than a controlled, lowest-possible, safe-energy, landing, and
2) never (NEVER!!!) departing from controlled flight in any landing pattern.
Everything – and I mean EVERYthing! – else is secondary.
It’s impossible to prioritize when you’re dead. Contacting the ground horizontally vastly improves one’s chance of remaining alive; hitting it vertically practically guarantees a closed-casket funeral.
That’s how I thought before ever taking a flying lesson. It’s how I sought to actively think about – and fly – every landing pattern. It served me well for 37 PIC years and 2600+ soaring hours.
I can instantly recall two experienced soaring compadres who should have been thinking similarly ... but evidently weren’t. Both died from “departures from controlled flight” on their base-to-final turns on utterly benign soaring days. A CFIG (with multiple witnesses) augured in returning from an aerobatic flight in her SZD 59 Acro. The other (unwitnessed) apparently focused too much on attaining a landout-avoiding, retractable-engine restart, less than 5 miles from his home-field launch site.
From 4+ decades of inhaling every accident report I could find, fellow-pilot-grapevines, etc., I’m aware of many more such fatal landing-pattern accidents from the soaring world. “Power types” routinely add to the depressing, entirely avoidable – if pilots would “only” keep their actionable-priorities properly prioritized – fatal crash stats.
Feel free to accuse me of fatuously stating of obvious realities ... but reality rules in the cockpit.
Please fly accordingly.
