How do you know if someone is a pilot?

They will tell you.

As aviators we like to let everyone know, not only our own ability but that of our airplanes. We are proud of our dispatch reliability rate, the utility they afford, the ease of travel, and the time saved not standing in a TSA line. And we would love to tell you all about it in great detail.

And yet, for all that talk, we don’t always communicate very well with our passengers when describing risk. We don’t want to scare the deer. Or show our airplane’s shortcomings. Or our own.

But, yes, our little airplanes really do offer up all that utility. Add a Garmin suite of avionics to the already reliable powerplant/airframe in my highly updated Bonanza, and I can get in and out of places that no commercial airliner could ever attempt.

Part 91 takes away whatever remaining restrictions the majors have in getting off the ground. Technically, we GA pilots can take off in any conditions we like. Sure, we don’t necessarily do it, but we all know that we could if we wanted to badly enough. And that’s simply not a helpful framework for our self-deluding primate brains.

• READ MORE: Misses, Near and Far…

I remember once getting a call some years ago on a Saturday morning from my buddy, Dave. He and a friend had to make a wedding in California’s Bay Area that night. Their commercial flight into KSFO was canceled because of fog. He asked me if I could get them to a nearby airport in the next few hours. A part of my brain lit up at the thought of saving the day. It’s fun being the hero. I tried to remain calm and even had the wherewithal to tell him I had to check the weather first. But my mind was already 87 percent made up. I was getting them to that wedding.

Turns out it wasn’t just fog. There was a well-developed low making a ton of rain along with 70 knot winds at 10,000 feet. We flew right through that storm. While there was no convection, and I wasn’t exactly in over my head, it was not a flight that needed to happen. I had just received my instrument rating a few months earlier and was determined to leverage it to its full potential.

I remember this one moment up at altitude when I realized the weather at our destination was not going to lift above minimums. I told the guys we would not make San Jose and would have to land at Monterey. They were concerned with rental cars and ground transportation, blissfully unaware I had not studied our alternate’s instrument approaches—there are six of them at KMRY. Runway 28 was active, and it required a descent toward mountainous terrain and an approach that takes you right past peaks higher than the aircraft’s path. The surrounding terrain there is the real deal, having taken the life of a well-known CFI who had a CFIT accident in 2021 while departing into IMC.

Our flight ended with a successful landing, but I will always remember walking away from the airplane toward the FBO when Dave asked me if I always sweated this much when flying. “Yes,” I replied. “I’m a ‘schvitzer.’” Better that than explain to him that I exposed them both to a much higher risk without ever giving them the option to make a choice for themselves. Had I called Dave back earlier that morning and explained that our desired destination was at minimums and our alternate had mountainous terrain surrounding it on three sides, he might very well have decided making the wedding wasn’t that important after all. More than 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, anyway. But I never gave him that option. I wanted to make it work—for me, as much as for him. And that’s a problem.

In the end, I didn’t even achieve the hero status that was fueling my decision-making process. The guys were scrambling to find a rental car as they tossed a thank-you over their shoulders as they walked to the FBO. I slowly made my way back to the airplane and just sat there in the left seat for a bit and breathed before filing and heading back to LA.

The best example of this noncommunication was also the worst day of my life: that fateful morning in Telluride, Colorado, where I encountered wind shear on takeoff and almost entered a stall/spin, ending with a gear-up landing. My passenger and I could have left later that day or the next morning. That’s when all the “reasons” start flooding in:

• The hotel room in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is booked.
• The restaurant reservation is made.
• The girl is new to me, and I want to impress her.
• My airplane is perfectly suited to the mission.
• I am a pilot of exceptional, bordering superhuman ability.

In hindsight, those seem patently absurd (the last, also being patently false) with the reality I was then served: a totaled airplane, a scarred pilot and his dog, and a woman who ended up being subjected to a terrifying, near-death experience.

Had I just asked her if she was willing to risk the flight at one of the most notoriously dangerous airports in North America because of mountain wind shear and a climbing density altitude, I can almost guarantee she would have declined. But that dialogue never occurred, because I never opened it.

There are times where we really don’t see the danger coming and, as such, a conversation cannot be had. For that, there is no remedy. But I find the vast majority of the time there is that tingling feeling that originates in your brain then migrates south to the back of your neck, where it surfaces, becoming almost topical—like an itch.

We almost always know. We just don’t always listen, and we often don’t speak.

This column first appeared in the September 2023/Issue 941 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Pilots Don’t Always Communicate Well When Describing Risk appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Then came the little indulgences, like a recent trip to Lebanon, New Hampshire (KLEB), to meet our older son for lunch and help him with some car trouble. He is in college in nearby Hanover and while the distance is driveable, it typically takes five hours. Annie the Commander can make it in just over one.

On this particular day, I had planned to fly to an earlier work-related appointment and was able to bundle the errands neatly and, if all went well, I would enjoy the rare accomplishment of two missions in one day. The weather was gusty—one of those days when every leg of the trip has a headwind component and all landings are crosswind. But it was still a nice, sunny flying day, just warm enough with a few scattered clouds.

The best part of a trip like this is knowing that I will not be held up by highway traffic jams over which I have no control. It is a rare road trip that is not prolonged at least somewhat by traffic that often congeals for no apparent reason. How many times, after setting off before dawn so we can finish a 500-mile trip in time for lunch, I struggled to reach our destination before dinner?

Flying, despite the pressures of planning, loading, briefing, and actually piloting the aircraft, is a far more relaxing endeavor because I am not worried about encountering road construction, accidents, or holiday volume around every bend. There are far more serious problems one might face aloft. And pilots might have to wait for days before the weather is appropriate for traveling by air. Still, I look back on dozens of long family vacation trips by car during which I looked up, saw an airplane overhead, and dreamed of flying the same route in my own aircraft someday.

While heading to New Hampshire on my recent jaunt, I looked down from 4,500 feet on traffic creeping through Massachusetts on Interstate 495, a road I have traveled often and rarely enjoyed. Every highway looked clogged as I cruised easily overhead. I wondered if any of the drivers happened to look up and see my airplane making good time and fading into the distance as their tempers flared.

My arrival in Lebanon was largely friction-free. I borrowed the FBO’s crew car for the drive to Hanover, where we installed a new battery in my son’s car, grabbed lunch, caught up on current events, and said our farewells as I dropped him off at his rowing team’s practice. Squeezing this visit into the day was surprisingly easy with Annie but would not have been possible in the car.

Less than 30 minutes later, I was calling ground, ready to taxi for departure to the south. The controller instructed me to hold briefly while a Hawker Beechcraft 900 cleared the taxiway. That wait of less than a minute was my only delay of the day.

You might think the trip home would have benefitted from a tailwind, but the breeze had shifted against us yet again. Despite this, I got back in time to pick up my younger son from his high school sports practice. It was not the first time the airplane has played a role in the elusive work-life balance.      

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