Safety Dance

We can act if we want to; if we don’t nobody will.

Ever since

John Carter

posted his masterful essay entitled simply “Fear” — which pointed back to his earlier “Safety Last,” I’ve been looking for a hook to piggyback a small codicil onto his insights. Today I got it. Jack and I had another episode of in-flight excitement.

It wasn’t a big deal. We’d just departed 0P2 Shoestring, a small grass strip in Pennsylvania, where we’d met up with a group of pilots to celebrate the birthdays of four septuagenarians who are still strapping themselves into absurdly small aircraft and playing in the air.

This is the sort of machine that dominates Shoestring.

It’s hot and humid here, which degrades performance. So we weren’t surprised we weren’t climbing or accelerating well. We’d performed the obligatory zoom climb / steep 180° turn / low pass over the runway maneuver and were climbing through 2000 MSL at full throttle when the engine made a series of sounds like “blat.”

“Blat blat BLAT BLAT BLAT.”

With accompanying shuddering effects.

Circle in place while running some brief troubleshooting. Fuel flow reading suspiciously low. Fuel pressure likewise concerning. Blatting smooths out in level flight at reduced throttle. So a fuel delivery issue. Nothing had stopped working completely (although when things sour in the cockpit that can happen quite suddenly, so you don’t want to push it) and we weren’t far from where we’d started. So we just returned, removed enough fuses and screws to isolate the problem as the electric fuel pump, tied down, borrowed a car,¹ and drove home. We’ll order the fuel pump, throw the toolboxes in the trunk, and rewind this video in a few days.

Described this way, it all seems quite mundane. And in a way it was. Not because we weren’t in a potentially life-threatening situation, but because pilots are trained in particular modes of thought and action that routinize what we do when faced with emergencies in the air, and make it a normal part of life in the sky.

This habit of mind governs you hours or days before you even walk up to the plane. Every trip is evaluated with regard to several sources of risk — weather, aircraft, pilot, airspace — which can only be imperfectly quantified when you are making the go/no go decision. So when you push the throttle to the firewall, accelerate to rotation speed, and your wheels leave the ground — you are still launching into the unknown.

That’s where the next mental habit takes over. You force yourself into ongoing vigilance regarding what you would do if — at that moment — your engine stops / you catch fire / you hit a bird. You are constantly assessing where the closest landing spot is and how you would glide there with no power. You scan the sky in 10° slices for conflicting traffic.

This is how you — you as an individual — manage risk. This is how you overcome the fear that longs for some managerial elite to manage it for you. You do not insist that the world be scoured of bad outcomes, so that you can wander fecklessly through life and never encounter danger. You take onto yourself the responsibility, and cultivate the knowledge and skill, to balance your understandable reluctance to die prematurely with the wisdom that if you never control your own fate, you have never really lived.

This frame of mind is wholly at odds with the “Safety First” credo that

John Carter

so justly eviscerates. And it brings to mind a running joke Jack and I share when he’s heading off to the airport to teach a student while I’m stuck in front of a computer firing up my next Zoom meeting.

“Have fun — fly safe!” I call out.

And he responds: “Well, which one is it?”

1. One of the amazing things about small general aviation airports is how willing the operators are to loan out airport vehicles to pilots — who are usually complete strangers. Granted, they’ve got an aircraft as collateral, but — they’ve seen us fly, they must know how we drive.