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Making
things happen - with integrity. A Weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, February 28, 2000 Volume II Number 9
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FOCUS - Flying Blind
Dan Dill is the only guy I know who considers round-the-world flights routine.
On any ordinary workday, Dan occupies the left seat in the cockpit of a jumbo Boeing MD-11. It’s hardly glamorous, he says. He calls it “the office.”
The left seat is reserved for the Captain. The co-pilot sits to his right.
But
when Captain Dan gets clearance from the tower and reaches over to push forward
all three throttle levers, simultaneously releasing the brake pedal, he’s
pouring enormous quantities of jet fuel into three lit Pratt and Whitney 4460s,
which in turn release maximum thrust. When
his aircraft is fully loaded (which it almost always is), Dan sits atop over
six hundred thousand pounds of high tech instrumentation, precision tooling,
alloys and compounds, topped off fuel tanks, cables and wiring and twenty
thousand cubic feet of cargo space, packed solid, as he begins his roll down
the runway.
Accelerating to somewhere around two hundred miles per hour at full throttle, Dan gently pulls back on the stick. The nose wheel is the first to lift off the runway as the massive machine points skyward. The pitch of the wings now attacks the wind at a new angle. Gravity’s hold on this marvel of modern technology is defeated. Dan’s bird is airborne… freed from “the surly bonds of earth.” Gear and flaps up.
We’re flyin’.
* * * * * * *
My fantasies of sitting in Dan’s seat are almost as old as I am.
I can still hear my dad telling me the stories of his first business flights. I was a little kid. Wonder filled his voice and his eyes as he asked the rhetorical question – “How do they get that big old thing off the ground anyway?” He’d shake his head and add one more word. “Amazing.”
We’d be driving down the road as he told the story.
When Dad sat in an airline passenger seat at the end of the runway on those business trips, he was thinking about the guy up front waiting for the tower to give him the OK. Dad would pretend he was the Captain of the great bird. A crackled voice – “clear for takeoff.” He nodded and answered, “Roger, clear for take off.”
I was sitting next to him in the front seat of the family automobile, listening to every word and watching every move, barely tall enough to see over the dashboard or out the side window. The old car was transformed into a cockpit. With his left hand on the steering wheel, he’d reach over with his right hand to grab the imaginary throttle of his imaginary airliner; the number of levers matched the number of engines – sometimes three, sometimes four (depending on which plane he flew on the last trip). One finger was wrapped around the knob of each lever. Then he’d push 'em up in slo-mo. Puffing out his cheeks, the simulated sound of jet engines came from somewhere deep in his throat and I could tell, in his mind, he was takin’ off one more time. I was, too. We weren’t just drivin’ a car.
We were in flight. Dad and me.
On Sunday afternoon, sometimes we’d drive down to the airport just to watch airplanes from the end of the runway. “There’s another one!” Off in the distance, you’d see one more comin’ in on final approach. “What is it?” We’d make our guesses and see who was first to correctly identify the aircraft.
It made that old out-dated hand-me-down encyclopedia set on the bookshelf at home fascinating to me – I read all about airflow and lift and drag and ailerons and vertical stabilizers and elevators and turn-and-bank and rate-of-climb indicators and directional compasses and altimeters and VORs. I built model airplanes and flew them all over the house, up the stairs, off the roof, then outside and all around the neighborhood. Our driveway was a runway. Our front porch – the control tower.
And as a little boy, I wanted to grow up to be that guy wearing the uniform in that left seat.
Dan Dill is one person I know who made that boyhood fantasy a career. For him London, Paris, Luxembourg, Singapore, Bangkok, Tokyo, New York… none of them are exotic ports of call. They are routine docks of pick up and delivery.
Routine - until those occasional approaches that involve weather conditions pilots call Category III. Like last week in Seattle.
* * * * * * *
Balance is a miracle of human anatomy. The same hair cells of the inner ear that discern sounds and differentiate pitch also tip off the brain when we teeter off balance. It’s involuntary.
You don’t think to yourself while standing, “hmm, I seem to be drifting a little to the right. Without an immediate correction, I’ll fall over in front of all these people. I’ll tilt my head a shade left, and stiffen my right leg a bit. Push it back just a touch left. There that ought to do it. I’m back to straight again. Good.”
Nope.
Doesn’t happen. That is, it doesn’t happen on a CONSCIOUS level. But the conversation between your ear, your brain and your muscles never stops. There are hundreds of electrical impulses, multiple and simultaneous calculations, a quick flex here, then there. It’s the internal autopilot of balance. You remain upright because your body constantly monitors your position. It’s incredibly complex, and yet we rarely think about it.
Unless the system goes haywire. It’s called vertigo. It isn’t fun. When the body loses its capacity to hold itself in balance, everything else becomes secondary. You roll into a personal tailspin.
* * * * * * *
On a clear day, pilots who fly by Visual Flight Rules (VFR) depend on their senses. They can see the horizon. They go from landmark to landmark, spotting the water tower, the Interstate, the rivers and lakes and train tracks, each familiar sighting leads one step closer to that predetermined destination.
But sometimes there is no visibility. Dense clouds form. Fog or haze or glare obscure the horizon. There is no point of reference.
In such a situation all the rules change. The flight rules are no longer visual, but Instrument - Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). IFR requires special training and lots of hands on experience. A VFR pilot not certified in IFR has no business flying his airplane in IFR conditions. He’s an accident waiting to happen.
The IFR pilot must learn to ignore the regular, involuntary signals of his inner ear. In the air, the human balance autopilot is easily fooled. Without a clear line of vision, the horizon is no longer an orientation for straight and level flight. The IFR pilot must believe what his instruments tell him: his artificial horizon, his rate of climb indicator, his altimeter, his compass, his navigational radios even when his brain’s involuntary balance system gives him a strong and contradictory message.
IFR instruction is rigorous. It’s a grueling process of written tests, hours of flight time with an instructor and a final exam involving real time IFR flight. During training, the pilot wears a hood which prevents him from seeing outside the windshield or the side windows. The instruments, properly set, properly calibrated, properly functioning, determine every move the pilot makes.
The foundational principles for IFR: Trust your instruments. Ignore your physical instincts.
* * * * * * *
When John F. Kennedy, Jr. flew his Piper Saratoga to Martha’s Vineyard that fateful Friday night, he failed to heed the message delivered by the backlit dials on the panel before him.
As of last week, the NTSB determined the probable cause of the crash: pilot error. Young Kennedy, relatively inexperienced, flying a sophisticated single engine airplane – followed his instincts and ignored his instruments.
It cost him, his wife and his sister-in-law their lives.
* * * * * * *
Last week, late one night, as Captain Dan and his co-pilot turned their mammoth MD-11 in the direction of Sea-Tac (Seattle-Tacoma), the tower reported the airport’s weather condition: Category IIIb.
Typically the minimums for IFR (Instrument) approaches are a seven hundred foot ceiling (seven hundred feet between the lowest cloud formation and the ground) and one mile forward visibility. Once under the cloud ceiling, the approach becomes visual. The pilot can see the runway once he breaks through.
I asked Dan, “What’s a Category IIIb?”
“One hundred seventy five feet forward visibility and zero ceiling,” he said.
“You can land in THAT?” I said.
Might as well cover up the windshield with canvas.
The tower gave Dan’s FedEx jumbo jet priority. The Captain switched the system to auto-pilot. He programmed the computers to read the glide-slope signal, controlling all his sophisticated systems to guide the big jet through the nasty Puget Sound fog directly in line down to the runway.
Dan is a veteran pilot. In his thirty years of flying, he’s logged over twenty-four thousand hours in the air. He’s been a military transport pilot and a flight instructor. Today, he’s the left seat captain of a jumbo jet.
“Dan, I gotta ask ya,” I interrupted him. My palms were sweaty just thinking about it. “At what point did you SEE the Sea-Tac runway?”
“A coupla seconds after touch down.”
“No way! After touchdown? Wow.” I get nervous in the passenger cabin when I can’t see the wingtips out my window. I could not even imagine sitting in that pilot’s seat with no visual reference. Flyin’ blind. I went on.
“Dan… one more thing. When you are flyin’ blind on final approach, does your heart rate increase just a tad? Do the knuckles go white around the control wheel while you’re waiting to feel that landing gear make safe contact with the runway?”
“Not at all,” Dan said with the coolness of an old pro. “Just another day at the office.”
* * * * * * *
Here we are again. It’s another Monday morning.
You are a leader.
In your world, you occupy the Captain’s seat. The left seat. People
are looking to
you to keep this baby airborne, straight and steady, on course.
It’s a heavy responsibility.
Could be that Visual Flight Rules are sufficient for now. The sky’s clear. Visibility unlimited.
Then again, today you may well find yourself in a thick fog. You’re not sure where it’s all going because there are certain things you’d like to see out there ahead, but you’ve got zero visibility.
You’re flyin’ blind.
You may even wonder if you are suffering from professional vertigo.
Today, just for today, lock into your instruments. Tune into your radar beam. Trust them to keep you upright. Let them hold you to that point of reference. Ignore those psychological and physical and emotional signals that contradict the clear message of what you know to be true, but today you just can’t feel.
Stay the course. All the way to touch down.
“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” The Psalms
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
FedEx MD-11 photo by Amernikon. Other Airline Photos available at Airliners.net
Psalm 119:105
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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