Flight Training - October 2019 - 46

FINALLY!
A CARD
FOR PILOTS.

ADVANCED PILOT ACCIDENT ANALYSIS

MILESTONES
THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR A PILOT...
BY DAVID JACK KENNY

IN CASE YOU SLEPT THROUGH IT, July

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2019 marked the fiftieth anniversary of
the first moon landing. Most of those
whose eyes (and brains) struggled to
resolve the grainy black-and-white footage of that first extravehicular activity
into meaningful images of astronauts
walking on the moon still recall where
they were, who was with them, and how
they felt.
At the risk of speculation, Neil
Armstrong's pilot's log probably didn't
record any of his time on the lunar
surface-after all, it wasn't while the
spacecraft was in motion with
the intention of flight.
(Maybe it went into
the "notes" column:
"EVA on lunar
surface," but
contemporary
descriptions
of Armstrong's
character make
that seem
unlikely.) But
every aviator's
logbook documents milestones
of enormous significance to his or her
individual development,
global historical importance
notwithstanding.
Leafing through them and the comments we-or our instructors-saw fit to
record can put our subsequent careers
into sharper perspective. If the CFI
mentioned crosswinds on the entry for
your first solo, they were presumably
significant for a student pilot-meaning
said flight instructor was confident of
your ability to manage them. Checkrides stick in the memory even though
the examiner's comments tend to
be limited to "satisfactory." If you're
instrument-rated, you probably noted
the weather at your destination the first
time you flew a single-pilot approach in
actual IMC. Have you flown into lower
46 FLIGHT TRAINING OCTOBER 2019

weather since? And if you don't log
conditions as a matter of routine, how
challenging do they have to be before
you now bother writing down details?
Plenty of other entries constitute
milestones when viewed that way: a
first flight as pilot in command carrying
passengers, first landing at a notably
challenging airport, or first 100 or 1,000
hours of time in type.
And there are others as well: This
month, around 9 percent of our fellow
aviators will celebrate a birthday. Your
author will be among the one-tenth of
one percent who'll reach an age
that's an even multiple of
10 (and, no, it won't be
100, but thanks very
much for the compliment). Those
of us who've
been forced
to acknowledge we're no
longer getting
younger,
smarter,
more agile, or
better-looking also should
recognize that our
logbooks chronicle
what we've done, but
usually not how well.
Unlike athletes, whose performance trajectories are mercilessly
recorded by scorecards or stopwatches,
nothing documents whether we broke
out 50 feet left of the localizer or
touched down 200 feet beyond our
target point. We have to muster the
integrity to recognize any gap between
any ingrained belief in our own abilities
("300 and one, 15-knot crosswind, yeah,
been there and done that") and our
actual skills on the day of the flight.
The answer might be a pleasant
surprise-but we owe it to ourselves and
any passengers to pose the question. FT
DAVID JACK KENNY is a freelance aviation writer

and airline transport pilot based in Maryland.

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Flight Training - October 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Flight Training - October 2019