Suppose I told you I could get your child to enthusiastically study geography, math, physics, chemistry, and psychology. After you had my head examined, would you be interested? Oh, and as a bonus I can get him or her to hang out with highly motivated, well educated older people who are good role models because they don’t do drugs, graffiti, or tattoos, and they have a great work ethic.

You’re still with me, aren’t you? Then let’s talk about the value of allowing a responsible teenager to take flying lessons.

Perhaps you’re one of those parents (or perhaps you know one) who’s reluctant to let their teenager take up flying for one or all of the usual reasons (generalized anxiety, cost, competition for the family plane). While you may have compelling reasons for feeling as you do, I would like to offer a different perspective on why you should enthusiastically nurture and support your child’s desire to fly. More specifically, since you’re probably a pilot already and support the idea, I’d like to offer you a few responses that might help you convince reluctant non-pilot parents that flight training for their child would be the best educational investment they could make.

Social science research now says that a teenager’s peer group has as much (if not more) influence on the development of that individual’s values as the parents. For this reason alone, it’s reasonable to consider that flight training might confer a powerful developmental advantage on any young adult with an interest in airplanes. After all, the moment he begins flight training he immediately starts associating with an entirely new peer group that emphasizes the value of rules, rituals and responsibilities.

Most of the individuals your child encounters during flight training are highly motivated, educated and dedicated people, and most of them will be older and more mature than your child, too. Think about it. Suddenly, your teenager starts singing the praises of someone over 30 who values education, self discipline, self study and self reliance. Even in your wildest dreams as a parent, could you imagine that your teenager might seek out and spend time with such people, especially since these folks aren’t probation officers? Could you imagine having some influence over the new friends your offspring makes? Go ahead, pinch yourself, so you’ll know it’s true.

If this weren’t reason enough to support your teenager’s flight training desires, consider that it’s not even the most important reason for doing so. There are few things as sad as young people without a sense of purpose or passion in their lives. Sure, they may be good kids, but they’re also bored and boredom provides absolutely no developmental advantage whatsoever. Nature and teenagers abhor a vacuum (or a vacuum cleaner), so it’s going to be filled with something. This is the primary reason young people should be exposed to as many new and novel ideas as possible (specifically, ideas that don’t involve puncturing, piercing or indelibly coloring parts of the body). You hope that something clicks and triggers a burning desire—the Holy Grail for most parents—deep in their child’s psyche. If there’s any chance that flight training will trigger a passion for learning in your child, then you owe it to him or her to explore the idea. It may just change the way they look at the world. It may also disabuse them of the notion that being tossed into a Mosh pit at a Radiators From Space punk rock concert and body surfing a wave of human hands is Nirvana, itself.

A third reason to consider flight training for an interested teenager is that it’s an honest way of developing self respect. For the past quarter century, the self esteem movement in this country professed that simply making young people feel good about themselves was the key to generating productive and responsible behavior. You see this in physical games where nobody loses because a score is seldom kept (thus, nobody has their feelings hurt) and everybody wins because you get a trophy for just showing up. Lack of self esteem was even touted as the real reason behind the irresponsible and criminal behavior of young people. Social science, however, has shown this premise to be false. In fact, most of the really bad boys and girls in prison aren’t short of self esteem. Scientifically speaking, criminals score extremely high on self esteem scales. It turns out that the value of self esteem as it applies to positively changing someone’s behavior is primarily determined by how it’s earned, not the way it’s conferred.

Telling young people to have pride and self respect simply applies a veneer of feeling good, but doesn’t teach them behaviors that both generate and sustain self respect. In the end, the common sense view prevailed: people more deeply appreciate what they legitimately earn, not what they’re given (or told they should have). Learning to fly an airplane is a responsible, authentic means of generating pride and self respect. Give an interested teenager flying lessons and you’ll teach her that study, discipline and practice are personal qualities to be admired and acquired.

If you’re hesitating about your child taking flying lessons (or are the doting aunt, uncle, grandfather or grandmother), I hope you’ll consider what I’ve said, and give the gift of flight. When you learn something new, you become something new. So give your child a chance to become something new by introducing him or her to aviation.

(This story originally appeared in AOPA Pilot magazine.)

Dear Rod:

I imagine that in the course of your time as a pilot, you’ve flown long enough to personally know someone who has died in a plane crash?

Several years back, a fellow CFI died in an airplane crash along with his student. The part that is most vivid in my mind is that my instructor desk (at the former school I used to teach) was at the front of the CFI office area, right near the door; I remember this instructor’s smiling face (he was always happy) saying that he’d see me later, and I told him to have fun. Just a couple of hours later that smiling face was a cadaver at a crash scene. It was all very sudden and totally unexpected—the contrast, for me, was between the moment I told him to have fun and the moment he was dead.

First of all I still continue to love instructing and flying and am a very big proponent of teaching my students safety by my own example—enough said. I guess what I wanted to ask you is this normal? Not ALL the time, but sometimes I catch myself wondering while I am bidding my dog and cat goodbye (for my trip down to the airport) if this is the last time I will see them? Now I want to stress that it isn’t a fearful thought, just sort of like a passing thought, a brief ponderance on the notion, so-to-speak.

Do other pilots/instructors have thoughts like this? The part I find silly about the whole thought is that one’s life could just as easily end by doing just about anything (driving to the corner market, or going to the ATM). So, why should going off to fly cause the thought to pass through my mind…?

Thank you,

No Name Please

Greetings Member of Witness Protection Plan:

You ask a question that happens to be on the mind of more than a few pilots. Yes, you’d be surprised to know how many pilots actually wonder whether or not the last time they left home to go flying will actually be the last time they leave home. There are several significant reasons why some pilots think this way and they’re worth a little exploration.

Most of us who’ve flown for a while know of someone (either directly or indirectly) lost in an airplane accident. And if we don’t actually know someone who vaporized themselves this way, then we willingly go in search of someone like this by subscribing to magazines and periodicals that describe aviation accident scenarios in great detail. It doesn’t take long before the accumulation of these stories tip the balance of our aviation risk-reward scale and start us thinking about our chances of lifting off and returning to earth in one piece.

What makes matters worse is that all pilots carry genetic coding in the form of an instinctual fear of falling. Eons ago, we lost those big grasping hands and feet, the tail we use for balance and those powerful muscles we used for jumping which made high treetops and bananas look less inviting, and the ground, more appealing. It’s not much of a stretch to see that flying might arouse our instinctual fear of falling by reminding us that we can fall if we fly wrong.

So it’s pretty hard to deny, much less ignore the ever increasing collection of reasons we accumulate supporting the idea that it’s possible for us to actually get hurt in an airplane (which, of course, doesn’t mean that we will). As a result, we often respond psychologically to protect ourselves from this perceived danger. It appears that our response typically evolves through four distinct stages.

Most of the time, we dedicate very little conscious energy to thinking about the bad things that can happen to us in an airplane. We go about our flying business until a significant enough event (be it an aviation accident, an accident report or simply a discussion of accidents) causes us to question our ability to actually fly an airplane safely. Never mind that we might have flown without an incident for decades or that we might be considered the safest of pilots by our peers. When doubt takes root, the mental stew that brews in our noggins is often disturbing enough to cause us to personalize these aviation accidents. It’s as if we emotionally and somatically (physically) project ourselves into each airplane accident, wondering what would happen if we had been the person doing the flying. This is the first stage in which we typically experience our nascent anxiety about flying.

Next we posit what it would be like if our presence were suddenly removed from the planet. We begin to think about what our homes would feel like if we never returned because we managed to demolecularized ourselves in an airplane accident. We run these mental scenarios as we leave home, not because they’re therapeutic, but because they’re symptomatic of an ever increasing—but not yet debilitating—fear about our future (or whether or not we’ll have one).

The stage that follows next is where be begin making excuses not to fly. We actively look for reasons not to go to the airport and get in an airplane. In a sense, on some conscious level, we act to sabotage the thing that once gave us great pleasure. And here’s the great irony. Once we actually get in the airplane and fly, we feel just fine. When airborne, we wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place.

The fourth and final stage is where the risk-reward scale tips one way or another. If the scale tips toward the side of perceived risk and excessive anxiety, then the pilot doesn’t receive as much pleasure from flying as he or she used to. The discomfort associated with flying wins the day and the pilot often hangs up his or her headset and seldom returns to the airport. On the other hand, some pilots manage to sustain a sufficient balance of risk to reward or pleasure to discomfort and continue to fly, despite the ubiquitous anxiety they have about flying. Yes, they still occasionally wonder if they’ll ever see their family, their home or their dog again when leaving for the airport. They aren’t, however immobilized by these thoughts, despite the fact that, in some small way, flying is less enjoyable to them than it once was. On the other hand, there’s another group of pilots that have found a way of controlling and even diminishing their anxiety while simultaneously increasing the pleasure they receive from flying. These are the folks that have something valuable to teach pilots who’ve been or are being immobilized by their fears.

The pilots who are able to sustain their aviation pleasure and keep their anxieties at bay know one very important thing. They know the antidote to apply to counteract the debilitating thought patterns that diminish the pleasure they receive from flying. What’s the antidote? Well, brace yourself for impact. Here it comes, and it’s framed in the form of a self-referential statement: I know I can choose to fly as safe as I want to fly. This is the antidote that gives pilots great comfort and helps them derive great pleasure from flying airplanes. Furthermore, they actually believe the statement because it’s absolutely true.

We can indeed choose to choose to fly as safe as we want to fly. Period! You can’t, however, say the same for driving a car, can you? No, you can’t. That’s because you don’t have control over what other drivers do on the road, but you do have almost complete control over what you do and what happens to you in an airplane. In other words, you have nearly complete control over the safety statistic outside an act of God. That’s right. If you are clobbered by a meteorite on the downwind leg, well, that will teach you to hold a heading, right? Acts of God are things for which no one can prepare. They are, after all, acts of God, and are so rare that we shouldn’t even think about them. Then again, we can control nearly everything else that affects us in an airplane.

Years ago, the head of NASA Dryden once told me that their pilots are safer flying one of their experimental jet airplanes than they are when walking on the ground at Edwards Air Force Base. That’s because NASA’s flight operations are conducted within the scope of a pilot’s ability to actually influence and control the safety statistic. And this is precisely the way general aviation pilots can fly their airplanes, but only if they choose to do so.

In fact, if you want to reduce your chances of getting hurt in an airplane to nearly zero (no, not zero, but close to it), then do the following things.

• Never allow yourself to be airborne with less than 1/4 fuel in your tanks (you can “choose” to do this).
• Never fly in weather that’s beyond your capability to handle (you can “choose” to do this).
• Learn good stick and rudder skills sufficient to fly by the seat of your pants, and keep proficient at these skills (you can “choose” to do this).
• And finally, prioritize everything you do in the following way: Aviate, Navigate and Communicate, in that order (you can also “choose” to do this).

Most pilots bend their airplanes and a few bones by neglecting one or more of these four items.

It’s important to understand that fate isn’t the hunter here. But if fate were the hunter, it would certainly be so when driving a car rather than flying an airplane. So if you want to be scared, please be scared in your car. In an airplane, there’s no need to be scared. There’s only a need to be cautious and to choose to fly as safe as you desire to fly. The odds are really on the side of the cautious pilot here. Sure, there will always be someone who crashes an airplane, but in almost all of these instances, it’s because he or she didn’t choose properly. Even the NTSB says that 75% of accidents are primarily a result of pilot error. That means the pilot had a choice in three out of four instances but didn’t choose properly. If we had a little more courage as a society, we’d probably up the NTSB’s number to 95%.

So the next time you (or anyone else) begins to wonder if this is the last time you’ll ever return home, make a simple choice for yourself. Choose to fly safely. It’s within your ability to do so. Even in those small and rare instances where you may not actually have control (think catastrophic engine failure here), you can still regain control if you’ve practiced your emergency skills (think emergency landing skills here) before hand.

As a final note, I have several articles on this subject in my Rod Machado’s Plane Talk book as well as on my web site at: (http://www.rodmachado.com/_available_products/plane_talk_book.php).

Here’s a question asked by a fellow pilot a while back that, I don’t believe, made it into my Since You Asked column in AOPA Flight Training magazine. Some questions and answers are a bit more fun than educational and aren’t quite ready for prime time.

A fellow pilot named Rick asked the following question: As a CFI I’m curious about the most difficult/strange/wild student you’ve ever had. Care to share?

My response follows.

Dear Rick:

I’ll gladly answer your question because I think it’s instructional and something of which all CFIs should be aware.

I experienced one of my most unusual students more than 30 years ago, as a young CFI. He was a middle aged private pilot who hadn’t flown in 20 years and needed a flight review. He was also a doctor who always showed up fatigued, with his eyeballs glazed over, and he mumbled a lot to himself. This didn’t bother me, because he acted just like I did after a full day of flight instructing. It was only later I found out that he was on drugs, which explains why he offered to medicate me during our first lesson (I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t). I respectfully declined the offer, then mentioned that if he flew properly I might not need medication.

On the first lesson, he nearly taxied into a parked gas truck. The worst part is that he had to go out of his way to get close to the truck. He claimed he didn’t see it. On the second day, he landed with brakes on. I had to stab at his thick barrel-like legs with my pointy little arms just to get his feet off the pedals. A few days later, a senior CFI at the airport pulled me aside and told me the truth about this fellow. He apparently had worn out four flight instructors in his recurrency attempt, totaling over 35 hours of dual in the process. When each CFI caught on to his game, they’d furlough him. The doc would simply get a new logbook and try for a fresh start. Yes, this type of thing happens. I, too, was really upset and promptly furloughed the doc. He suggested I might not be so upset if I were medicated. No thanks, doc.

The moral here is to trust your gut. If it quacks like a doc, it probably is one. I knew something was wrong with this fellow but chose to ignore my instincts. I try never to make that mistake again.

Pilots are actually quite good at “almost” not running of fuel during flight. Several years ago a study indicated that in 70% of the fuel exhaustion accidents, the pilot crashed within 10 miles of the destination airport. In 50% of all fuel exhaustion accidents, the pilot crashed within one mile of the airport. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Perhaps we can reduce fuel exhaustion accidents by 50% if pilots would simply pick an airport a mile short of their original destination. A jest, of course, but not a big one.

Here’s how to think about the statistics above. It’s a no-brainer that pilots will avoid flying airplanes beyond their fuel range when the trip distance is ridiculously large. After all, who would attempt to fly a normally-tanked Cessna 150 from California to Hawaii? The answer is, someone with no brain, of course. And why would anyone worry about flying for an hour in an airplane with five hours of fuel on board? That leaves those trips where there’s room for doubt as to whether there’s enough fuel on board to complete the flight safely. Here is where some pilots fail miserably at doubt management.

Doubt should be the motivator that compels pilots to carefully consider the ratio of risk to reward during flight—the risk of fuel exhaustion compared to the reward of avoiding an unplanned fuel stop. In these instances, pilots often mismanage their doubtful disposition by attempting to prove to themselves that they actually have enough fuel to make the destination airport. The problem with this type of thinking is that it doesn’t tell us the truth about our perception of reality (in other words, it’s anti-scientific). I believe Einstein once suggested that a thousand theories proving relativity correct are meaningless if even one theory proves it wrong (all that from an amazing guy who couldn’t manage his curling iron). The correct doubt management strategy here is to look for ways to prove yourself wrong, not prove yourself right. As the statistics suggest, the proof that pilots had enough fuel to land must have been compelling, at least compelling enough to get them within 10 miles of the destination airport in 70% of those accidents. Had any of the pilots above attempted to confirm their doubt—to prove themselves wrong—it’s likely that they would have found at least one compelling bit of evidence (if not a lot of evidence) to support making an intermediate fuel stop.

Another ineffective doubt management strategy occurs when pilots use superstitious behavior and magical thinking to avoid acknowledging their limited fuel levels. For instance, one form of superstitious behavior occurs when a pilot is low on fuel and begins “hoping” that he can make his destination. Of course, hoping has no influence whatsoever on fuel levels, but it certainly can make a pilot feel better. The sad thing is that feeling better is exactly the opposite of how the pilot should feel if he or she wants a better chance at avoiding fuel exhaustion. The only way hope could possible help a pilot is if he “hoped” into the radio, preferably on 121.5 MHz, where hope springs eternal. Clearly this is doubt management gone bad.

Other forms of superstitious behavior include, reworking in-flight fuel computations until we have a fuel quantity that pleases us as well as modifying our recollection of the amount of fuel we believed we had prior to departure. My all time favorite form of superstitious behavior occurs when pilots say, “I’ve heard pilots say that they’ve flown airplanes similar to this one for over five hours straight at this power setting without running out of gas.” Each of these forms of superstitious behavior (and the many, many others that I can’t possibly list here) are terribly ineffective strategies for managing the doubt we have about our in-flight fuel levels.

Magical thinking is also an ineffective doubt management strategy. A form of this behavior occurs when pilots find solace in the use of parallax to increase their apparent fuel levels. I’m speaking of pilots who look slightly to the left of the fuel gauge needle—a needle reading close to “E”—and feel better because this view shows a sudden increase in their fuel supply. Anyone turning a car that’s low on fuel and sees the gas needle suddenly (and temporarily) point to a higher quantity knows exactly what I mean. Drivers may actually feel a bit better as a result of the needle’s movement. Pilots low on fuel in turbulent air know this magical feeling, too. Turbulence may temporarily nudge those fuel gauge needles into the higher fuel quantity region, allowing pilots to feel some degree of relief, albeit temporarily. The fact that these types of superstitious and magical behaviors can make pilots feel better, is a sure sign that we need to be better doubt managers.

Given that pilots in these fuel exhaustion accidents managed to get so close to the destination airport, you have to wonder how many pilots actually land on fumes? Of course, this is something we don’t hear about, perhaps because there’s no such thing as an FAA “fumigator” stationed at the end of each runway. The scary thought here is that superstitious and magical behavior may actually be a strategy that appears to work for pilots, at least until the time that it doesn’t. It’s entirely possible that some pilots compensate for a lack of proper flight planning through the unwitting use of superstitious or magical behaviors. Either way, becoming a good doubt manager means reducing any reliance we have on these types of behaviors.

The takeaway point here is that it’s the doubt we have about our fuel situation that should signal us to change our thinking strategy. First, we need to become more aware of our natural tendency to engage in superstitious behavior and use magical thinking. The moment we find ourselves hoping, fudging fuel calculations, modifying our memories or enjoying the pleasures of parallax, we should (sorry Mr. T. Leary) turn off that thinking, tune out those strategies and drop in to a more rational frame of mind. Instead of trying to prove that we actually do have enough fuel to land at our intended destination, we’re often better off trying to prove that we don’t. If we can’t prove this, then there’s a good chance that we have sufficient fuel for a safe landing. So be it. If we can prove ourselves wrong, then the chances are that we are wrong. I have no doubt that this strategy brings us closer to knowing the truth about the actual amount of fuel we have on board our airplanes. Without a doubt, it make us better doubt managers.

If you’d like to learn more about how pilots think (or should think) in the cockpit, take a look at my book titled, “Rod Machado’s Plane Talk,” available for $19.95 as an ebook (instant download). This book is filled with chapters on effective cockpit thinking strategies, coping with in-flight anxiety, dealing with first time passengers, and many other useful tips to help pilots fly safer and wiser.