The Pilot’s Lounge #157: Screw the Aviation Caste System

Great. I must be getting old. It had been quiet in the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport, I’d sat in one of the ratty, comfortable recliners to read an article on ADS-B and, I couldn’t help it, my eyes slammed shut.

Suddenly I was reliving every time I was among a group of pilots that were telling me or someone else that I or they were not a real pilot unless: You fly taildraggers; you do aerobatics; you do outside aerobatics; you fly gliders; you tow gliders; you fly seaplanes; you fly hot air balloons; you shoot instrument approaches down to minimums; you fly behind glass panels; you eschew glass panels for the classic six-pack; you only fly airplanes that have a BRS (Ballistic Recovery System) whole-airframe parachute; you refuse to fly airplanes with a BRS whole-airframe parachute; you wear gloves when you fly; you fly barefoot; you wear boots when you fly; you have gone skydiving; you fly airplanes with heel brakes. It just went on and on.

I woke up more than a little angry at the egos and narcissism that have created a caste system in aviation—indeed in just about every human endeavor. For some reason people must create reasons for them to feel superior to others, whether or not those reasons have any basis in reality.

Aviation is a small community—depending on the source, there are only about 850,000 certificated pilots (including students) in the U.S. For every pilot, there are 400 people who have never flown any kind of aircraft. Yet, in our small community there are too many who feel the need to put down other pilots as not meeting some internalized definition of adequacy. They aren’t real pilots.

That’s nonsense and harmful. I’ve seen too many pilots decide to move on to some other way of spending their time because they were driven out of it by unfriendly attitudes at their local airport. I’ve been at airparks, wonderful places where pilots can live with their airplanes, yet I’ve watched two collapse because big egos lead to fights between pilots/homeowners over trivial nonsense. It’s also harmful because pilots have to act together politically to protect our freedom to fly and our airports that are so often under attack—and the attackers will almost always take advantage of divisions between pilot to weaken them.

So, let’s look at a few of the “you aren’t a real pilot unless …” claims.

Tailwheel

The big one is that you aren’t a real pilot unless you fly taildraggers/tailwheel. There’s no doubt that learning to fly tailwheel ratchets up a pilot’s stick and rudder skill by an order of magnitude. However, almost all of that of that is just on takeoff and landing. If you could borrow a Star Trek transporter and transport a pilot into the left seat of an airplane in flight, he or she couldn’t tell whether it had a tailwheel or nosewheel. Control responsiveness wouldn’t be determinative as the Aeronca Champ and Tri-Traveler (sometimes called Tri-Champ) are identical except that one has a nosewheel and one a tailwheel. Same with the Piper Pacer and Tripacer. CubCrafters’ NXCub can change from a nosewheel to tailwheel airplane in four hours.

There are tailwheel mods for Cessna 150s, 152s, and 172s. The dirty little secret about tailwheel pilots is that despite some of them posturing as the only “real” pilots, and despite having to undergo some serious training to be approved to fly tailwheel airplanes as PIC, they wreck airplanes on landing at a rate 2.5 times that of pilots landing nosewheel airplanes.

Yes, in general, there are places where you’ll be more comfortable landing a tailwheel airplane than a nosewheel airplane, but those places have been known to reduce tailwheel airplanes to unflyable balls of modern art because of the pilot mishandles a crosswind—and it may take a helicopter to get them out. Hmmm, does that mean that helicopter pilots are the only real pilots?

Just being able to fly tailwheel airplanes doesn’t automatically imbue a pilot with good judgment and respect for personal limitations. And soapbox time now: I love the challenge of flying tailwheel airplanes and have instructed in them for over 50 years; however, they are tailwheel airplanes, not taildraggers. Taildraggers are airplanes with a tail skid—hence the term drag. They require specialized skills to taxi, there are few left flying, and many cannot handle a crosswind of any magnitude (that’s why airport symbols are a circle; early airfields were just that, fields, because the taildraggers had to take off and land into the wind). In my often-uniformed opinion, referring to a tailwheel airplane as a taildragger shows a lack of respect for the pilots who flew the early birds that were much more difficult to fly, in general, as well as land.

I’ve only flown a taildragger once—when the tailwheel broke off a ski-equipped Luscombe on a rutted, ice runway. I don’t think that counts, but I did have to taxi to the tiedown with the tail in the air.

Stick and Rudder

In terms of very good stick and rudder pilots who know how to plan ahead—because they have to—I think of glider pilots. I’m invariably impressed with how well glider pilots fly airplanes. Yet, they can’t claim to be the only “real” pilots because gliders are considered so easy to fly that they can be soloed at age 14.

I’m still stunned by the disrespect shown by some pilots to those who fly BRS-equipped airplanes. It seems we don’t learn. When parachutes became available to U.S. military pilots after WWI, those who used them to save themselves faced approbation from other pilots who said that they should have ridden the airplane down and saved it, especially in the flight test world. Too often valuable information about the underlying problem with an airplane was lost because the pilot tried to save it and died.

It took some punitive action and rules to convince pilots that saving their lives was more important than hoping to save the airplane. By the mid-1920s when Charles Lindbergh was an Army aviation cadet, then making a test flight of a new airplane and finally flying the mail in open-cockpit DH-4s, he had to take to his parachute four times. Otherwise, he would have never lived to fly the Atlantic in 1927.

Bringing BRS to airplanes has saved hundreds of lives. Suddenly pilots who had plans A, B, and C when something went wrong had Plan D. Yet I was appalled when some “real” pilots on social media castigated the first pilot to pull the chute on a Cirrus. Good grief, an aileron had come off of his airplane. Talk about hubris of “real” pilots. I was also terribly upset not much longer afterward when two pilots managed to spin a Cirrus into the dirt from several thousand feet because they didn’t use the BRS.

I can just hear the argument in the cabin: “We’ve got to pull the chute.”

“No, other pilots will think we don’t have the right stuff.”

“We’ve got to pull!”

“No, we can recover!”

And on and on to impact.

In my opinion, real pilots use all the tools at hand to protect themselves and passengers when things go wrong.

Then, of course, there’s social media dissection of every aircraft crash with “real” pilots expressing what the “not real” pilot did wrong, otherwise there would not have been a crash. Hubris cubed. Human beings make mistakes. Smart human beings make mistakes. Extraordinarily good pilots make mistakes. Bob Hoover crashed after his piston-engine Shrike Commander was fueled with jet fuel and he didn’t sample the fuel. No one has ever accused the late Bob Hoover of not being a real pilot.

A NASA team lead by high-time pilot Key Dismukes did a study of several airline crashes—all involving high time pilots. They analyzed why smart pilots crash and found that combinations of stress, weather, fatigue, mission continuation bias, and the human brain’s diminishing ability to identify and evaluate alternative actions under those conditions caused what amounted to tunnel vision and the inability of those pilots to break the evolving accident chain. The study is published in an excellent book, The Limits of Expertise: Rethinking Pilot Error and the Causes of Airline Accidents.

The Spectrum of Aviation Experiences

There is a truly amazing and wonderful spectrum of experiences that make up flying. The visceral thrill of the takeoff acceleration of a bizjet, watching the world snap into brilliant color when taking off at dawn from a small grass airstrip surrounded by trees, the sounds of a propeller being hushed around with the power at idle and then the swish as the floats just start to touch the water on landing on a quiet lake, the amazing feeling of freedom and exultation as you loop and roll an aerobatic airplane, the serenity of a hot air balloon flight near sunset, the pure joy of making that first landing on your first solo flight are merely a few.

I think of how hard every single pilot worked to master the skills and knowledge required to safely cause an aircraft to rise off the ground and then return to earth when and where desired, and I have the utmost respect for every human being who has done so, no matter how much flight time or what kind of aircraft that pilot flies. To assert that pilots who fly a particular type of aircraft are the only real pilots is the height of arrogance and, if there is poetic justice, such a statement should immediately precede the speaker’s dramatic groundloop of a tailwheel airplane in front of spectators made up of nosewheel pilots.

Aviation is too vast to label a person who flies a particular type of aircraft as the only real pilot. The reality is that every one of us wants to fly as much as possible and as many different types of aircraft as possible. But money and circumstances make that impossible. We all do as much as we can, and I think that we need to respect that in others. I like the quote of writer Ian Maclaren: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”

Every one of us who flies strives to meet some internalized goals, and, in my observation, one of them is to be the best pilot he or she can. We all must exist within limitations, money being by far the biggest. The pilot who carefully budgets hard-earned bucks to fly a Cessna 150 a few times a month is no less a real pilot than the one who pays cash for a brand-new Aviat Husky because she’s decided that she needs a third airplane and flies it regularly into the backcountry.

I think of the best pilots as the ones who are constantly learning, seeking to improve their skills, whether it is by adding a rating or taking frequent recurrent training. A good friend of mine, Dr. Jay Apt, has made a practice of taking a flight review and instrument proficiency check twice a year as long as I’ve known him. He wants to ensure that he’s not losing a step or unconsciously developing bad habits—and he’s a multi-thousand-hour pilot who had four missions in the Space Shuttle. In my opinion, he’s most definitely a real pilot who wants to be a good one for as long as he can.

I also think of a kid I grew up with in my neighborhood who went on to set the world’s record for obtaining the most type ratings—over 100—Bob Briggs. Bob purely loves to fly and knowing him for decades, I’ve watched him seek to share the experience of flight with as many people as he can. There’s not an ounce of hubris in him.

Humble

A few months ago, I was present when several pilots were being given demonstration flights in a new airplane. I happened to be near the airplane after the instructor and the pilot who had just flown the airplane got out and were talking. They chatted briefly about airplane systems and performance and then the pilot asked the instructor, “Did you see anything that I did while flying the airplane that gave you any concerns about my flying?”

The instructor looked surprised, thought for a moment, and then said, “That’s a very humble thing to say. Looking back at the flight I saw you go through the usual uncertainty everyone faces when first flying an unfamiliar airplane, but I didn’t see anything that gave me heartburn other than you getting on the brakes hard to try to make a taxiway and swerving back and forth before you realized that wasn’t a good idea and decided to turn off at the following taxiway. The fact that you asked the question is a pretty good indicator that you are willing to listen and want to keep improving.”

As I said earlier, we are a small community and we need to support each other. One of the best examples I’ve ever seen is at my home airport where Northern Air, the FBO/flight school, celebrates every new solo, rating, and endorsement. In addition to the ritual cutting of the shirttail (solo), a photo of the pilot is added to the collection that covers a long hallway and much of the lobby—and it goes back some 30 years. Finally, there is an LED display outside, on the highway where the FBO’s road sign is, that says “Congrats” and names every person who solos or gets a rating or an endorsement. It’s wonderful positive reinforcement for all who fly here and is one of the reasons that in a county of but 10,000 people, we have an active, vibrant airport.

At our annual holiday party, we have a traditional trivia contest “For Pilots and Normal People.” The rules state that anyone who has ever soloed any kind of aircraft is no longer a normal person and must participate in the pilots section of the contest. I think of the quote often erroneously attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci: “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return.” It’s true.

And I think of my late friend Randy Sohn, who was the senior check airman for the Commemorative Air Force for many years and was approved by the FAA to give type rating checkrides in any two- and four-engine piston airplane. He regularly would say that once you take an aircraft off of the ground, it doesn’t get any more real than that, no matter what the aircraft is.

You’ve flown an aircraft solo; you are a real pilot. It doesn’t get any more real than that. To amend the words Shakespeare put in the mouth of Henry V: We are all seeking the sky, we few, we happy few, we band of sisters and brothers. Let’s honor and support our aeronautical brothers and sisters.

See you next month.