Us brave bloggers
A thought occurred
to me whilst whiling away some spare time surfing the internet (OK yes , I was
meant to be studying , so sue me!)
Us bloggers are very
brave people. I seriously mean this. We admit to every single screw up and post
it for the entire world to see. * Every bouncy landing, every mis-navigation,
every wrong button press. Not only admitted to ourselves but indelibly dedicated
to the internet for us all to see. Instead of being able to pretend it didn’t
happen the entire world will know that I once tried to lean the mixture a
little too enthusiastically in cruise and heard the heart wrenching sound of
the engine going “chug-c h u g– c h u g”.
This is Ok though
because I know I’m not the only one. There are myriad of bloggers out there
who’ve done exactly the same thing, or worse. There are professional pilots
who’ve nearly killed themselves in ways far more spectacular than I could ever
dream of. In a strange way this reassures me. I’d like to extend a genuine and
heartfelt thank you to every single pilot or pilot to be who has taken the time
to admit to those little snafus. It is reassuring beyond belief to know that
I’m not the only one who has nearly strangled themselves on their headset wire
or inexplicably decide to stomp hard on the wrong rudder pedal.
You see the one
thing in life I’ve never managed to do, is to cover up my mistakes particularly
well. Instead I prefer shout about them from the rooftops it would seem. It’s
an attitude I hold at work as well. Make a mistake; I have no problem with
that. Admit it to me and I’ll help you fix it, hell I’ll even sit down with you
and figure out why it happened so we don’t repeat it. Lie to me though and I
will watch you BURN
This blog keeps me
honest as well. I know who reads it and I can't lie about how I'm doing, not
that I've ever felt the need to.
I salute all us brave people out there. Keep
on Bloggin'
* Ok In my case the
entire world consists of family in the UK, one lone guy in New Zealand and a
strange following in the former Soviet Union (apparently I’m big in Russian
porn, don’t ask L)
I heard it best described by a Canadian Fighter Pilot, "We don't have time to make all the mistakes ourselves and learn from them, so when someone makes a mistake, we make sure EVERYONE learns from it."
ReplyDeleteIt might be that some scrap of information you read might either a) click in your mind and unlock a particularly knotty problem you were struggling with in your flying, or b) save your life.
But at the end of the day, your flying instructor has the final word on anything you read on the internet. I would like to think they don't mind discussing things you read about on the internet (although I really hate being second guessed by my clients because they Googled something and took it completely out of context).
Fortunately for student pilots, learning to fly is a fairly standardized affair no matter where you are learning. I am sure if you came to NZ and had a lesson here things wouldn't be completely foreign to you, and that is by ICAO design.
Cheers
Flyinkiwi
aka the lone guy in New Zealand
I'm totally in favour of letting other people make the mistakes! Bob doesn't mind me bringing up stuff I've read becasue I think he respects me enough to know that I'm selective in what I choose to read/believe and filter out the obviously wrong/misleading/dangerous crap.
Deleteflying is mostly standardised but in Canada we do tend to get a bit influenced by our friends down south who occasionally have their own little quirks, and as for the brits, well don't get me started on their airspace classification!
I take your point though that apart from slight regional differences , learning to fly is pretty sameish. Reading through your blog, I could lift lesson review that could have easily been written by me. Same manuevres, same thoughts.
I bet you didn't have to sweep two inches of snow of your wings last week though!