Bill Crawford’s Flightlab Blog

We usually anticipate a pilot’s ability by their hours flown, and we figure the more the time the deeper the skills. Of course, there must be a law of diminishing returns: The first one or two-thousand hours right after earning your wings are going to be full of challenges. But for a seen-it-all veteran with thousands of hours already, another thousand down the road may not produce much that’s new, other than seniority, unless the type of flying changes in a significant way.

Over the last couple of months I’ve flown unusual attitudes and aerobatics with a number of high-time pilots: airline, corporate, and flight-test folks who otherwise would be teaching me. It’s been fun to watch how an experienced professional pilot adapts to a new airplane and to unfamiliar flight attitudes. It’s particularly fun if the pilot hasn’t flown a light aircraft in a while, especially not a responsive aerobatic one with relatively low stability and thus relatively low control forces.

In that case, the veteran often discovers that the aircraft does some bopping around right after takeoff. It doesn’t seem to matter how you brief a pilot beforehand. He or she is going to bop the thing until their muscles adjust to the lower force requirements and their hands calm down. One of the defining characteristics of a good pilot is the ability to develop the muscle memories necessary for smooth, apparently effortless flying. But the dominant memories, or response patterns, are largely dependent on what you’ve been flying lately. When you’re asked to fly something different, or to fly differently, the muscles take time getting the message. This pretty much holds whether you have thousands of hours or hundreds. Big-iron pilots who haven’t flown a small aircraft in a while often have remarkable trouble their first few landings. They tend to flare too high because of the more elevated runway view they’re accustomed to. A lightly wing-loaded aircraft’s greater responsiveness to gusts often takes them by surprise, and they over-control. High-time jet pilots who’ve stayed away from pistons often get the rpm gauge and the manifold pressure gauge mixed up, looking at one when they mean to look at the other and doing something comical as a result. And if they’ve never seen them before, unusual attitudes are just as unusual for high-time pilots as for low. Everyone gets to feel embarrassed at some point. But if you have a high-time opinion of yourself, it can be especially tough when a little airplane knocks you off your throne.

The inescapable and sometimes exasperating thing about flight training is that the process virtually requires the commission of error at every stage and level of experience. You really don’t pursue perfection—you flee mistakes. (Remember learning to land?) Before you get to do new things in a new cockpit well, you get to do them badly; no matter how many hours you have in your log. That’s simply the nature of how we learn new skills, or learn to apply old skills in new proportions. The irony is that long experience is often relied upon as a guarantor of piloting skill. It takes a resilient ego to admit that the contrary sometimes holds, especially if that ego belongs to a high-time pilot who, by common expectation, is supposed be master of the skies.

Average pilots often tell you how good they are. Great pilots tell you not to expect too much.