Fly the Plane

“Pack up your shit, and get the hell out of my classroom!”

I don’t recall what I said or did this time to piss him off. I do remember making sure I had a smug look on my face so that everyone knew I was proud of making my ill-fated teacher lose his temper again. The truth was I really liked the guy, and his Aerospace Engineering classes were the only thing I enjoyed and tried in my whole high school career. Seriously. I skipped algebra 39 times my senior year. I think I tormented him because I was jealous. He was smart, respected, and I was so ready to not be a kid any more so I could start being the one to tell people what to do.

But that guy taught me a tremendous amount. I learned how gyroscopes worked. About how pilots could get disoriented looking down at their laps while in a holding pattern because the fluid in their ear normalizes, then when they level out their brain tells them they are pitching down, so they yank back on the yoke and go into a stall. He taught us the physics involved in flight, the Bernoulli principle, torque rolls, and how to design an airfoil. We built gliders with ten foot wingspans, then he taught us how to launch them and find updrafts to soar like actual eagles. The guy was a legend and I have always felt horrible for how I acted towards him.

But the best, most impactful thing he taught me was this: Fly the plane.

He gave us actual flying lessons in real airplanes like the one in the picture above. To build up to that we worked on simulators in the classroom. These had computer screens hooked up to them, and little instrument panels for our altimeter, attitude indicator, etc. This is how we learned how to read maps and find vectors as we “flew” from place to place. After we got the basics down he’d start randomly failing our instruments. He did a great job making it feel real - it was stressful when your altimeter suddenly stopped working and you couldn’t see anything because you were in the clouds.

Fly the plane, he’d remind us.

What that meant was that no matter what was going on, never forget you are in the drivers seat with your hands on the controls. Just because things start going wrong, you don’t fall out of the sky. You have to keep your wits about you and remember that what makes that plane fly is not the radio or the instruments. Panicking in a situation like that could mean death for you and your passengers.

There’s a Dawes song that goes, “Things happen, that’s all they ever do.” As a leader, things go wrong all the time. Part of your job is to create an environment that balances prevention with progress, but you can’t prepare for everything. Layoffs, restructuring, some new innovation that makes your job or your company irrelevant. Sometimes you have to recenter and remember the things you can control, and just fly the plane.

P.S. I ran into my teacher many years later and finally had the opportunity to apologize for being such a little jerk to him. He actually laughed and said I wasn’t even close to the worst student he had to deal with during his career. That didn’t make me feel any better, but I am glad I got to see him again.

Image credit: James from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons