Aviator90 Episode 24

[musical introduction]

Chris Palmer: [0:31] Welcome to another episode of Aviator90 from Angle of
Attack. I’m Chris Palmer, still in the airplane just like the other
episodes. Last time I said that we were going to talk about free
spirit but I was incorrect. This time we are talking about safety
and the uncool. Sometimes safety is the uncool thing to do. As a
pilot you’ve got to be willing to let go of your ego and do the
hard thing and be uncool when it comes to safety.
[1:04] That can mean a number of different things. At the end of
last episode I talked about that radio issue I had that I had to
divert. That meant I had to drive a lot and just do the safe thing.
Oftentimes there’s a lot of pressures on a pilot and aviator to fly
and there’s people that want to get somewhere and they don’t
necessarily understand the processes we talking about now, the
thought processes, the safety issues involved.

[1:43] It’s very important for you to be willing to do the uncool
thing and just say “Hey, we can’t take this bag. It’s going to put
us overweight” or “We’re going to have to make a stop along the
way. We just don’t have enough fuel, it’s stretching it too thin,
the winds are too high. We’ve got to make a stop here and it’ll
extend our trip this much. But that’s what we’ve got to do.”

[2:07] Just situations like that where you just err on the side of
caution. That’s not to say that you’re totally uptight all the time
and you don’t fly in a cloud because it’s a cloud and you can’t see
outside. If you’re rated to fly instruments then you can legally
fly them, then fly them. There’s no point not to but if there’s
moderate icing in the clouds and your party wants to get somewhere,
don’t do it. If it’s not going to work just wait it out a couple of
hours. It’s no big deal.

[2:43] As pilots many times we end up being uncool because we have
to make those hard decisions that people aren’t aware of and
they’re not necessarily familiar or forgiving about the kind of
responsibility that we have to take on. Now how that relates to
flight simulator I don’t really know. Because honestly . . . .
There’s a helicopter hovering above the hangar, but honestly as a
pilot you can do whatever you want within flight simulator.

[3:14] You don’t have to worry about all the safety stuff but if
you don’t want to waste your time . . . . If you get up and do a
two hour flight and you end up just piling it up before the end of
the flight, then you’ve just wasted your time unless it was a great
learning experience for you. In which case you actually learned
something and I guess if you had fun along the way that’s fine.

[3:36] But generally I like to go from point A land at point B
safely and taxi in and shut down all normally just like a real
pilot would do. You want your takeoffs to match your landing
numbers in your log book. Basically you don’t want to have more
takeoffs than landings. That means that something’s missing there,
something got screwed up.

[4:05] Short episode but just be willing to be an uncool pilot, an
uncool aviator. That’s all because of safety. You’re watching out
for the people that you’re dealing with. Again, how that relates to
flight simulator, I don’t even know. It’s something to keep in
mind.

[4:24] Next time we will actually talk about the free spirit and
what that means to me. I think it’s one thing missing within
virtual aviation. It’s something within virtual aviation we get
more of than real aviation but it can be done in real aviation as
well. We’ll talk about that next time, I won’t go on anymore. So
until next time, throttle on.

Transcription by CastingWords