Goldtent TA Paradise

a long reply to Plunger’s comment

1. GoldBalloon says:

   June 30, 2023 - 12:33 pm at 12:33 pm

   The life vests were a funny thing to me. Initially, they seemed to me to be more for the peace of mind of our Alaskan pilot friend who suggested that Rick get them. I told Rick I didn’t need one. I then realized that although he loved flying 5 feet off the deck at high speed, he was spooked about the water. So spooked that in addition to the life vest, he wore his dry suit until we no longer had any big stretches of water to fly over. I told Rick that if we ditched in the water and survived, since I’m bigger and stronger than him, I would be riding on top him in the water! Because he didn’t have a pistol to shoot me, I think his plan if we ditched was to knock me in the head with a wrench.

   Regarding the perception of safety, it’s a funny subject to me. I’ve taught a risk management class for balloon pilots, but am not sure any students truly understood or related to my perspective of safety. This is understandable, because people are too often taught right from the get-go that safety comes from following rules and using safety devices, leading to the belief that seatbelts, helmets, following rules, etc., will save them. The #1 thing I advocate for minimizing risk and not becoming an insurance statistic is to pay attention, which means learning how to bring one’s conscious awareness to NOW. Most people are never taught this. Of course, it’s necessary in flight. Paying attention doesn’t mean you’re not going to die, only that you’ve done the most important thing possible in your favor. Of course, this applies to everything, not just flying.

   When instructing student balloon pilots, some of whom have had thousands of hours of fixed wing time, it’s a curious thing that I always have the opportunity to ask each student, “Where are you now?” Of course, there’s always confusion, as they say they are with me in the basket. I then ask where their mind was just a moment ago, when they did/did not do something that indicated to me their attention was elsewhere. Invariably, they would admit to thinking about their wife, their job, their dog or something specific. Teaching the mechanics of ballooning is very easy. Teaching good judgement and anticipation is more difficult, but doable. Getting people to be conscious of their mind is sometimes impossible, because of decades of getting away with a bad habit. Learning technical skills is necessary in order to do things of a critical nature, but the skills won’t save you if you’re not paying attention. Conversely, doing things that of a relatively low level of inherent risk, like driving, kill people every day because they don’t pay attention. One of my mantras is that it never matters what you do, only how you go about it.

   A long time ago, my sailplane instructor impressed upon me as fact the idea that six consecutive wrong decisions as a pilot and I’d be dead. He said that it was imperative to recognize and remedy the first wrong decision, as each successive decision becomes exponentially more difficult to choose the correct input, such that if you don’t die before the 6th mistake, you’re definitely dead very soon afterwards. I internalized that as a basic understanding for all of life, to pay attention to whatever I was doing and to always look for the best path forward, not at where I did not want to go (this applies to the image of the plane in the tree, in the middle of a huge field). Some popular sayings come from correcting things early rather than late, like a stitch in time saves nine, to nip things in the bud, or even the first thing to do when you recognize you’re in a hole is to stop digging!

   On the subject of appearance vs. reality, something that used to amaze me was people’s perception of safety and risk. I learned this best from passengers who had just made a balloon flight with me and then saw photos on my office wall of ballooning, bungee jumping and hang gliding. Someone always commented on these two other ‘dangerous activities’. I always asked them to rank the three activities in order of inherent risk, which they all always got exactly opposite. Because of the appearances, they simply couldn’t get it through their heads that bungee jumping was inherently safest because everything about it could be calculated and accounted for, hang gliding somewhere in the middle and ballooning by far the highest inherent risk, because of the use of a volatile fuel, no steering mechanism and the fact that the total conditions are almost always deteriorating (diminishing fuel supply, increasing chance of encountering thermals on a morning flight or darkness coming on an afternoon flight, and increasing mental stress load on the pilot). We can fly balloons because of how we fly them, not because they are inherently safe. Yet people think balloons are benign, simply because of their appearance.

   It would be good to get together with you sometime, for any number of reasons, but definitely for flying. No doubt you have a lot of interesting flying stories.

   • Plunger says:

     June 30, 2023 - 8:06 pm at 8:06 pm

     I am presently instructing pilots for America’s second largest aviation training firm. It’s funny how from day to day my memory keeps getting triggered of some story I experienced in 10 yrs in the USAF and 33 yrs with a major airline. Yes, flying can be very unforgiving and it’s not for everyone. But it also is likely the best profession in the world.