3 Things Pilots Fear

By Capt John • July 15th, 2010
tornado-like • storm.clouds
Image by origamidon via Flickr

As a pilot who makes his living working for the airlines, I’m involved in aviation every day, in one capacity or another.  Being a de-facto diplomat for aviation, I love writing articles that might help fearful flyers.

A certain mystery surrounds aviation. Darkness, ethereal haze, or pure magic and sorcery?  Truthfully, I’m the wrong person to speculate in such matters; flying has always been as natural to me as walking. But, for most people—particularly people with a fear of flying, flying is not at all natural. With little effort, one can laundry-list the ill-feelings and discomforts. Too, the inconveniences that must be endured at the airports and the total relinquishment of control are anything but pleasant and test the patience of even seasoned travelers. Crew members, including pilots, have been known to reach their limits of tolerance at the madness of the entire airport scene.

So, flying is uncomfortable and unpleasant and most certainly something that the fearful flyer dreads. All these emotions get dumped into a bucket that we summarily label:  Fear.

Fair enough. I’ve got something to share with the fearful flyer:  Sometimes I experience fear too. What would make an airline pilot fearful, you wonder?  The list is not terribly long, so here it goes:

  1. Thunderstorms. We routinely fly around thunderstorms. From April to November, pilots will be navigating around various areas of thunderstorm activity almost every time we go to work. We don’t fly through them, but we sometimes have to “pick our way around them.”   Now, let me explain what this means, and then you can check out the video.  We actually look at our on-board weather radar, which paints pretty color pictures of the moisture content of the thunderstorm, and then we stay out of those colored areas. Oh, I can hear it now!  You do WHAT?  While we trusting passengers read, sleep and fret, you pilot-types are trying to dodge colored blobs on a screen?!  Like on a video game?  Yep. True story. Surprisingly, very little specific training is provided. We learn this game by years of hard-earned experience and become very good at this mysterious art. The game is deadly serious, and when I start losing, I get scared. Real scared. White-knuckle scared. I remember the terrible nights flying air freight, alone, in poorly equipped piston twins and turboprops. IF the radar worked, I didn’t know how to use it very well, and I had no help. No flying partner. No resources. Nothing like now when we have all the modern resources and wonderfully engineered and beautifully maintained airplanes. Still, thunderstorms scare me. This confession made, I’ve seldom spilled coffee in the cockpit, and virtually all of the flights that involve “picking our way through,” are remarkably smooth and beautiful. Thunderstorms are an awe-inspiring sight to enjoy. From a distance.
  2. Icy runways and taxiways. Ironically, the airports with major airline service have wonderful snow removal programs. Millions of dollars are spent on personnel and equipment and training. Denver, Minneapolis and Chicago have really impressive operations when the snow flies. Still, the runways can get slick, and, what is almost worse, the taxiways get slick, and they get obscured by low visibility conditions. I landed in New York’s JFK airport on one dark and stormy night. Actually, the First Officer landed the airplane, after shooting a beautiful ILS approach and making a smooth landing on a runway covered with hard-packed snow. It then took most of an hour and a half to taxi several miles to our gate, on taxiways that simply could not be kept clear of snow and ice. That same night, a cargo-carrying jet actually slid off a taxiway and closed part of the airport. It was a white-knuckle operation for me to taxi the airplane and keep the operation safe. Our crew was excellent; the best that the industry had to offer. Teamwork made the operation safe. Still, I’m never completely comfortable, and never completely relaxed, when airport operating surfaces are slick.
  3. The absolute greatest fear that I have while flying is an old fear: Fire. There are no fire trucks at thirty-nine thousand feet. Sure, we have procedures to fight a fire, but it still takes ten minutes to descend and land, assuming that we are flying over a sizable airport. Assuming that we make an emergency descent to an airport that we can land on, then what?  There likely won’t be any planning during such a rare and extreme emergency, so we can do nothing but perform our emergency procedures, and then rely on our experience. I’ve been on fire before, fortunately on the ground, and it turned out to be a relatively low-cost loss of an engine on an old freighter that I was flying. Nobody got hurt, though I was fired… (No pun intended.)

So, pilots have fears too. I developed the ideas for this article while riding around the freeway that circles around and through Phoenix on my Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Why would a sane person ride a motorcycle?  Everybody knows that riding is dangerous and filled with risks and countless unknowns. I was not going anywhere. I was completely alone, on a solitary mission to nowhere. Completely pointless?  Probably, but I get my best thinking done when I’m riding that Harley, or in the flight deck of an Airbus.

There must be a primal need to risk and overcome. We all have fears. Some days, I don’t ride. Some days, I don’t fly. Occasionally, I pad around in my robe all day, and don’t leave the house. A sixth sense for danger?  Perhaps… It would be a good guess that all pilots have this sixth sense. We are a risk averse group of professionals. We are constantly weighing any risk against any potential reward. This characteristic is a large part of what makes airline flight as safe as it is.

This post turned out to be more personal than was originally intended. It is not meant to frighten anyone, but rather, to share and enlighten. We all have fears. Thank you for allowing me to share mine. Unlike the fearful flyer’s fear, mine serves to increase my vigilance and enhance my ability to do my job.

As Nelson Mandela said, “I learned that courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” I hope we can all conquer our individual challenges.

Today’s guest blogger is Capt. Ron’s friend, Capt. John.  He has been flying since 1983 and has logged 20,000 hours. He assists Capt. Ron in the live Phoenix classes when his flying schedule permits.

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Related posts:

  1. Afraid to Fly? Then Meet the Pilots!
  2. What’s to Fear about a Short Hop in a Turboprop?
  3. Another Routine Day to Fly
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