Mama said, “there’ll be days like this, there’ll be days like this”, my mama said.

You battle traffic and eventually make it to flight school without a minute to spare, you know that even though you are on time, you are late by the look of your instructor from the other side of the counter. You request the keys to your assigned plane and rush to the tarmac to do your pre-flight inspection since the clock is ticking, and as you learn early on in aviation, there is little to no time for small talk when you are taking lessons. As you briskly walk to find the plane among the 2 dozens tail numbers, you are doing a mental checklist to see if you have everything. Headsets? check, Fuel tester? check, Writing pen, check, and on and on.

If you have a personality like me, you tend to think, there are more efficient ways to do this pre-flight checklist, so you re-arrange the sequence of certain things like leaving the master switch on after checking the fuel gauge, after all eventually you are going to check the lights when you check each wing so why not leave it the master switch on until the end of your checklist.

You finish the outside portion of the pre-flight checklist and you climb inside, at this point your instructor meets you and you get that feeling of “ok, total concentration now”. The instructor sets the radio frequencies since you still can’t seem to grasp the “simplicity” of maneuvering the radios, and the instructor asked you to contact clearance. Since radio comms seems to be your nemesis your stress level starts increasing and after shocking on the radio call out, your self-esteem takes a punch to the belly, somehow you manage to sound acceptable to clearance and you get your instructions to run short to E4 and hold. Rest of the procedures continue and eventually, you take off, fly around, do maneuvers, and land the plane. You survive the day.

The point of the story is how a series of seemingly small unfortunate events keep new pilots pre-occupied in an already hectic evolution of learning something as intense as flying.

“Every problem, begs a solution” Ron Ackerman

Things can go South at any moment in our lives. It is not different in Aviation and sometimes we have little to no control over circumstances; however, for the things we have control over and do not control them we are doing ourselves a great disservice.

I was taught a few years ago to ask myself often a profound question “what did I lack in x,y, or z situation?”, This simple question put us in a mental frame of taking ownership of our participation in whatever happens around us. Sort of a “what could I have done better?” type of question.

In my story above, I was running late to start with. To put it in general aviation terms, I started my final approach very unaligned with the runway. Simple solution, get to the airport 20 minutes earlier than your scheduled flight. It sounds very basic, but believe when I say there is a lot of “us” out there, kind of like me telling a smoker to quit smoking, very easy for me since I have never smoked.

The second thing I could have done is to properly express to my instructor how inadequate and intimidated I feel about talking with ATC. Perhaps scheduling some ground time to practice the comms and minimize the fear. In this topic, I also found an online real-time communication add-on (https://www.ivao.aero/) for my Prepar3D flight simulator, where 1000’s of people from all over the world join to act as pilots or ATC so others can practice from the comfort of their computers.

Finally, I would say that there are 2 ways people learn, by pain or by observing. In this story, I learned that pre-flight checklist have a sequence for a reason, my leaving the Master Switch on during my pre-flight checklist cost me an additional 1/2 hour, big lesson, nowadays that master stays on less than a minute while I swiftly check the lights and accessories.