Pilot, Know Thyself: Discovering What It Means to Be Painfully Average

This airline pilot has always nursed the secret conceit of being especially capable aviator—at least until recently.

Sam Weigel

Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

So, it turns out, the author discovered he’s nobody special. But the airline pilots he flies with are pretty damn good. [Image: David Weaver/Adobe Firefly]

Key Takeaways:

Pilots, including the author, often overestimate their own abilities, a perception challenged by objective flight data.
FlightPulse, a pilot-facing app derived from the Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) program, provides individual pilots with transparent, detailed data on their own and de-identified peer flight performance.
This data transparency enables self-analysis, identifies performance trends, and allows crews to proactively brief for and mitigate route-specific threats, thereby significantly enhancing overall flight safety.

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If there’s anything I’ve learned in my 31 years in aviation, it’s that just about every pilot claims their spiritual hometown as Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Which is to say that if we weren’t all a bunch of raving egomaniacs before we started flying, the experience of soaring through the sky and looking down upon oblivious earthbound folks didn’t do us any favors.

I have yet to meet anyone who describes themselves as a below-average pilot, and the least competent people I’ve flown with were all supremely confident in their abilities. And yet, I too have always nursed the secret conceit that I’m an especially capable aviator—at least until recently, when I received incontrovertible proof that I am, in fact, thoroughly and merely average. I’ve been forced to look in the mirror, and it turns out I’m just a plain Jane after all.