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Sky Kings: Waiting for the Perfect Flight

Gemini Sparkle

Key Takeaways:

  • Even experienced pilots make mistakes, often due to factors like lack of recent practice, highlighting that expertise lies in effectively catching and correcting errors rather than avoiding them entirely.
  • Mistakes fall into categories: skill, procedural, and the most dangerous, situational errors, which stem from a lack of knowledge and can have severe consequences.
  • The article stresses that being aware of and learning from one's imperfections is crucial for pilot safety and growth, as self-deception about a perfect flight is inherently dangerous.
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Maybe, someday, at the end of a flight I will be able to say, “My performance as a pilot was perfect on that flight. I didn’t make a single mistake.” So far I have never come close. My performance (and John’s) on a recent flight is a great example. It was time for us to fly just to keep current. We hadn’t been able to fly our old Falcon 10 for nearly a month. That’s a long time for us, because things move fast in that airplane and we get rusty pretty quickly.

We decided on a flight from our San Diego home base at Montgomery Field to San Luis Obispo in central California. The Falcon 10 requires two pilots, so this would be a proficiency flight for both of us and a chance to hone our crew coordination. I would be captain on this leg and John would be copilot.

Martha King

Martha King and John King take turns writing Sky Kings. They have shared flying and teaching aviation for more than 50 years.

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