Coachable is defined as “being easily taught and trained to do something better.” If you ever had the chance to learn a sport or play a team sport, or maybe even coached someone yourself, you know that it takes physical skill and knowledge to play a sport.
These things are also required in aviation.
Just as you don’t always play well, there will be days when you just don’t fly well, and instead of beating yourself up for that bad landing or missed radio call, you need to just focus on “the next play,” said Mkristo Bruce, a Washington state native and former NFL defensive end.
Bruce, 40, is a businessman and working on his instrument rating flying a Beech Bonanza that he has based at Norman Grier Field (S36) south of Seattle in Kent, Washington. Part of the reason Bruce pursued his pilot certificate was to give him the ability to travel easier for business. He recently recorded a testimonial for AV8Prep.com, an online ground school that’s helped him with his training.
He said there are parallels between pursuing aviation and sports. Bruce—known as “MK” to his friends—grew up playing multiple sports, including high school basketball and football. The latter ability enabled the one-time 6-foot-6, 272-pounder to land a football scholarship to Washington State University.
“I played football at WSU and was a team captain there,” Bruce said. “I was [second team] All-American [in 2006] and ended up going to the NFL, [where] I played for the Miami Dolphins, Oakland Raiders, and the Jacksonville Jaguars.”
Bruce began his flight training during the COVID-19 pandemic and earned his private pilot certificate in 2022. Today he has 620 hours and is working on his instrument rating.
He finds himself sharing flying stories with his 19-year-old son who is enrolled in flight school in Texas.
“He just got his instrument and is working on his commercial ticket. He was telling me about an awful landing he had, and he was in his head [and] he kept thinking about it, and he was beating himself up over it,” said Bruce, who recalled something a coach taught him in high school. “Coach said get on to the next play. We beat ourselves up about that one play in 59 minutes. Pilots beat themselves up like athletes over a bad landing. The coach used to say, ‘Flush it and get on to the next play.'”
Learning to fly is very much like learning a sport, according to Bruce, as the carrot-and-stick approach works in both.
Bruce believes it’s good to have multiple coaches and instructors. That goes especially in flying where you might have a CFI who allows the client to get away with a bad habit so as not to hurt their feelings, while other instructors use tough love and call out the bad habit and correct it.
“You need both to learn to fly,” he said. “You need to get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable.”
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As a fledgling pilot there are some mistakes that fortunately aren’t deadly, but they definitely offer learning events for the pilot. For example, abruptly retracting flaps during a go-around, or mistaking the mixture knob for the throttle, and perhaps the most dangerous one—inadvertently flying in IMC.
Bruce said he once had an instructor who tested him with uncomfortable situations that made him a better pilot.
“I was lucky because my instructor wanted me to see every scenario,” he said. “I had 10 hours of actual IMC before I got my pilot certificate. It says in the books you will become disorientated, and it’s true. It’s eerie.”
The big difference between sports and aviation is that there are no participation trophies in aviation. You either know the material and can perform the skill or you can’t. Failure is part of the learning process, according to Bruce, and that provides a life lesson.
“If you have someone bailing you out or coming to the rescue all the time, you are not able to fail,” he said. “That’s going to make failure that much harder in the future.”
