Muscle Memory

Have you encountered a situation or hazardous condition that yielded lessons on how to better manage the risks involved in flying? Do you have an experience to share with Aviation Safetys readers about an occasion that taught you something significant about ways to conduct safer flight operations? If so, we want to hear about it.

Editorial Staff

Monday, January 09, 2017 at 12:00 AM ET

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Key Takeaways:

Muscle memory significantly impacts a pilot's ability to transition between different aircraft or even different seating positions within the same aircraft.
This phenomenon can manifest as difficulty adjusting hand movements for controls (e.g., switching seats) or misactivating switches due to reversed layouts (e.g., flap/gear switches in different aircraft models).
Such ingrained habits can lead to critical errors, underscoring the importance of careful training and the practice of identifying controls before activation, particularly in high-risk phases like after landing.

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Way back when I was working on my flight instructor certificate, I was surprised to have some initial trouble acclimating to the right seat. It wasn’t a matter of being able to reach everything necessary to safely fly the plane, a Cessna 172RG Cutlass, or needing to adjust my sight pictures. Instead, it had to do with literally years of using one hand on the yoke and the other for the throttle.

The best description of the problem I can give involves approaching a runway for landing and needing to slow the descent just a bit before flaring. When seated in the left seat, the tendency is to pull back slightly on the yoke with the left hand and ease in the throttle just a bit with the right. Switch seats, though, and attempting to add that same slight amount of energy with the same hand movements results in pitching the nose down when you want it to come up.