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:

FlightPulse, a new flight data analysis tool, challenges pilots' self-perception of being above-average by providing objective, data-driven insights into their actual flight performance.
Evolving from the non-punitive Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) program, FlightPulse grants individual pilots access to their detailed flight data and de-identified peer data.
The tool significantly enhances aviation safety by enabling objective self-analysis, identifying performance trends, and allowing crews to research and proactively brief specific route-based threats from past flight data.

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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.