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Sky Kings: Waiting for the Perfect Flight

Gemini Sparkle

Key Takeaways:

  • The author recounts a proficiency flight where he and his co-pilot made several procedural mistakes due to rustiness, such as pressurization issues and autopilot errors, illustrating that even experienced pilots are not immune to making errors.
  • The article distinguishes expert pilots from novices by their superior ability to quickly identify and recover from mistakes, rather than their ability to avoid them entirely.
  • It emphasizes that the most dangerous errors are "situational mistakes" (e.g., misjudging environmental risks) stemming from a lack of knowledge, and concludes that self-awareness of imperfections is a crucial sign of expertise and essential for aviation safety.
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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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