“The flight grade is unsatisfactory,” I said to an instructor who had just completed a flight with one of our best cadets.
He looked at me in confusion.
I expected such a look: for him, my assessment was absolutely inadequate. We knew the student well, I read flight reports about her from two previous flying schools, as well as our squadron, where she was trained as a fighter pilot of the Royal Air Force (RAF). She was excellent - her flying technique was above average in every way. In addition, she was hardworking and well prepared for flying.
But there was one problem.
I've seen this problem before, but the instructor obviously didn't notice it.
"Evaluation - unsatisfactory" - I repeated.
“But she flew well, it was a good sortie, she is an excellent cadet, you know that.
Why is it bad? - he asked.
"Think about it, bro," I said, "where will this 'nice cadet' be in six months?"
I've always been interested in failure, perhaps because of my personal experiences during flight training. As a beginner, I was pretty good at flying small piston aircraft, and then even a little better with faster aircraft equipped with turboprop engines. However, when I got into advanced flight training for future jet pilots, I began to stumble. I worked hard, prepared carefully, sat in the evenings for textbooks, but still continued to fail flight after flight. Some sorties seemed to go well, until the post-flight debriefing, where I was told that I should try again: such a verdict plunged me into shock.
One particularly tense moment occurred in the middle of learning to fly the Hawk, the aircraft used by the Red Arrows aerobatic team.
I just - for the second time - failed my Final Navigation Test, which is the highlight of the entire course.
My instructor felt guilty: he was a good guy and the students loved him.
The pilots do not show their emotions: they do not allow us to concentrate on work, so we “stuff” them into boxes and put them on the shelf marked “another time”, which rarely comes. This is our curse and it affects all our lives - our marriages collapse after years of misunderstanding caused by the lack of external signs of sensuality. Today, however, I couldn't hide my disappointment.
“Just a technical error, Tim, don't worry. It'll work out next time!" was all he said on the way to the squadron, while the incessant drizzle of north Wales only added to my sadness.
It did not help.
Failing a flight once is bad. It hits you hard no matter what grades you have. Often you feel like you're failing - you can forget to level the plane after making an instrumental takeoff error, go off the airway while flying in the upper atmosphere, or forget to set the weapon switches to a safe position during a sortie. Returning back after such a flight usually takes place in silence: the instructor knows that you will be overwhelmed due to your own inattention, and you understand this too. In truth, due to the complexity of the flight, a cadet can fail for almost anything, and therefore little flaws are often not paid attention to - and yet some of them simply cannot be ignored.
Sometimes on the way back the instructors take control of the aircraft, which is often safer.
But if you fail a flight twice, then the pressure on you increases exponentially.
You might think that cadets who fail their flight twice become withdrawn and avoid their fellow students. In fact, classmates also distance themselves from them. They may say that by doing so they give their comrade personal space, but this is not entirely true. In fact, the guys do not want to be associated with unsuccessful cadets - all of a sudden they will also start to overwhelm sorties because of an incomprehensible “subconscious connection”. “Like attracts like” – Pilots want to excel in their training and falsely believe they don’t want to fail.
After the third failure, you are expelled. If you're lucky and another flight school has a vacancy, you may be offered a place in a helicopter pilot or transport aircraft pilot course, but this is not guaranteed and, often, expulsion means the end of your career.
The instructor I flew with was a nice guy and, on previous flights, would often play a phone call to me in a headset until I "answered".
“Hello,” I said.
“Yeah, hello Tim, this is your instructor from the backseat, the guy is so cute – you may remember me, we talked a couple of times. I wanted to tell you that we have an air route ahead of us, maybe you would like to avoid it.
“Oh, hell,” I replied, sharply turning the plane around.
All cadets know that the instructors are on their side: they want the cadets to pass, and most are ready to go out of their way to help novice pilots. Be that as it may, they themselves were once cadets.
For a novice pilot, success is obviously important - it is the main focus for most cadets. They will work late, come in on the weekends and look at other pilots' flight records in order to get bits of information that can help them get through school one more day.
But for instructors, success isn't that important: there's something we're more interested in.
Failures.
When I was 10 years old, my father took me on a trip to Normandy with a group that restores old military vehicles, of which he was a member. He had a World War II motorcycle that he restored, and while my father rode next to the convoy, I traveled in a tank or a jeep, having a great time.
It was great fun for a small child, and I chatted with everyone who listened as we made our way through the battlefields and spent our evenings in campgrounds set up in the sun-baked meadows of northern France.
This pastime was wonderful until it was interrupted by my father's failure to control the operation of the gas stove in the dark.
One morning I was woken up by a cry - "Get out, get out!" - and pulled out of the tent by force.
She was on fire. And me too.
Our gas stove exploded and set fire to the door in the tent. The fire spread to the floor and ceiling. My father, who was outside at that time, dived inside the tent, grabbed me and pulled me out of it by my legs.
We learn a lot from our parents. Sons learn a lot from their fathers, daughters from their mothers. My father did not like to express his emotions, and I am not very emotional either.
But in the case of the burning tent, he showed me how people should respond to their own mistakes in a way that I will never forget.
I remember sitting by the river where my father had just dumped our burnt tent. All our equipment burned down and we were devastated. I could hear several people nearby laughingly discussing the fact that our house had been destroyed.
The father was confused.
“I lit the stove in the tent. It was wrong,” he said. "Do not worry everything will be fine".
My father did not look at me, continuing to look into the distance. And I knew that everything would be fine, because he said that it would be.
I was only 10 and that was my father.
And I believed him because there was nothing in his voice but humility, sincerity and strength.
And I knew that the fact that we no longer have a tent is not important.
“It was my mistake, I'm sorry I set it on fire - next time this will not happen again,” he said in a rare outburst of emotion for him. The tent floated downstream, and we sat on the bank and laughed.
Father knew that failure is not the opposite of success, but that it is an integral part of it. He made a mistake, but he used it to show how mistakes affect a person - they allow you to take responsibility and provide an opportunity to correct.
They help us understand what works and what doesn't.
That is what I said to the instructor of that cadet who was about to graduate.
If she makes a mistake at the front, she may never return from it.
The higher you climb, the harder it hurts to fall. I was wondering why no one understood this at an early stage of training.
"Move Fast, Break Things" is an early Facebook motto
Our overachieving cadet didn't understand the meaning of mistakes. Academically, she did well in her Initial Officer Training, receiving many accolades along the way. She was a good student, but whether she believed it or not, her success story saga could very soon be interrupted by the reality of front-line operations.
“I gave her a 'fail' because she never received them during her training,” I said.
Suddenly it hit him.
“I get it,” he replied, “she never had to bounce back from setbacks. If she makes a mistake in the night sky somewhere in northern Syria, it will be harder for her to recover. We can create controlled failure for her and help her overcome it.”
That is why a good school teaches its students to perceive failures correctly and value them more than successes. Success creates a comfortable feeling as you no longer have to look deeper into yourself. You can believe that you are learning and you will be partially right.
Success is important because it tells you that what you are doing is working. However, failure builds the foundation for the continued growth that can only come from honest evaluation of one's performance. You don't have to fail in order to be successful, but you do need to understand that failure is not the opposite of success and should not be avoided at all costs.
“A good pilot is able to objectively assess everything that happened ... and take another lesson out of it. Up there we have to fight. That's our job." – Viper, feature film “Top Gun”
Failure teaches a person the same thing that my father taught me before I became a senior flight instructor in the flight school in which I myself struggled for years for survival.
Humility, sincerity and strength.
That is why military instructors know that any success is fragile and true training must be accompanied by failure.
A few comments on the original article:
Tim collins
Hard to tell. Any mistake must be accompanied by a debriefing that explains the failure and suggests a course of action and a direction towards subsequent success. Crashing someone after a successful flight is to make this debriefing more difficult. Of course, no one is perfect and there is always something to blame for failure, but I would not be satisfied with a fabricated blockage. At the same time, I myself did many such reviews, advising not to be too self-confident in the expectation that everything will always be ok.
Tim Davies (Author)
I agree, the analysis was carried out, and nothing was falsified - the quality of her flights was deteriorating, and she was just tired. She needed a break. Great comment, thanks!
Stuart Hart
I don't see anything right in passing off a good flight for a bad one. Who has the right to evaluate another person like that? .. Is all the analysis about her life just based on flight reports and CVs? Who knows what failures she witnessed or experienced and how it affected her personality? Maybe that's why she's so good?
Tim Davies (Author)
Thanks for the insight, Stuart. Her flights got worse and worse, we discussed this many times until we decided to stop her sooner rather than later.
Source: habr.com