Inner Art of Airmanship > Inner? Art? Airmanship?

Inner? Art? Airmanship?

Ever experienced the blinding brightness of near-perfection in the cockpit? Would you like to learn the hard-won knowledge that connects elite aviators? Modern psychology and neuroscience research has found that experts are truly different from average performers. This profound difference is not always easy to see; for it is inside our minds. It is not talent or luck. It can be learned. It is the Inner Art of Airmanship.

This website will not teach you how to fly. But if you are a pilot maybe it will move you closer to touching personal aeronautical excellence. This is a practical guide to peak experience piloting, where some proven techniques and esoteric sounding ideas are translated into concrete cockpit terms. Most pilot books and magazine articles look down for flying lessons in fatal crashes, unconsciously copying the methods of cognitive research journals that cite studies of flawed reasoning about six times more often than they cite studies of successful reasoning (Christensan-Szalanski & Beach, 1984). As an alternative approach, we will look upwards to see what the skilled connoisseurs of excellence can teach us. It turns out there are many more places to look for flying lessons than twisted wreckage sitting in a smoking hole in the ground.

Part of the formal framework of the site is the new and powerful branch of knowledge called positive psychology. At Harvard University, Psychology 1504 (Introduction to Positive Psychology) is now the most popular course in the catalog. The instructor of those overflowing classes, Dr. Tal D. Ben-Shahar, noted early in the first lecture in the Fall of 2006 that counting the subjects of psychological journal abstracts between the years 1967 and 2000 showed 5,584 papers dealing with anger, but only 415 dealing with joy. There were 41,416 papers dealing with anxiety but only 1,710 dealing with happiness. 54,040 dealing with depression but only 2,582 dealing with life satisfaction. That's a depressing 21:1 ratio of studying the bad rather than the good. Positive psychology studies this academically neglected side of human nature. Looking not at the abnormal or the malfunctioning, but instead concentrating on how average people become great, and how a normal life can be spent happy.

This is not just TV pop-psychology feel-good mumbo-jumbo, but real solid science with real solid results. This website explores and explains the warm uplifting thermals of superior human ability. Sport psychology has long studied how athletes improve, and we'll use their knowledge where it is approiate. We also draw from the extensive recent scientific research into expert performance, which are the significant differences between the amateur and the skilled professional in many activites. It is a distillation of wisdom and spirit from pilots, athletes, astronauts, sailors, surgeons, race car drivers, neuroscientists, clinical and applied psychologists, philosophers and—maybe the most tellingly named of all—martial artists. It is an attempt to study the mindset of a master pilot. There are some tools to become the pilot you have always wanted to be, some tools to create the life you most want to be living. The prize is immense. The only real cost is your investment of time.

Inner? We are investigating the most important airspace in aviation—the six inches between a pilot's ears. New brain imaging technology and advanced neuroscience research is starting to make sense of the once unknowable neuronal nebulae in our skull. The human brain is made up of over 100 billion cells—about the number of stars that there are in the Milky Way—that are dynamically linked together by one million billion synapses. Incredibly complicated. The most complex structure in known existence. However this is an exciting time in history as we are increasingly aware of how our brain works, and how to improve individual functioning.

This is a personal journey inward, with the goal of vastly increased performance in the cockpit. We are all familiar with the easy to understand outer goal of flight: going safely from A to B. There are boat-loads of books on navigation and aerodynamics and aircraft systems to help us with this goal. We take written exams and pass flight tests showing we have all the knowledge and skills to perform the external goal within certain safe standards. However planes still crash. Pilots get bored.

Enter the inner game. Played inside the mind of the aviator, it is a dance with lapses in concentration, weak decisions, errors in execution and our self-inhibiting bad habits. It is the start of a journey away from mere pilot proficiency, aiming instead at excellence in aviation, excellence in life. The journey inward may be the longest but most satisfying flight we can undertake. While Crew Resource Management (CRM) talks of managing many external elements, inner flying is the balancing of our own skills, knowledge, mind, body, dreams and soul with the goal of melding to the wing. Being one with the wind.

Art? Not art in the meaning of arranging empty cigarette boxes into a statue of a naked George Washington, but rather art in the broader meaning of skill and creative imagination acquired by observation, study and experience. It's the Greek idea of Techne, which encompassed art as well as rational elements of craftsmanship. (which is where we get the word technique from.) As pilots we spend a lot of time studying the individual elements of flight, but not much time thinking about being a complete pilot. There is a real art to integrating the many diverse skills required of the modern aviator. Flying may not be recognized as an art by the lovers of music and ballet and whatnot, but soaring in a tight desert thermal or landing a seaplane in rough seas or watching the Blue Angels perform is proof enough for me. We are highly skilled artisans. Piloting is endlessly challenging; different every time I takeoff. Because flying is an art it means the pilot can never stop learning, as we understand the impossibility of ever having the fully perfect flight.

Most of us have flown with the miserable jerk who knows every word of every paragraph in the flight manual; but at the end of the day must be considered a below-average pilot. There is no flexibility, no artistry. These poor people are painting by numbers—with predictably sad results—when they should be using an aeronautical paint box to boldly yet smoothly draw whatever they see in front of them. The highest level of piloting is to soar above the books to become an aerial artist. Dancing with the clouds.

Airmanship? All pilots understand what airmanship is, even if they can not define it in words. Airmanship is the powerful combination of skill, knowledge, awareness and discipline in action that is the difference between passengers and pilots. It is our common heritage with birds and sailors. It links old captains of 500-seat airliners with new students in single-seat gliders, it links pilots of spaceships and Piper Cubs, fighter jets and helicopters. It is the sweet central essence of piloting. Problems with airmanship are often at the core of the eighty something percent of aviation accidents that get blamed on what is now called 'human factors'. The exact percentage varies mostly with how we decide to define human factors, but the 80% number has not changed much since World War II. It's about the same story for the older art of seamanship (Buck, 1989).

The FAA defines airmanship as sound acquaintance with the principles of flight, the ability to operate an airplane with competence and precision both on the ground and in the air, and the exercise of sound judgment that results in optimal operational safety and efficiency (FAA, 2004). That's a good solid start. Tony Kern (former Chief of Cockpit Resource Management Plans and Programs United States Air Force and author of the classic book Redefining Airmanship) went further when he wrote that:

"Total airmanship blends technical and tactical expertise, proficiency, and a variety of human factors to smoothly and effectively integrate the capabilities of the pilot and machine into the joint/combined team. Total airmanship leads to improved situational awareness, fewer mistakes, increased operational effectiveness, improved training, and safer flying operations." (Kern, 1997).

Studies have shown the vast majority of pilots believe they are above average in airmanship. Of course, half of us are not. But we can get better. Will you join me on a journey into the Inner Art of Airmanship? Flying the plane, grooving with gravity . . .

Master pilots share thoughts on the Inner Art of Airmanship

Captain John Wiley

Many have written about this and I believe there can be little doubt that there are aerial artists. Having done some painting, I was surprised to find how much science and how many disciplines are involved in putting paint on canvas. It is more than just slopping color onto a surface. The really good painters are also very disciplined and learned. And, in many cases, they continually seek to improve their efforts. They are not satisfied with maintaining a skill. They want to enhance and broaden it.

From this, it is easy to see from walking into any art show, there is a wide range of people passing themselves off as artists when in fact, they are dilettantes, dabblers and impostors. They can talk all day about art but are unable to demonstrate mastery. From that, they seek to obscure their inabilities in new babble. Thus we get people smearing chocolate on themselves and calling it "art."

In the aviation community, I believe there are three groups, much like any other community. There are the hackers who do it for various reasons, who are mostly competent and can demonstrate some skill. Like any bell curve, this group is a minority. The second group is the largest. The ones who want to improve and who have more than basic skills, but like the local artist and Leonardo, there is a huge chasm between the talents and abilities. The final group, smaller than the hacker's group, is made up of the aerial artists. They are able to blend science, ability, discipline, skill, and a myriad of other components into a work of art. Those who see them perform know they have been in the presence of greatness. The hackers are intimidated. The second group is inspired and awed. The artists view it with astonishment and wonderment, knowing the effort it takes to excel.

— John Wiley

John was a UASF pilot in Vietnam and retired from US Airways as a 19,000 hour check airman typed in the A-320, B-707, B-727, B-737, B-757, B767, CE-500, DC-9 and Lear Jet He continues to fly and to write about flying.

My Introduction to Sam

Twelve Flights of Inner Airmanship

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Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes.

— Carl Jung

Flying is an art, an imperfectible art.

— Harrison Ford

C. coming out of the sky with a kind of directness, a kind of magnificence that is only his. And when he banks his plane around the field with that slow and absolute grace, it is as much him as a gesture of his hand. It catches my breath. I have always taken it for granted. But to see it in the sky . . . it is an act of creative beauty, a work of art.

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, watching her husband Charles Lindbergh land.

Few in number though they be, we can learn a great deal about values from the direct study of these highly evolved, most mature, psychologically healthiest individuals, and from the study of the peak moments of average individuals, moments in which they become transiently self-actualized.

— Abraham Maslow

He was persuading and willing and coaxing that airplane into doing what he wanted it to do, leaning it like a bobsled right down where it could safely land. He could feel its every movement as though it were his own body. My father wasn't flying the airplane, he was being the airplane. That's how he had always done it.

— Reeve Lindbergh, on flying with his dad Charles Lindbergh in an Aeronca Champion after an engine failure.

There is always an inner game being played in your mind no matter what outer game you are playing. How aware you are of this game can make the difference between success and failure in the outer game.

— Tim Gallwey

The risks in actual flying are really rather slight. Even the most dangerous sports, properly done, are exercises in risk management, risk reduction. Watch a good mountaineer prepare his ropes and map his route. He is no wild dice-roller in a game with God.
The real risk we need to face, the real hazard we must brave, is already present long before we launch the airplane, climb the mountain, shoot the rapids—or paint the picture, plant the flower, or whatever mode of searching we embrace. The bear we're hunting is already within reach. He is waiting, neither fleeing nor hiding. We will find him when we are ready. First, we have to look in all the wrong places. If we learn to look attentively, we will learn, finally, to look inside.

— Paul J. Sampson

What can we gain by sailing to the Moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

— Thomas Merton

The only journey is the one within.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

At the controls of a small, high-performance aircraft day in and day out, you reach a point of oneness with the plane. Some people would call that the Zen of flying, but that's too deep for me. You're just a part of the plane, not separate from it, as if you are the brain and it is the body, doing some things you don't have to think about, like breathing, and other things that are converted from thought to action in an instant.

— John Glenn

To be 'unhampered by senses and intellect' is to dwell openly within the world of the creative imagination. The master of a traditional art represents this state where action and creation spring effortlessly 'out of formlessness and soundlessness.' Paradoxically, this state is reached when unrelenting discipline and practice have purged the rituals of the traditional art from the interference of both senses and intellect, so that the 'isness' of the simplest act, such as preparing one's clay for the wheel, contains all that there is to being in the universe.

The master thus draws the apprentice slowly away from preconceived ideas, theories, and even history, toward life as fullness of present action. This profound lesson cannot be communicated orally, in the didactic or philosophical mode. We can know and share much more than we can say. In addition to head knowledge, there is hand knowledge, eye knowledge, and heart knowledge; and heart, eye, and hand fuse through selfless practice and example.

— Kenneth Beittel

A thoughtfully flown traffic pattern; a perfect holding pattern entry; one of those greaser landings rewarded with the simultaneous chirp-chirp of the main gear just as the sun sets on a calm summer evening; a quiet no-bounce wheel landing on turf. Don't tell me there's no art in aviation.

— Thomas B. Haines

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

— Henry David Thoreau

A night flight, almost over, with the blinking beacon of the home field already in sight, and overhead stars and stars. A good time to not think; to sit quietly, doing nothing. To be here now. No present or future, no self, no coming or going, origin or destination. Lights, a roar, a dipping wing, the chirp of a tire: let go of it all, and it will all go smoothly by itself.

— John Shade

First Meeting | Inner Airmanship | Twelve Flights