Even-keeled: unflappable, steady, unperturbed, coolheaded.
“How do you remain so calm?”
It’s a question I, and other pilots, have heard through the years. Early on in our flight training and aviation careers, situations arise that might be startling at first. But once we see that situation time and again (gusty winds, icy runways, an amber light on our panel indicating a malfunction) we no longer are startled and calmly take it in stride.
Being A Pilot Is More Than Just Hand Flying Skills
Besides just hand-flying skills, pilots learn about positive and negative behaviors and their effects in aviation. In addition to actual flying lessons, pilots are taught to avoid distractions and channelization, which is focusing on one item at the expense of many others. We strive not to fixate on any one instrument but to scan the cockpit continuously to ensure everything; our heading, altitude, airspeed, and the engine performance, remain as they should.
Throughout training, we learn to remain steady under pressure and not become distracted or a hothead. Crew members who tend to become overly excited, or “ping” during a flight are known as Pingers. One is such person was a KC-10 flight engineer with the last name of McClary. In our squadron, he was known as Scary McClary for his tendency to fly off the handle. One morning, I was taxiing the KC-10 onto the runway for takeoff. As I started to push the throttles up, Flight Engineer McClary started yelling, “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
I yanked the throttles to idle, whipped my head around and asked, “What’s wrong?!”
McClary yelled, “I dropped my damn pen!”
I couldn’t believe it. That was not the time or place for his meaningless outburst.
Read all of David Dale’s stories here in his new book:
Ok, So I might have lost my cool every once in a while
I’ll admit I’ve lost my cool occasionally, but for the most part friends remark about how even-keeled I remain in various situations. One particular time that I got upset was during Desert Storm as a KC-10 copilot during an air refueling mission. My job was to monitor up to four different radios simultaneously: VHF, UHF, and HF (Very High Frequency, Ultra High Frequency , and High Frequency, respectively). The KC-10 had two civilian-style VHF radios, which airliners use daily to talk to Air Traffic Control. One of our two radios was set to an emergency broadcast frequency, for potential critical information or an unscheduled air refueling request from a desperate fighter. The primary VHF radio enabled us to talk to the E-3 AWACS for traffic separation in the combat arena and a military UHF radio was used for air refueling purposes with our receiver aircraft.
During the combat operations the frequencies could be jammed or interfered with by the enemy. On this day, there was static and a loud squeal coming through my headset from the VHF and UHF frequencies. After over two hours of all this constant static and a piercing squeal in my headphones I finally yelled, “Goddamn these fucking radios!”
The cockpit got very quiet for a bit after that. Our flight engineer, Sgt. Mike McKittrick, told me after the flight, “I’ve never seen you get mad before.”
Compartmentalization is key in the cockpit
Southwest 737-700 image via BRIYYZ
Aviators try to compartmentalize our feelings during a flight. We are taught to leave our problems on the ground. Our job is to focus on the mission at hand and not be distracted by what may be going on with our family or friends back home. As we share stories with non-aviators, some may wonder about our feelings during a given situation. While we aren’t robots, we may tend to be a bit emotionally dead about concerns for others or whether a situation should make us freak out. Panic doesn’t do anybody any good.
Do I get nervous? Definitely. I don’t want to make a mistake or be the cause of an accident. But I remain focused on the mission.
At the end of the day, we are just mission oriented people
The military knows that there is a spectrum of focusing on the mission versus focusing on people. We have to balance which comes first; are we Mission-oriented, or People-oriented? I’m a Mission-oriented person, which may strike some as being callus. As the saying goes, there is a time and place for everything, and I joined the military to carry out their missions. Thankfully, I was surrounded by likeminded team members who enjoyed the satisfaction of getting the job done.
Denzel Washington in the movie Flight. Image: Flight, the movie
Hollywood likes to overdramatize any situation and depict emergencies with a lot of yelling and excitement. In reality, as the evening news plays the audio tapes from any aircraft incident, people are often struck at how calm the flight crew sounds over the radio. A lot of that is the result of our simulator training. We’ve seen these emergency situations before. Now we need to take the correct actions and hope we sound cool on the radios.