Risk

I can’t say that I’ve done a lot of specifically dangerous things in my life. But I haven’t exactly been averse to risk either. Flying, though, is an order of magnitude above and beyond anything I’ve done before. It’s like climbing without a rope. There’s no one to catch me if I fall.

I learned a lot about fear, confidence and trust rock climbing.
Every sane person has a fear of falling from a great height and getting hurt. Part of learning to climb a cliff involves learning the mental discipline to minimize the fear. You do that by learning to trust your equipment, your partner holding the other end of your rope, your own physical skill and judgment. And you practice. Ultimately you get over it.

That’s not to say that climbing rock faces wasn’t ever completely terrifying. On occasion it was. Even so, I don’t think I ever walked away from a climb thinking, “I’m going to kill myself doing this one of these days.” More like, “I might get hurt, but I won’t actually die – so how hard can it be?”

Not so with flying an airplane. There’s nobody holding the other end of rope to keep me from hitting the ground. If I misjudge or if my equipment fails the stakes are infinitely higher – I very well just might get myself killed. Get too close to that jet that just landed, fly into clouds and lose all bearing, carb ice, structural ice, a bird, a power line, engine failure… So many ways to die. It’s actually a little scary.

Stick says you start out with a bag of luck in the right hand and a bag of experience in the left. And you hope you get to fill up the left bag before the right bag is empty.

He’s kinda right, but there’s more to it than that. There’s learning, planning, and practice, practice, practice. I gotta do a couple more flight plans and then (whenever the damn rain clears) I gotta get up there and do some more practice.