Why is flying so easy?

[teacher]

I've also said it before in another thread but it's worth saying again. If our job was easy and anybody could just get in the plane and fly it we wouldn't have to be legislated back to work.

[loopy]

The physical skill of flying is relatively easy. I think most people could learn the basic flying skills. What is hard about it? Learning the skills of steep turns, stalls, spins, short and soft field landings, spirals, crosswind landings on a gusty day, and my favorite, raw data NDB approaches on a fixed card ADF without autopilot. All skills I think most people could learn with enough desire and practice.

As someone else said earlier, it's the decision making, the experience and knowledge of your aircraft and its abilities and limitations which are more difficult. That is the hard part of being a safe recreational flyer, or a professional flyer. Learning when it is better to stay on the ground and drink coffee (or beer). What is an acceptable risk for me today is sure different from when the ink was wet on my group 1 IFR or any of my other licenses and ratings.

When it comes to monkeys turning wrenches or teaching monkeys to fly, good luck. Yeah, some primates have shown a very crude ability to use makeshift tools. However, most dogs have better problem solving skills than the great apes. Come to think of it, I may have flown with both dogs and monkeys!

[Dash-Ate]

Well lets start with comparing flying an airplane to working as a roofer.

Both jobs are done above the ground, which job do you think is harder?

I though you were going to say hooker.

[Meatservo]

.

[Colonel Sanders]

Every single response to this post has been motivated by ego

Including yours, presumably

PS I can't speak Swahili, and I haven't played
the piano for almost 40 years.

Being a mechanic is not harder than being a pilot

Have you done both? I have, and I agree with ..

[Chuck Ellsworth]

Meatservo, I think the main reason we all post here is because we belong to a like minded group of people who work in aviation.

I guess we could attribute a lot of how we react here to ego, however what is the alternative to ego?

Rather than ego would we be more acceptable if we were lacking in self worth because we struggle with coping with the difficulties of operating a mechanical device?

Maybe the forum would be better if those of us who managed to get through our careers in one piece just keep quiet and hide it from our fellow aviators?

As to the comment more pilots get killed flying airplanes than mechanics get killed fixing them that is not a very good argument to prove flying is more difficult. Having worked all my life doing both jobs it is my opinion that fixing them is more difficult than flying them.

How many doctors get killed while working on their patients?

[watermeth]

from the beginning of training to this first commercial flight, or succeeding those different type ratings when you progress in this career, flying will seem sometimes easy and sometimes tough. like in any other sport, being average is easy and being good or extremely good at it requires some extra work and studying and anticipation, whether it be aerobatics, AG, floats, charter, line flying.
depends how in depth you wanna go, how thoroughly you wanna understand your operations, your aircraft, this airspace, that new airport, and how often you'll open a book to find that information you were wondering about few days ago.

[x-wind]

Insightful words from Meatservo, IMHO.

[Meatservo]

.

[JigglyBus]

I find memorizing peoples names very difficult. I find doing single digit addition in my head relatively easy. It doesn't mean that either of these things ARE hard or easy, just that I find them this way.

I guess . and Colonel obviously have a knack for flying but are struggling a little with the mechanical aspects.

[Chuck Ellsworth]

At the moment I am struggling with waiting for spring to arrive so I can fire up the motorhome and hit the road again.

And I can't quite make up my mind when to go get my T.C. Medical renewed...will probably wait until I get back from my first spring trip......

.....I plan on getting a sailplane rating and need my medical valid before I start.

[Meatservo]

Thanks for that ..

Yet again I have allowed myself to be goaded into putting a lot of unnecessary thought into a response to another stupid AvCanada topic where nobody really has anything to say that they haven't been saying over and over again, time without end, Amen.

[Slats]

The RELATIVE ease with which a highly trained, practiced professional completes their chosen task is not the baseline by which its INHERENT difficulty is judged. If that was the case, nearly everything a person COULD do, would be easy. We would all be able to perform open heart surgery, shred a guitar like Hendrix, throw 100 mph fastballs for a strike, and fly like Bob Hoover. After all, there are people who find those things easy.
In reality, the baseline by which a task's inherent difficulty is judged is by how easily the average bozo could do it. By that criteria, I'm convinced flying IS inherently difficult. l don't believe the average person has the natural aptitude for it, much less the desire to get good at it. (Hell, I'm not even convinced a lot of pilots possess those things.) Don't believe me? You don't need to look very far to see countless examples of the average Joe's total ineptitude in operating simple machinery. At best, the average person could MAYBE fly just barely well enough to not kill themselves. Certainly not well enough that you'd trust your wife and kids with them, and thus, not ever well enough to make a profession out of it.

[JigglyBus]

I think you should put that back in Meat.... I think your thoughts are accurate on this topic.

You must find putting your thoughts into writing very easy.

See what I did there????

[Chuck Ellsworth]

Hey meatservo I enjoy discussing this stuff with you.....

........Sometimes you guys just don't get what I am saying, in this case I am only giving my personal feelings about the actual mechanical act of flying an airplane, that part I never ever found difficult because that is just wth way I am wired.

As to flying as a job that is totally another subject, it can be so difficult to deal with it is amazing any of us got it done.

It was the politics and the ever expanding bureaucracy that finally did me in.

Looking back on my career and some of the flying we did I get cold with fear just remembering it.

I still sometimes go to intellicast.com just to see what the ITCZ is doing, makes me so happy I no longer have to face another trip through it on long over ocean flights.

[hst]

The dreaded word "ego" rears its ugly head. Why does it have such a negative connotation? Arrogance and incompetence when combined are a lethal qualities in pilots. (and other inherently dangerous jobs) IMHO, high self asteem is a requirement in all good pilots. In some cases, it's those that accomplish 'making flying look easy" and in the process have an over inflated value of one's self where things go wrong.

Here is a guy who made it look easy.

http://imageevent.com/okbueno/mopic?p=1 ... =0&z=2&l=0

[Gear Jerker]

Don't forget where you came from. Just because now after years and years of flying (think repetition), it feels easy, does not mean that it is inherently easy.

Personal example: I find dunking a basketball, and shooting turnaround contested fadeaway jumpshots easy. However, I am aware that neither one is. In my case, I spent most of my youth training to do these things, and so now these are highly developed, perfected skills, created through extensive repetition. Somewhere around 2005 or 2006, Kobe Bryant scored 62 points in 3 quarters against the Dallas Mavericks. In an interview after the game, he said "it felt like I was playing a video game."

Applying the logic of certain posters, I would conclude that it's easy to become an elite athlete.

Flying is the thing that we all had a passion for at some point in our lives, and decided to pursue as a career. Those who have lasted the longest and been most successful with it, are the ones who have continuously found ways to improve their skill, knowledge, and decision making, in a variety of areas. So, for them an average day feels pretty damn easy.

I have a good friend who is working on an M.D. P.H.D. - in other words, a Doctor Doctor (LOL). He spends about 12 hours a day in a lab studying the biochemistry of huntington's disease, and with his peers, works towards a cure. He describes it as being very easy, and he doesn't feel like he works very hard.

I'm not comparing the difficulty of Flying with the difficulty of being Kobe Bryant or an MD PHD candidate. I am talking about the 10000 hour concept, introduced by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.

You can't judge the inherent difficulty of something if you are a person who has put in hours and hours of repetition, beating on your craft. Of course it will feel easy.

I also think it is important to distinguish a true professional pilot, who strives to master all subjects and skills related to safely and efficiently flying an airplane, from those who do the bare minimum to become licensed and meet their needs, privately or commercially.

I can accept the argument that the average person is CAPABLE of becoming a skilled pilot, but that doesn't mean that it's an inherently easy thing to do. Flying is not the hardest thing in the world, but it's definitely not the easiest.

[Rockie]

Don't forget where you came from. Just because now after years and years of flying (think repetition), it feels easy, does not mean that it is inherently easy.

Personal example: I find dunking a basketball, and shooting turnaround contested fadeaway jumpshots easy. However, I am aware that neither one is. In my case, I spent most of my youth training to do these things, and so now these are highly developed, perfected skills, created through extensive repetition. Somewhere around 2005 or 2006, Kobe Bryant scored 62 points in 3 quarters against the Dallas Mavericks. In an interview after the game, he said "it felt like I was playing a video game."

Applying the logic of certain posters, I would conclude that it's easy to become an elite athlete.

Flying is the thing that we all had a passion for at some point in our lives, and decided to pursue as a career. Those who have lasted the longest and been most successful with it, are the ones who have continuously found ways to improve their skill, knowledge, and decision making, in a variety of areas. So, for them an average day feels pretty damn easy.

I have a good friend who is working on an M.D. P.H.D. - in other words, a Doctor Doctor (LOL). He spends about 12 hours a day in a lab studying the biochemistry of huntington's disease, and with his peers, works towards a cure. He describes it as being very easy, and he doesn't feel like he works very hard.

I'm not comparing the difficulty of Flying with the difficulty of being Kobe Bryant or an MD PHD candidate. I am talking about the 10000 hour concept, introduced by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.

You can't judge the inherent difficulty of something if you are a person who has put in hours and hours of repetition, beating on your craft. Of course it will feel easy.

I also think it is important to distinguish a true professional pilot, who strives to master all subjects and skills related to safely and efficiently flying an airplane, from those who do the bare minimum to become licensed and meet their needs, privately or commercially.

I can accept the argument that the average person is CAPABLE of becoming a skilled pilot, but that doesn't mean that it's an inherently easy thing to do. Flying is not the hardest thing in the world, but it's definitely not the easiest.

I only wish I was this articulate. Seriously.

[GGCC]

If flying was easy, we'd let women, children and senior citizens do it... Oh wait, we do.

And us senior citizens are a problem?

Yup! We know too much and the youngsters won't listen

[Colonel Sanders]

Ok, Meatservo went on the attack because I don't
speak Swahili and haven't played that piano for 30
years - that is a "display of ego".

On the basic premise that you might as well be what
people attack you for, let's get down to brass tacks.

You can't judge the inherent difficulty of something if you are a person who has put in hours and hours of repetition, beating on your craft. Of course it will feel easy.

Sure, but there's more to it than that. For example,
I find this ridiculously easy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcy4ZhGHHaE

Rolling an airplane upside down right after takeoff,
for example, is quite trivial. I do not understand
why more people, who tell me that they are such
awesome pilots, don't do it.


However, I find the following to be between 10x and
100x as hard as the above solo surface acro:

http://www.pittspecials.com/movies/outsideloop.wmv

That's probably because I'm not as good a stick as
the experts here, but I can assure you that negative G
vertical formation is very physically unpleasant and
very technically challenging. Snowbirds don't do it,
Thunderbirds don't do it, Blue Angels don't do it. It
is the most difficult thing I have ever done in a cockpit,
and doesn't seem to get a whole lot easier with the
years. Is that because I have an ego problem?


tl;dr There is some flying that is really hard, even if
you have been doing it for 100,000 hours already.

[lownslow]

Simply flying, like screwing, seems easy because it's fun. They both appeal to a pretty common basic impulse and that gives us the drive to get better and better at it. Doing either for a living, however, is a little more complicated.

Consider the following:

I once read that there is a much larger supply of wannabe male porn stars than there are decent jobs for them. For some reason or another, some are special (either through being naturally gifted or developing a unique skill) and make a decent wage but the vast majority hardly make enough to get by. Now, of the ones that aren't special, some have devised a plan to get out. Believe it or not there are straight men who get into gay porn because it pays better and hey, it's only temporary until they can establish themselves and get the job they want for the wages they want, right? This is starting to sound kind of familiar...

Anyways, the moral of the story is when it comes to a career you can either make yourself special or spend the rest of your life taking it up the, well, you know.

But flying itself is easy.

LnS.

[complexintentions]

Flying is easy.

Reading this thread though, was painful.

[Colonel Sanders]

Reading this thread though, was painful

As you read more and more, you will find that your
lips won't get tired as quickly.

Trying to get back on track ...

I can accept the argument that the average person is CAPABLE of becoming a skilled pilot

I would modify the above - the average person is capable
of becoming a moderately safe pilot - but I'm not so sure about
skilled.

but that doesn't mean that it's an inherently easy thing to do.

That I would strongly agree with. Most people, for example, have
to put some effort into their flight training, be it ab initio, IFR, etc.
I can tell you that in my decades of instruction, I have yet to meet
someone who finds landing a Pitts, or formation aerobatics effortless
to learn. At least 99.9% of the pilots out there really have to work
at it, but maybe I'm just hanging out with the wrong crowd.

I am disappointed as to how short the memories are, of so
many people here. I suspect that if you look at the first logbooks
of the people here who say that "flying is easy", that they didn't
solo after one dual flight. Or even two. It might have taken three.

[V1VRV2]

Talk about ego’s
Are you for real?

[PositiveRate27]

Don't forget where you came from. Just because now after years and years of flying (think repetition), it feels easy, does not mean that it is inherently easy.

Personal example: I find dunking a basketball, and shooting turnaround contested fadeaway jumpshots easy. However, I am aware that neither one is. In my case, I spent most of my youth training to do these things, and so now these are highly developed, perfected skills, created through extensive repetition. Somewhere around 2005 or 2006, Kobe Bryant scored 62 points in 3 quarters against the Dallas Mavericks. In an interview after the game, he said "it felt like I was playing a video game."

Applying the logic of certain posters, I would conclude that it's easy to become an elite athlete.

Flying is the thing that we all had a passion for at some point in our lives, and decided to pursue as a career. Those who have lasted the longest and been most successful with it, are the ones who have continuously found ways to improve their skill, knowledge, and decision making, in a variety of areas. So, for them an average day feels pretty damn easy.

I have a good friend who is working on an M.D. P.H.D. - in other words, a Doctor Doctor (LOL). He spends about 12 hours a day in a lab studying the biochemistry of huntington's disease, and with his peers, works towards a cure. He describes it as being very easy, and he doesn't feel like he works very hard.

I'm not comparing the difficulty of Flying with the difficulty of being Kobe Bryant or an MD PHD candidate. I am talking about the 10000 hour concept, introduced by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.

You can't judge the inherent difficulty of something if you are a person who has put in hours and hours of repetition, beating on your craft. Of course it will feel easy.

I also think it is important to distinguish a true professional pilot, who strives to master all subjects and skills related to safely and efficiently flying an airplane, from those who do the bare minimum to become licensed and meet their needs, privately or commercially.

I can accept the argument that the average person is CAPABLE of becoming a skilled pilot, but that doesn't mean that it's an inherently easy thing to do. Flying is not the hardest thing in the world, but it's definitely not the easiest.

This is probably one of the most intelligent posts I've read on Avcanada.

I can't help but roll my eyes in frustration at the big egos that walk around spouting off about how easy flying is for them and then complain about how little they get paid for the service they provided. Becoming a professional pilot requires the same time commitment to the development of your craft as say, a doctor, lawyer, dentist etc... The big difference I see between those professions and flying is they never go off on a rant about how easy it is and how a monkey could do it! No wonder we are typically under valued by our employers, we have no self respect and little self worth.

Consider this:

A General Practitioner will need about 4 years to get their initial degree, then another 4 years of med school and 2 years of residency before they can practice medicine (note the term practice). So we are looking at about 10 years from start to finish. Once working they typically will work 9-5 Monday to Friday, often even less than that, in the same office in the same time zone. As posted above, although their jobs provide them with a mental challenge and, despite the responsibilit of hundreds of lives, I'm sure the vast majority don't find their day to day work particularly hard because they have worked so long in their respective field. Yet, you never hear a doctor say "My job is easy!" - they shouldn't, it's not.

Lets look at an Airline pilot, specifically narrow body regionals.

The average pilot that goes through flight school to get their CPL through a degree program will need their PPL first, approx 1-1.5 years (give or take) then the degree program of 4 years. Once that is complete you are looking at 2-4 years of fighting it out, instructing, dumping skydivers, pipeline patrolling etc for shit pay on clapped out equipment that should have been banished 20 years ago. If you survive that and make it to a regional it will now be 2-4 years befor you see a captains seat. Now you are making less than 100k a year and fly 18+ days a month, overnighting in different cities with different time zones. You probably fly 6+ legs a day, in all weather conditions trying to swat your little tin can out of the sky. On top of that you are responsible for 50-100 people's lives on any given leg. As expected from a professional, you take all this in stride and handle it all gracefully because you are a competent professional of 10 years + flying under your belt. Please don't confuse that with being easy.