Page 17 - Nov 2015 Volume 9, Number 11

age 60 – and beyond. Flying till- you-drop makes maintaining health, home, hangar and the airplane, as well as beating other writers to print, more challenging. But a sound-barrier-breaking acquaintance that had the Right Stuff once told me that the best way to become a better pilot was to get your ass in the air – and often. A recently-retired airline pilot friend with 40,000 plus hours said the same thing, mostly. The downside is that any spare time remaining is used to catch up on things that the 9 to 5 crowd are able to do every day. The upside to all of this flying, however, is that pilots with 20, 30, or 40k total time who continue to fly 90 hours each month may have ESP. No, not the sports channel: Extra Sensory Perception. It’s perception occurring independently of any of our sensory processes and includes telepathy, clairaudience, clairvoyance, precognition and retro cognition. A tantalizing hypothesis, but, at this point in our evolution, one still considered by most to be baloney, and I agree. However, the “Spidey-Sense” that experienced pilots develop is a real and proven trait. It’s called intuition.Intuition is like your peripheral vision, you don’t notice it unless there is something to see. It comes from the recognition of things you’ve experienced before: sounds, smells, the timing of events or their sequence, temperature sensations and visual clues. When one or more of the hundreds of recognized and practiced sensory inputs are out of place, we get an alert – something doesn’t feel right. Like catching something out of the corner of your eye – a momentary glimpse. Intuition is a realization or conclusion that occurs rapidly. Some might mistakenly use the word instinct. Instinct is an inborn pattern of activity common to a given biological species. Birds build nests, spiders spin webs and salmon swim upstream because of instinct. Most human instincts are subduedby reason – who wants to swim upstream, anyway. Intuition is a proven phenomenon of the human mind and describes the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. When you see a tiny detail of a familiar design you instantly recognize the larger composition. The canopy of a certain airplane, a section of an airport diagram or a set of engine parameters, for example. Your intuition is what fills in the rest of the story. When confronted with a choice or situation, we use intuition to help complete a mental picture so as to recognize what is happening and what we should do about it.Whether we’re alerted by automation or discover it on our own, a critical element of intuition is having enough experience (getting your ass into the air, and often) to recognize when something is askew. We may doubt our intuition, however, if the action we choosefails to yield the expected result. Several scenarios may reveal the problem: You did the wrong thing, like pulling back on the yoke while the stall warning system is activated or shutting down the wrong engine. Or, maybe your intuition was telling you to try three or four actions in a specific sequence and the first action wasn’t enough: fuel selector, fuel pumps, mixture or start lever, and mags or ignition, for example, after an engine failure/flameout. Perhaps your intuition was right but you accidentally pushed the wrong button or that particular button accessed an inoperative component. And, finally, your intuition and actions were correct, the system you accessed works just fine and it should have fixed the problem, but there is more happening that you have yet to discover.Well, CrapEven the most experienced aviator can be confused initially.MADE IN USASixth Page 4/C AdPHONE: (954) 966-7329 FAX: (954) 966-3584 5614 SW 25 St., Hollywood, FL 33023WEB: www.survivalproductsinc.comEMAIL: sales@survivalproductsinc.comSurvival Products Inc.$1,510 $1,960Double M Aviation Sixth Page4/C AdTWIN & TURBINE • 15