Instrument flying

One of the hardest things for a pilot to learn is how to fly without being able to see. Normally, in good weather and during the day, flying a plane is fairly intuitive. You look outside – is the sky up? The ground down? Am I aimed away from anything I wouldn't want the plane to be in? As long as the answer to those questions is yes, the amount of trouble you can be in is fairly limited.

However, the real world isn't all sunshine and visual meteorological conditions. When your eyes give out, you have to turn to the cold, mechanical logic of flight instruments. People have been flying without being able to see since the 1930s, and thousands of flights land each day using only their instruments. However, pilots need to be trained to do it, and those who aren't often die when they attempt it. VFR-into-IMC (Visual Flight Rules into Instrument Meteorological Conditions) remains "one of the most consistently lethal mistakes in all of aviation".

Kahneman writes about the Müller-Lyer illusion, that famous image with the two lines that appear to be different lengths but are actually the same. He argues that you never stop seeing the two lines as different lengths, you just learn to ignore what you see. You haven't actually fixed the broken intuition that led to the illusion, merely learned how to recognise it. The same is true of instrument flying; there are various sensory illusions you need to recognise so that you can learn to ignore them.

I've been writing these posts for something like 9 months now, and one thing I can say with complete confidence is that they take about an hour. Sometimes it's a little less, sometimes a little more, and on rare occasion I luck out and just transcribe a completely finished thought in 30 minutes, but one hour is the right prediction to make for the vast majority of circumstances. However, despite this frankly overwhelming weight of evidence, I still find myself making ridiculous optimistic guesses about how long a particular post will take. Ooh, I need to go to bed soon – maybe this one will be half an hour! Nope.

It seems like one of the hardest things for us to do is really, truly trust the numbers when they don't agree with our intuition. Like Han Solo saying "never tell me the odds!", we don't really believe that the numbers are reality and that it's our intuitions that deserve distrust. If you take million-to-one bets that just feel right, you're not going to miraculously make it through by the seat of your pants, you're just going to lose.

The skill of ignoring your intuition and trusting the data is a powerful one, and unique in some ways. Most skills involve improving yourself, but instrument flying is about learning to accept areas where you won't improve. You're never going to feel quite right pulling out of a turn, or really see those lines as the same length, and that's okay. The skill of instrument flying is learning to be humble.