Author Archives: Chris

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About Chris

I have retired from my airline job but my passion is still flying. I want to write and teach as much as I can, as long as I can.

Losing Competence Part III: Asiana 214 and the Loss of Control Accidents

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document.write(" serif">Today's News

NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman continues to impress. Quoted today in the San Francisco Chronicle, she says: “What I'm telling you is that from 500 feet to 100 feet, there is no mention of speed.” That's on page A10. On page A12 there are two articles, Do pilots have adequate skills? by airline pilot James F. Atkinson, and When will FAA require alerts? by lawyer Robert A. Clifford. (I am not including links to these articles because you would have to be a Chronicle subscriber to read them.)

Atkinson rightly addresses basic flying skills and airmanship, pointing out that today's automated systems actually undermine skills. Clifford calls for mandatory low airspeed alerts, missing the point that this would make the pilots even dumber. (It is worth analyzing the terrific save by the captain of the Quantas A380 that had the uncontained engine failure. There was so much damage and so many (hundreds) of ECAM alerts that he finally said, Stop ECAM. Lets go backwards and just see what we've got left. That critical decision was the key to saving the airplane.)

Analysis of the Last Minute

At 1000 feet, 54 seconds before impact, someone says, Sink Rate. The throttles are at idle. The training captain tells the trainee, who is flying the airplane, to pull back. This is exactly the wrong thing to do. We will explore why that is so in greater detail in another post, but for now we'll say that they were at idle, on the back side of the drag curve, so total drag is increasing with angle of attack. As any pilot knows (see Stick and Rudder, 1944), instead of correcting the sink rate, pulling back on the control column actually increases the rate of descent and causes the speed to decay faster and faster.

At 200 feet, 18 seconds before impact, the training captain realizes they are too slow and moves to engage the autothrottle. After saying pull back he does nothing for 36 seconds while the airplane descends at over 1300 feet per minute. The target for any approach is 700 feet per minute. The engines are still at idle. They are well below approach speed.

Could they have done a missed approach that point? I will leave that for formal analysis, and point out only that these aircraft are designed to be able to do a baulked landing from any point before touchdown, but only if the engines are already spooled up and the speed is at approach speed, about 1.3 times the stall speed.

Ten seconds later, it was already game over. Perhaps the autothrottle had been armed, but most likely it had not actually been engaged, so thrust lever movement happened only now, at about 100 feet and 8 seconds before impact. And it will be another 5-7 seconds before the engines develop any useful power. So we see the slowest speed at 3 seconds before impact, at perhaps 40 feet above the water. This is where the passengers behind the wings see the plumes of water as the engines start to spool up. Meanwhile the stick shaker is going, indicating impending stall. Despite pulling back and belatedly adding power, they are still descending at 750 feet per minute, by my calculations. This is the first time anyone in the cockpit calls for a go-around. Of course it is too late. Way too late.

What the training captain should have done, back at 1000 feet and 54 seconds, is push the power up. Manually. With the thrust levers. The problem is that he would probably not been able to stabilize the approach from the idle thrust, slow (148 knots) and 1300 feet per minute sink rate descent. It would have been a neat parlor trick if he could have put on go-around thrust, pushed to counter the nose-up moment of the added thrust and bring the speed back up to bug (the approach speed), and then quickly brought the power back to approach power and held the speed. At 1000 feet he had room to fart around a bit, at least in theory. But airline Standard Operating Procedures (SOP's), his own airline's included, say that the approach must be stabilized by 1000 feet and remain stabilized, or else a go-around shall be performed.

So what the training captain really should have done is to say:

I have control.

Go-Around.

That's it. That's the last time the training captain, the Pilot in Command, had any say in the matter. That's when the pilots, the crew, gave up having any influence over the outcome.

It is sad, but true. It must be said. The pilots were incompetent.

Next: aerodynamics they should have understood . . .

Losing Competence Part II: Asiana 214 and the Loss of Control Accidents

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document.write(" serif">News and Public Relations

Deborah Hersman, The NTSB's Chairwoman, has taken some flak in the last few days. But from my perspective, she is one of the few in responsible positions who are looking good.

First a minor annoyance: on Saturday and Sunday news outlets kept repeating a young witness's observation that Asiana 214 came in “low and fast.” Many immediately available facts, including where the aircraft came to rest, made it a slam dunk that the aircraft was, instead, flying way too slowly.

Then on Monday the Korean Government announced they would be “inspecting all Korean B-777's”. On Tuesday and Wednesday various pilot unions called for Ms. Hersman's head, saying presumptions of pilot error were speculative and premature.

Please. I am used to the power players grandstanding their interests, but this is amateur hour. There is only so much ignorance out there.

The Last Thirty Seconds

Now let's get back to what we know. The cockpit cleared the breakwater nicely. The main landing gear and the tail did not. The speed at impact was 106 knots, within a knot or two of the stall speed. (The approach speed should have been 137 kt.) One and a half seconds before impact, engine power increased. Passengers in seats just behind the wing could see spumes of water being thrown up. At four seconds before impact the stick shaker operated, signifying an impending stall. At seven seconds someone is heard on the voice recorder calling for an increase in speed. In his interview the training captain said he went to push the throttles forward but the trainee already had. (Notice at least 5 1/2 seconds elapse between advancing the throttles and the increase in power. Seven seconds spool-up from idle is typical for a fanjet engine.) At 500 feet altitude the training captain became aware that they were too low (the PAPI lights were red over red) and he asks the trainee to pull back. The training captain also notices they are not aligned with the runway. Ms. Hersman says at that point they knew they were low and they were making lateral corrections to line up on the centerline of the runway.

These are the bare facts.

Flight Preparation in Seoul

Now let's go back twelve hours or so to the pilots' briefing. The dispatcher has already produced the flight plan with its route as close as possible to the minimum time track. The weather is good over the Pacific and at destination. Most likely they have fuel for a close alternate, such as Sacramento. It looks easy. But somewhere in the data available to the dispatcher and pilots are these two lines:

ISFO 06/005 SFO NAV ILS RWY 28L GP OTS WEF 1306011400-1308222359

ISFO 06/004 SFO NAV ILS RWY 28R GP OTS WEF 1306011400-1308222359

San Francisco airport (KSFO) always lands on runways 28L and 28R unless a winter storm blows through. With today's light winds and good visibility it is a near certainty that these runways will be in use. But decoding the two lines above (they are called NOTAMS, for Notices To AirMen) we find that the GlidePath (GP) is OuT of Service (OTS) for both runways. The When in EFfect (WEF) is from June 1, 2013 to August 22, 2013 at midnight. This is important because the aircraft cannot fly these approaches on autopilot in the way the pilots are used to.

Here is where we have to move into sensitive territory. (There will be more of these before we're done.) At the end of the article Terror on Jet, in The New York Times on Monday, July 8, we find these lines:

Some experts said that pilots often have little opportunity to practice landings without the aid of such technology . . .

Still, given that the weather was ideal and the guide lights (PAPI, or Precision Approach Path Indicator) were on, making a visual landing should not have been difficult for most commercial pilots . . .

on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, this was a 2 or 3 at the most . . .

Pilot Judgment

A pilot's most important skill is his judgment. (see my Developing Pilot Judgment) He must look at the tasks and maneuvers ahead and ask two questions: Can the airplane do it? and Can I do it?

The former is mostly hard data in the Aircraft Flight Manual Limitations section, but it is also practical knowledge of what the aircraft's systems can and can't do and an understanding of the feedback systems that tell the pilot if the job is being done. (A good example is the AutoThrottle).

The latter question is the more important of the two: Can I do it? The only way to answer is through experience, and it is not measured in flight hours.

Training: have I been trained in this maneuver?

Practice: have I practiced it on my own? What were the results?

Recency: have I done one in the last 30 days? 90 days?

When Asiana's pilots were preparing for the flight in Seoul, the two NOTAM lines about the glidepaths on 28L and 28R should have triggered a dialogue:

“We're going to have to do an everything-off visual approach in KSFO. Has any of us been trained for this? Who has practiced one in the last year? Which of us has done one in the last 30 days? 90 days?”

I'd be willing to bet (I'll back this up in future installments) that none of the four pilots had flown a visual approach in the last 90 days. In that case, pilots with sound judgment would never have attempted the visual approach to 28L in KSFO. They would have diverted to Sacramento where there were long runways with functioning ILS systems.

Next: what else they did wrong . . .

Losing Competence: Asiana 214 and the “Loss Of Control” Accidents

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document.write(" serif">Introduction

Asiana 214 is in my dreams. All day her last two minutes of manually controlled flight replay in my head. Searching for a cause does not distress me. The pilots were clearly incompetent. But how did we get to this pretty pass? My overwhelming sense that that's where we are distresses me greatly.

For the last few years disasters like this one have come to be known as “Loss Of Control” accidents. It's a catchy label, but it doesn't get to the heart of the matter. The pilots of these airplanes – I'm thinking of Colgan Air at Buffalo, Air France 447, and Asiana 214, but there are many more – these pilots fundamentally did not understand what was happening, so they were unable to do their jobs.

How has this come about? And how can it be fixed?

At this point I don't know if this is going to be a blog, a series of blogs, or a book. I know only that I must explain the technical issues, explore the commercial and financial forces as they interact with my trade, and try to map a path through this crisis.

Flying has grown into a huge industry. The era of limitless supplies of hugely keen, military-trained pilots is over. Worldwide, there will be a demand for over 600,000 pilots in the next decade. Where will they come from?

I love flying. Most of my working life has been in airplanes, flying and teaching. I see flying as a living link between the sailors of the past from Magellan to Jack Aubry and the space explorers of the future like Jim Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard.

Sailing, navigating, flying: these have always been apprenticeship trades. You learn the theory, but you also learn the practical, the hands on. You practice. You repeat. You get sharper. Gradually you come to understand what you have to do to stay sharp, to stay competent. (Or, in airline-speak, to maintain your compentency.) Then you pass your knowledge on.

Somehow this process has broken down. There is no single villain, no smoking gun. Instead there are many villains conspiring unwittingly, starting with you and me, airline customers, frequent flyers, looking for a painless flight and, most of all, for a deal.

Training a pilot, says Transport Canada (in the Flight Instructor's Guide), must be done right the first time. The pilot can't see his airplane moving through the air, because most of the time air is invisible. Instead he must imagine the air flowing over his wings and through his engines, and imagine the air pushing on his slipping or skidding fuselage and fin. Above all he must imagine the angle the airflow makes meeting his wings and how this critical parameter is related to lift and airspeed. He must viscerally feel the drag curve as he controls this angle, the Angle of Attack, as he slows his airplane for approach and landing. He must understand at all times where he is on that curve and what the consequences are. He must know how to fly.

It is not as easy as 1, 2, 3. It requires work and practice, and most of all it requires imagination.

Pilots don't call it that, of course. That sounds too much like an artist, an inventor, or a writer. Pilots refer to it as Situational Awareness. It's what was missing in all of these “Loss of Control” accidents. But why? And how can we fix it?

More to come . . .

Bach Too Fast

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Letting Go

It is a beautiful Spring morning in Montreal, the last Sunday in April, and I'm listening to the last of Peter Togni's all-Bach concerts on CBC. Perhaps I'm having trouble letting go.

It seems only yesterday that I could listen to classical music all day on CBC. Midday was Off the Record with Bob Kerr. For the last five years or so, his leitmotif was complaining about liner notes. He never quite came to terms with the transition from LP's to the new CD's with their sharply reduced space for pictures and text. I can still hear the pauses and sighs of exasperation as he tried to read the small type in a CD booklet or searched for a piece of information that was just not there.

Frustration. Stuff left out. Things that are just not there anymore.

Listening to Bach. To the St. Matthew Passion. And remembering Otto Klemperer and his recording from 1961. The classic that has become famous because of the very slow tempi. I have found it in my collection and am listening as I write this. Yeah, it's probably too slow.

Glory

Otto understood something. Just as the body of the violin resonates with the strings, receiving and amplifying their musical energy, so does music capture the listener, fastening his heart to its pulse, breathing with him, giving substance to the torment in his soul.

But music doesn't move us by force. The connection is a tenuous one. It is like rocking a car stuck in the snow, back and forth, gently feeding the rhythm of the rocking. If it is expertly done, enough energy can be transmitted to break the car free. Just so does music move the soul. Its work is not done when it emanates from a violin body or a speaker cone. It lives on in the listener, building momentum, beauty, glory. Bach does it.

Bucket Music

Peter Togni opened Choral Concert today with Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, saying this is the music he would like to hear at the end of life. My bucket music came later in the the program: Mache dich, mein Herze, rein – Make yourself, my heart, pure. (So Jesus can live there.) It was preceded by other excerpts from the St. Matthew Passion and the tempi were, well, fast.

It's a sign of our times. Fast is fashionable. It's not that a fast tempo is bad – it can be very exciting, as for example, in some sections of Glenn Gould's first recording of the Goldberg Variations. But at a certain point I find myself asking, is there more to this than the technical virtuosity? Does it do anything musically?

Here I am, a heavy Chevy stuck in a drift, and the conductor isn't speaking to my rhythm. His energy whistles by and I'm still stuck. So here I am later in the day, thinking about Mache dich and hearing it in my head, much slower. Now the sixteenth notes are the third-story facade of an elegant piece of architecture. They build on the first and second story, elaborating on the structure beneath, adding momentum to the great design. How they do that is a subject for a long musicological article, or perhaps just a conversation between Bach and God. But now I am moved. I feel the beauty and the glory of death. I feel the intense longing, the sweetness, the desire for an innocence I left behind in the womb. I guess I'm just getting old.

Stuff of Dreams

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Chicago?

Reading a New York Times article last month about the Dreamliner’s troubles, something jumped out at me. Deep in the article were the words Chicago-based Boeing.

Of course I know that Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago some years back. But still, airplanes are made at airports, else how will they fly away?

Boeing field, Seattle, where the first B-17 crashed on takeoff with the controls locked. Boeing Field, almost downtown, nestled between the freeways. Boeing Field, where I myself went in 1974 for simulator training on the new B-727-200. Everett, WA, where the mighty Whale has been put together since forever. Boeing and its people are a part of the Pacific Northwest, and nothing will ever change that.

The Dreamliner Project

On the technical front the B-787 is ambitious. Carbon-fiber construction, fly-by-wire and all that, of course, in the service of reduced weight and therefore greater economy of operation. But these technologies have been proven in the field with the B-777 and Airbus aircraft. The leap forward is the almost complete elimination of hydraulic systems, replacing them with electrically operated everything. Six huge (by aircraft standards) generators provide enough power for a small city. And infamously, two lithium-ion battery packs provide power to start the APU and to back up cockpit instruments.

It is on the business front, however, that the real leap has been made. Following business school dogma, or perhaps to be near their largest customer, Boeing management made the move to Chicago. There they hatched a plan to build the new plane by doing less than forty percent of the work. The rest they farmed out to fifty-odd “strategic partners” around the world (See James Surowiecki's Requiem for a Dreamliner? in the February 4, 2013 New Yorker).

The Problem

As everyone now knows, the B-787 has been grounded following two incidents involving the meltdown of a lithium-ion battery pack. My own experience with these batteries is limited to a lightweight portable circular saw I used last year in a roofing project. It worked beautifully, except for when I used it to rip a ten-foot length of decking and overheated its battery pack. Wisely, it shut down and refused to go further. I had to wait half a day for the pack to cool enough to be recharged.

That battery pack still works fine today, thanks to the built in sensors and software. And I have learned to appreciate the lithium-ion battery's tendency to overheat when a large current demand is placed on it, such as ripping a long board or starting an APU.

From the New York Times' coverage this last month I also learned that the lithium-ion battery produces oxygen when it overheats, leading to the possibility of an uncontrollable fire. It would seem that when it comes to using lithium-ion batteries, it would be wise to know what you are doing.

The Solution

Recently Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX) wrote to Boeing to offer assistance with the battery problem. His offer was declined (Flight Global, January 29, 2013). Apparently, it is better to look like you know what you're doing than to actually know anything. Isolated in Chicago, Boeing management are doing damage control by gagging their Chief Engineer in Seattle and labelling the battery failures “maintenance issues.” (For an elucidation of this process in aviation, see the papers and speeches of Mark H. Goodrich.)

Whither the Dream?

Flying is based on confidence. We fly because it is cheap and we believe it is safe. We are lured by deals and fed statistics proving that flying is safer than it ever has been before. We understand that with today's technology aircraft usually “land themselves.”

But none of this is so.

Our single most polluting act is not driving a car or consuming coal-fired electricity, but taking an airline flight. The cost of climate change is not factored into those cheap tickets. But – perhaps closer to home – neither is the cost of non-existent pilot training or remote project oversight in aircraft manufacture. The statistics are re-assuring but mask obvious truths: a) in two recent tragedies the pilots stalled the airplane and didn't recover b) the Dreamliner is at risk of failure because of the financialization of business.

The B-787, as far as I can see, has the potential to be a winner. There are no technical obstacles that cannot be overcome with a little real work. But the danger lies in the dream, in the concentration on maintaining that flying is risk-free. Because, you see, there was something else that jumped out at me in the New York Times article. A Boeing Chief Engineer was quoted about the difficulties of building an airplane with fifty “strategic partners.” It may be my research, but I have been unable to find that quote since.

Management: Blinded by Success

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Blinded

We have become very good at management – so good that we have set it (and ourselves) on a pedestal. But management is not a panacea. We throw it at every problem, expecting the usual success. More and more we are encountering intransigence as we attempt to solve problems with measurement and money.

Two of the most pressing problems facing us today are health care and education. The cost of the former is out of control. The quality of the latter is declining and testing isn't fixing it.

The reason is straightforward: health care and education require a relationship between individuals – one person helping another. True, there is more to it than that – but the basic requirement remains. Ask anyone whose life was changed by a good teacher.

Atul Gawande

I am a huge fan of Dr. Atul Gawande. He writes like a dream, takes me into his world of medicine and surgery, and seriously addresses the problems facing his profession. But his most recent article Big Med (the New Yorker, August 13) took me into new territory. He describes how hospitals (including his own) are forming into conglomerates, and compares the management of these conglomerates with that of The Cheesecake Factory, a large and successful restaurant chain.

I devoured the article with my usual fascination and perhaps a touch of trepidation. The next day, I brought it up with one of my sons, who had also read it. He had been horrified, he said, both by the idea that health care could be “managed” like a restaurant chain, and by the “creepy” remote monitoring (by closed-circuit TV) of doctors on the job.

We had a lively discussion. In hindsight I can see my son brought me around to his point of view.

Finland

For the last decade the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been ranking countries in educational achievement using PISA tests. (Program for International Student Assessment). Finland has consistently ranked at or near the top. What is its secret? Respect for teachers.

The Finnish position on education is the opposite of the North American (especially the U.S.) position. There are tests, but they are not standardized. Teachers make and give tests to see if the student has learned and if they themselves have taught. Teaching is a higher-prestige occupation than medicine or the law. Teachers must have a degree, but it is not in education. The degree itself (at least an M.A. with a thesis) is the license to teach. When asked what might make them leave the profession for, say, business, Finnish teachers cite not higher pay, but loss of autonomy.

Management or Collegiality?

As recently as a generation ago, doctors and teachers could and did operate alone: the private practice and the one-room schoolhouse. Since then huge advances in technology have made that impossible. So much knowledge is available today that health outcomes are compromised if the patient's medical history is not instantly available to the specialist. Learning is limited if the teacher cannot back up her teaching with the Khan Academy and Coursera and learn from these herself. As Dr. Gawande points out, doctors (and teachers) must continue to learn from each other.

All this argues for collegiality. Good management can make sure fresh food isn't wasted at The Cheesecake Factory and it probably has a role running schools and hospitals. But as Finland's example shows, it is counterproductive when used to control doctors and teachers.

Why is this so? And why now, more than even a decade ago?

Financialization

Financialization. The word is not in the dictionary, at least not yet. But there it is in Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man, the excellent and revealing article about Mitt Romney's background in the October 1, 2012 issue of The New Yorker. With financialization – financial “products”, hedge funds, and private equity – management has been taken to a new level where, effectively, only money matters.

Of course, money is called productivity and efficiency among other euphemisms. But what it means in practice is that human interaction, energy, and invention are now virtual qualities at best, and at worst ignored altogether. Is it any wonder that in North America and especially in the U.S.A. health care and education have the highest costs in the world and some of the worst outcomes?

Human Potential

George Romney told his son, who idolizes him, that “there's nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success.” During Wednesday night's debate Mitt himself said his goal was to maximize the potential of each individual. How ironic is it that the son's policies and politics – the real policies, not the slight-of-hand wordplay visible Wednesday night – are systematically dismantling his cherished management and stifling each individual's God-given gifts, effectively fulfilling his father's prophecy?

Mitt Romney may, in his heart of hearts, believe in the sacred gifts of each human being, and even in the absolute necessity of their being channelled into paths that benefit society as a whole. It is, alas, probably too late for him to see how his actions are undermining his belief. That is for us to see and correct.

Mitt the Spider

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Watching Landings

 

You’re at the local airport. You watch landings, because pilots always do. Today, because there is a lot of traffic and you're not pressed for time, you watch for awhile. Twenty, maybe thirty landings go by. What do you see? Fifty percent (this is a flight school strip) touch down halfway down the runway. One or two touch down in the last 1000 feet.

What do you take away from the experience?

Gossip, certainly – if you're standing there with fellow pilots. Comfort, possibly – if you feel you can do better than most of what you're watching. Or perhaps chagrin, if the reverse is true and a recent example of your own work sticks in your craw.

But there is a more important take-away: forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing.That is the dictionary definition of judgment. And the aviation version of judgment is more practical: if I find myself in this situation, can we do it?

The we in the last paragraph refers to you and your airplane. You learn skills and you memorize your airplane's limitations. You are a team.

The situation is whatever pickle you're going to get into on your next flight. Can I land on a 2000-foot runway?

You look up the Landing Distance Required in your Flight Manual or Pilot Operating Manual. For my N-Model Bonanza I find 1600-2000 feet (no wind, 75°F. or less, 2000 feet pressure altitude or less). So we can do it, right?

Not so fast. The runway at my local airport is just under 4000 feet long. I consistently turn off on the center taxiway, but not without some braking. I have a bit too much speed over the fence and I float too long. So I'm not quite ready for that 2000-foot strip. My airplane is, but I am not.

Here is another clue. My POM also lists Landing Distance Required for a Short Field Landing. Same configuration, but the over-the-fence speed is 5 knots less. Instead of 1600-2000 feet, the required distance is 1200-1400 feet. Add five knots and add five hundred feet! Nope: my energy management – hey, my hands and feet, if you get right down to it – are not good enough yet.

Why not, you may ask? After all, I have been a pilot for 45 years. Well, two things: first, I'm 68 years old; and second, after I retired from airline flying I didn't touch a yoke for six and a half years. So I had to write exams and do a lot of re-learning. Now I'm learning the hands and feet again.

In short, for the moment my airplane is better than I am.

Hours, Experience, and Judgment

How do we discern and compare on the road to developing pilot judgment? First, look at the one or two Bottom Guns who touched down in the last 1000 feet. “Good enough,” they say. I guess so, if their airplane can stop in that distance. Then the fifty percent who touched halfway down. “Plenty of runway left. No sweat.” These guys are like me. Their airplanes are better than they are. It's just a matter of how much better.

What's missing? A path to learning judgment.

Experience is measured in hours. Judgment, theoretically, comes from experience. But it is not automatic. Hours of flight or even hours of practice take you nowhere unless they are accompanied by some discernment and comparison. Neither the Bottom Guns nor the halfway-down-the-runway pilots are safe trying to land on a 2000-foot runway. But do they know that?
Spiders are kind to their own. Well, story except for the kinky Black Widow, who eats her husband after sex.

Spiders are very good at controlling the populations of lesser insects – gnats, for example.

Above all, spiders dine in style. Pheasant under glass has nothing on them. Have you noticed? A fine, strapping exoskeleton gets stuck in a beautiful, geometric web whose strands are stronger than steel. There is no rush, no baring of teeth or ripping of flesh. No blood on the floor.

The spider, epicure and medical professional, injects a magic potion under the shiny shell. The guts and muscle of the beautiful captive are reduced, sautéed and flambéed. Only then does the spider dine – elegantly and unhurriedly.

After the meal the prize remains. The beautiful prey is still there, intact and whole, framed in the skyscraper web. Its value seems undiminished.

But it will move no more, except when the wind pulls at the strands binding it. The soul is long gone.

So too does private equity provide for its own.

Developing Pilot Judgment

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Watching Landings

You’re at the local airport. You watch landings, because pilots always do. Today, because there is a lot of traffic and you're not pressed for time, you watch for awhile. Twenty, maybe thirty landings go by. What do you see? Fifty percent (this is a flight school strip) touch down halfway down the runway. One or two touch down in the last 1000 feet.

What do you take away from the experience?

Gossip, certainly – if you're standing there with fellow pilots. Comfort, possibly – if you feel you can do better than most of what you're watching. Or perhaps chagrin, if the reverse is true and a recent example of your own work sticks in your craw.

But there is a more important take-away: forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing.That is the dictionary definition of judgment. And the aviation version of judgment is more practical: if I find myself in this situation, can we do it?

The we in the last paragraph refers to you and your airplane. You learn skills and you memorize your airplane's limitations. You are a team.

The situation is whatever pickle you're going to get into on your next flight. Can I land on a 2000-foot runway?

You look up the Landing Distance Required in your Flight Manual or Pilot Operating Manual. For my N-Model Bonanza I find 1600-2000 feet (no wind, 75°F. or less, 2000 feet pressure altitude or less). So we can do it, right?

Not so fast. The runway at my local airport is just under 4000 feet long. I consistently turn off on the center taxiway, but not without some braking. I have a bit too much speed over the fence and I float too long. So I'm not quite ready for that 2000-foot strip. My airplane is, but I am not.

Here is another clue. My POM also lists Landing Distance Required for a Short Field Landing. Same configuration, but the over-the-fence speed is 5 knots less. Instead of 1600-2000 feet, the required distance is 1200-1400 feet. Add five knots and add five hundred feet! Nope: my energy management – hey, my hands and feet, if you get right down to it – are not good enough yet.

Why not, you may ask? After all, I have been a pilot for 45 years. Well, two things: first, I'm 68 years old; and second, after I retired from airline flying I didn't touch a yoke for six and a half years. So I had to write exams and do a lot of re-learning. Now I'm learning the hands and feet again.

In short, for the moment my airplane is better than I am.

Hours, Experience, and Judgment

How do we discern and compare on the road to developing pilot judgment? First, look at the one or two Bottom Guns who touched down in the last 1000 feet. “Good enough,” they say. I guess so, if their airplane can stop in that distance. Then the fifty percent who touched halfway down. “Plenty of runway left. No sweat.” These guys are like me. Their airplanes are better than they are. It's just a matter of how much better.

What's missing? A path to learning judgment.

Experience is measured in hours. Judgment, theoretically, comes from experience. But it is not automatic. Hours of flight or even hours of practice take you nowhere unless they are accompanied by some discernment and comparison. Neither the Bottom Guns nor the halfway-down-the-runway pilots are safe trying to land on a 2000-foot runway. But do they know that?

What’s in it for Me?

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I admire Maureen Dowd and enjoy her columns, but she is off track on this one (Playing Now: Hail to the Chiefs – New York Times, Sunday, September 9, 2012).

She does, however, speak for us.

We live in a market-driven society that has come to expect service. I'm paying. You deliver. We have become puffed up with the importance of our money.

But education doesn't work that way. Good health care doesn't work that way. And – this was the President's point – democratic government doesn't work that way.

Just before the line Ms. Dowd satirizes – the election four years ago wasn't about me. It was about you – the President had the courage and the leadership to remind Americans that “We, the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights.” He goes as far as to say that “freedom without a commitment to others . . . . is unworthy of our founding ideals.”

President Obama is right. We won't get out of the mess we're in unless each of us can turn to a fellow citizen who has done good work and say, “Welcome home. You did that. You did that.”

We can't demand good work. We can't demand good teaching, good health care, or good government. No matter how much money we have, we can't put the “good” in any of these. Paying is not enough, and the Market is not a leader.

So perhaps Ms. Dowd has done all of us a service by putting a voice to our selfishness. The voice rings hollow in a society largely emptied of respect for good work and of motivations other than money. But perhaps Ms. Dowd was satirizing us and not the President?

How To Live: What Humanity Has Learned So Far

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Be grateful. Do good work. Keep the faith. This is how to live, according to two millennia of world culture.

Different cultures put it differently. Within a cultural tradition, the religion might put it differently from the philosophy or from the literature. And of course there are many religions, philosophies, and works of literature, each with its own voice.

But that is not what we are concerned with. Here we want to speak of what they all say, even if they do so in different words.

Be Grateful

This is the starting point. Without gratitude it is difficult, if not impossible, to move ahead into a productive life, into happiness, into peace. All religions address this point. The clearest exposition is the awakening of the Buddha. Sitting under the Bodhi tree, he saw that the self is the source of all unease.

Self-awareness is a great gift, but it is a double-edged sword. One can easily become drunk on self-awareness and slide further into addiction to its many temptations. Self-pity. Depression. Unhappiness.

Other religions are not so direct in their path to peace. Most approach from the other end, from faith. Believe in a god or gods, they say. Then by surrendering you will have expanded your awareness beyond your self. Believe and your problems will be solved.

This approach, it seems to me, is less attractive for two reasons. First, we are endowed with intellect and curiosity, and to be well we must use our gifts. To be told to suspend them, right off the bat, goes counter to our valid instincts. Second, there is a temptation to laziness in any belief. By accepting Jesus, for example, we can be saved. Or perhaps by saying we have accepted Jesus we can be saved, from one moment to the next. Have we really stepped outside ourselves, or is it a delusion? Are we instead inside ourselves, thinking of ourselves as good persons? And maybe of others as not quite as good persons?

I am not saying it is impossible to get to gratitude through faith. Or through good work, for that matter. It is just harder. And there are more pitfalls along the way.

Think of a cow, lying in a field of clover, chewing her cud. Is she content? Probably the question is meaningless. She is one of many cows eating clover and ruminating. She is surrounded by green and birdsong, by life, by creation. She knows she is not the center of the universe, or rather, she would never be tempted to think such a thing. She is already saved.

We humans can always be tempted. The doctrine of original sin is a way of pointing this out. The Christian cycle of acceptance and absolution, the ritual of the mass, is a path to awareness beyond the self. But it is not the only path. True, pain is part of life, and through the pain of transgression we can walk into gratitude. But it can be simpler. We can hear a thrush sing its greeting to the dawn and be made whole, which is to say to be made part of a whole, our awareness extending beyond our selves. Gratitude. For nature. For creation. For not being alone. For not being the center of the universe.

Do Good Work

I said earlier that we are endowed with intellect and curiosity. From birth, we have many other gifts as well, although just as each of us has different DNA, so each of us differs in our particular combination of gifts. Good work is putting these gifts to work for the benefit of mankind.

Of course we need money. Or maybe some land on which to grow food. Our first goal, after all, is survival. Once again, here is a valid instinct to be heeded. But the goal is not land. The goal is not money. The goal is survival for the purpose of doing our good work. Work which is unique to each one of us. So yes – as individuals we are important. But not because we are better than others. We are important because humanity and all creation will be better off if we manage to realize our gifts and give them back. We will be better off if we don't die with those gifts still clutched to our bosom.

Keep the Faith

This is another way of saying, be hopeful.

Be in the moment. This is important. When we are doing our best work we are in the moment, fully engaged, like the cow chewing her cud. But we are humans, endowed with intellect and curiosity. So we remember the past and think of the future. So yes – be in the moment when you can, as much as you can. But don't be dismayed if your thoughts turn to the past or the future. Our ability to do so is one of our gifts. But like many of our human gifts, it comes with temptations. To regret the past. To worry about the future. Some regret and worry is fine, of course. Regret and worry have their purpose. But don't get stuck there. The past must be accepted if we are to move on. And the future must hold promise. We have to believe in a future, whether it is in this life or beyond. We have to be hopeful.

I will finish with a personal parsing of the Lord's Prayer:

Our father who art in heaven. I am not alone. There are others. There is all creation.

Hallowed be they name. This creation is beautiful, and beauty will feed me.

Thy kingdom come. Let there be a future which is better than today.

Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Let me understand the limits of my gift of free will. Let me not suppose that I have dominion over others, or even complete dominion over my own life.

Give us this day our daily bread. May I have what I need to survive, so I have a chance to realize my gifts.

And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. May what I have done wrong not stop me, not prevent me from going on. And I know it is a bargain: I must forgive others as well as myself.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. I know that each one of my many gifts comes with temptations. I know that by struggling against those temptations I increase my chances of survival to do what I must do. Once again, this is a bargain.

For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. When I succeed and do my good work, let me understand that it is not for me. It is for all of humanity and even all of creation. It is not to put me above my fellow creatures. It is not to wield power for power's sake. If I am given power let me be a leader, not a bully. And if I am successful let me be grateful, not puffed up.

For ever and ever. May this continue beyond and outside of me for a century of centuries. For as long as my intellect can comprehend.

Amen.