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A child learning to use a hammer becomes more accurate with the experience of driving nails. If he makes a mistake, he hits his thumb, but he survives and learns. In most areas of living and learning, experience is enlightening and mistakes are survivable. It is not always so with flying. The most difficult thing for beginning pilots to learn and the most difficult thing for instructors to teach is how to know when to stay on the ground. Deciding is obviously easy if weather and other conditions are excellent. Deciding is also easy if weather is horrible. What is difficult is deciding whether it’s safe to go when conditions are neither clearly good nor bad. Imagine being in a smooth, grassy field on a moonless night. You take a few steps and discover you can walk by starlight without stumbling. What you do not know is that the field ends in a sheer cliff not far away. As you explore your dark world, you gain confidence. Your experience indicates that walking around in the dark is perfectly safe. You begin to walk more boldly. If you then step on the edge of the cliff, just enough so that the sensation in your foot tells you something is wrong, you stop, step back, and then carefully investigate what it was that didn’t feel right. Once you know the edge exists and know where it is, you can avoid the danger by walking nowhere near it, by providing yourself a large margin of safety. Being curious, though, you might approach the edge from time to time, carefully exploring its nature and its exact location. You would learn from experience where the danger lies, and you would become wiser in the ways of walking in the dark. Learning about flying can be like that. But if you don’t yet know the cliff is there, and if your bold, confident stride takes your foot beyond the edge of the cliff, you will fall and die. There will be no opportunity to learn from your mistake. Learning about flying can be like that, too. Like a person walking near an unseen cliff at night, pilots often don’t realize danger is near unless it bites them. A close encounter with disaster teaches the pilot something only if he is aware that he stepped right up to the edge. If a pilot is lucky and walks near the unseen cliff many times without falling over, he becomes complacent and confident. He doesn’t know the danger is there, just another step away. Disaster results, not from an obviously foolhardy or reckless act, but from merely going one step farther than before. There are traditional danger areas for pilots corresponding roughly with flight time acquired, plateaus of complacency and overconfidence. One of those lies in the first few hundred hours after earning a private license. A little experience goes a long way toward building confidence. The problem is compounded for wealthy people. One popular high-performance single-engine airplane has been called “Doctor Killer” and “Lawyer Killer” for years. There is nothing wrong with that particular airplane, but people who can afford to, jump immediately from the slow, stable, simple airplanes they learned to fly in to much faster, more complex airplanes. People who can afford expensive airplanes tend to be supremely confident in their abilities, but they reach too far too fast. Their 100-mph experience can’t keep up with their 200-mph airplanes and they sometimes die in them. Experience is the best teacher, we say. We learn from our mistakes. The problems with applying those axioms to flying are, experience is sometimes not survivable. We cannot learn from our mistakes if the first mistake kills us.
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