EAA Sport Aviation - October 2011

The phrase itself also has an ominous quality; it sounds as if bad news is on the way, as if it’s part of a large body of research titled “Personality Disorders: Pilots and What Is Wrong With Them,” and subtitled “Sure they get the job done, but why do they have to be so tightly wrapped?” And you can be confident that whatever else the researchers found, one of the main things wrong with us is our lack of interest in personality questions.

We can include this discussion under the Light Flight heading because the pilots of very light aircraft may not have a bunch of engines to manage or quite so many gauges to monitor and switches to move, but we take to the air for most of the same reasons as the big guys.

We have this thing about certain items being either one
way or the other. We want the landing gear, for example,
to be either “up” or “down,” not “sort of down.”

Pursuing this question, I came across a
blog kept by the girlfriend of a pilot who
emphatically agreed that he was annoyingly
“Pilots are bimodal: on/off, black/white,
good/bad, safe/unsafe, regulations/non-
regulations.” Yeah, we have this thing about
certain items being either one way or the
other. We want the landing gear, for
example, to be either “up” or “down,” not
“sort of down.” When we are going to turn
the prop over before hand-propping the
engine, we do not want to hear that the
ignition is “pretty much off.” After takeoff,
we insist on a “positive rate of climb,” not
something nebulous between “positive”
and “negative.”
“Pilots tend to be suspicious, even a little
paranoid.” Yes, well, when scientists are

WHAT WE ARE LIKE DEEP DOWN

There are a number of studies of “Pilot Personality,” and taken all together, we actually come off looking pretty good. Because various online sources tend to quote without attribution, it’s hard to say where these particular descriptions come from. But let’s get down to specifics (a very pilot-like thing to do, to judge from all of the studies), together with some observations.

“Pilots tend to be reality-based.” Most pilots would not have a problem with that statement. But what does it even mean? If pilots are different from the general population in this way, then by necessity most people are non-reality-based. Does that mean they hallucinate? Do they try to buy subway tickets from New York to London, or try to explain GPS to their dogs?

writing about you in journals, it makes you think people are talking about you.

Outside the cockpit, this quality shows up in the tendency of many pilots to set two or three alarm clocks—even though he or she may generally wake up before any of the alarms go off. That’s actually Plan B. Plan A is to set three alarm clocks and stay up all night.

“Pilots like ‘toys’—boats, cars, motorcycles, big watches, etc.” Whoa. Those are not toys. Those are necessities. You cannot live without air, food, water, shelter, boats, cars, motorcycles, and so on. You could try, but it would be some sort of horrible, zombie halflife. You couldn’t call it living.

ON THE OTHER HAND…

Let’s make a valiant effort to look at the other side. On the “reality-based” question, how reality-based can we be if we climb into a craft and take it thousands of feet into the sky even though it is so frail that it can be blown over and damaged by a strong wind? How well plugged-in are we to the world around us?

Actually, we may be reality-based— whatever that means—but at its heart, flying is not a rational activity. Not counting those who fly solely because they are paid to—and I have never actually known anybody like that—we fly for reasons we find hard to put into words. You hear about the spirit of aviation, the magic of flight, of having a passion to fly. Those are not hardheaded, rationalist, stern-reality-based concepts.

For most of us, flying is time-consuming, difficult, frequently dirty, often noisy, sometimes dangerous, and always expensive. How do personality researchers account for that? Maybe we are incurable romantics. Maybe we just want to be like the guy in the drawing.

Dave Matheny, EAA 184186, is a private pilot and an FAA ground instructor. He has been flying light aircraft, including ultralights, for 30 years. He accepts commissions for his art and can be reached at DaveMatheny3000@yahoo.com.