By Matt Ringen, EAA 1304226
“Uncomfortable is good, stay there,” was the response I received from a flying mentor as he recognized I was at the very edge of my personal envelope and task saturated. That advice is rather against the grain of most aviation best practices, but I thoroughly appreciated it, even long for it now. Despite many years of airline flying and a return to general aviation, a while back I felt myself getting stale. I wanted to do more with flying. Flying is full of perishable skills, and I realized I was in a rut and needed to “hit the gym” with a new routine to sharpen that edge again. So, I tried my hand at something new and got humbled, learned a lot — and then fell in love with it.
Let me roll back the clock a year or two and start at the beginning. For some time, I had enjoyed a side hobby of being behind the camera for formation photography missions. I really take to being a part of that team effort, the satisfaction of capturing a great image, and witnessing the group flying as one. When it all comes together it’s a marvelous sight. One day that mentor I mentioned above gave me a push, “Matt, you should fly form yourself. I think it would resonate with you and raise the bar.” Raise the bar! Maybe this was it, the new challenge I’d been searching for.
Look, I’ve admittedly flown “in formation” with other airplanes on my own before, perhaps in the spirit of having a grin. However, this mentor has “F/A-18” in his make/model column and effortlessly set me straight that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. It was immediately obvious I had been both naive and unqualified. Ouch, roger that (and sorry). If we were doing it, we were going to do it the right way. Feeling sheepish, I thought it over. For three seconds. Of course it was a yes! Teach me!
Into the unknown I went, challenge accepted! As good mentors do, mine led the way and introduced me to the tighter community of local formation pilots. They greeted me with big smiles, handshakes, and some lighthearted sizing up, “Well, well, look what the cat dragged in…” Some of the pilots I already knew but had no idea they participated, and I laughed at myself for feeling like I was being let in on a secret society. We studied, briefed relentlessly, and rehearsed the standardized procedures which keep everyone safe. The procedures are established through organizations I’d never even heard of like FAST and FFI (look them up!). I found myself literally walking alongside grown adults who were nearly holding hands as we danced a slow step around an open ramp, pacing out and chanting a set list of maneuvers, and me, the clumsy soldier trying to match the parade. I was astonished and excited, so much to learn. Maybe this was too much to learn. Could I do it? I was nervous!
Here is a testing moment from my first learning experiences. On an early training flight, we were flying the wingman role, and I was practicing holding the proper position on the lead airplane. Want to join up and learn with me? Try this: do some clearing turns, and when the coast is clear, hold up your airplane-hands in classic fighter-pilot-story-time fashion. Move them into the most stereotypical formation you can imagine: one hand is leading, and the other wingman hand is slightly behind and slightly outboard of the lead. While I practiced holding this position, I began to inexplicably drift acute. Slide your wingman hand straight forward so that wingman thumb is nearly abeam the leading thumb. That’s acute. In only a moment, I slid too far forward in the formation. I was out of position, on the closing side, and things have rapidly become… very crowded.
I was having a blast five seconds ago, but suddenly the lead’s navigation light felt softball-sized (so were my eyeballs, I’m sure), and with a full-bodied clench I yanked a long length of throttle out from the panel. Immediately my mentor stopped me and calmly said, “No, no, keep it in. Uncomfortable is good, stay there. Keep us right where we are.”
Say again? I did not understand. My mind pleaded for me to do something, anything! We felt so close! But he had a plan when I didn’t. With the help of his well-trained eye, we intentionally practiced in this uncomfortable position so I would be comfortable when it happens again. So it wouldn’t surprise me anymore and I could react and correct back to the proper position more calmly. So I could keep my mind open for business, even when at the margins. The fighter pilot was sharing a weapon: How to stay cool under pressure.
Did that revelation sound familiar? Allow me to secure the connection. Have you ever had an instructor let you tread water in these gray areas like mine did? Of course, we all have! At some point in our training, we were barely holding onto the rudder of some new subject or maneuver and probably degraded all the way down to wide-eyed nods of understanding while internally experiencing the exact opposite.
It’s funny how we are all too happy to leave those hard-fought days behind, even when that heavy lifting is precisely what earned our flying abilities and keep the best in our group razor sharp. This obviously isn’t my own original thought; I’m confirming what many have said including EAA’s Steve Krog who just described it well in his June 2024 Sport Aviation article, “Fear Factor and Flying.” Krog and his cohort have it right. He prescribes healthy doses of no-judgement, well-guided, incremental training for gaining confidence and proficiency in weak and, yes, scary subjects. These lessons are inherently laced with some intentional, beneficial stress, and they’re just one of many techniques you can use to widen your tunnel vision when alarming moments arise in the real world. It is immensely effective at breaking the grip of that dreadful scenario that plays out menacingly in the back of your mind. Yes, that one, the one that quietly haunts you, “I sure hope that never happens to me.” What stops us from attacking that scenario with focused training? We should be shifting our mindset and skill set to “if this happens to me, I will be ready.” After all, we all have something hiding under our mental bed, and like Krog said, the time to face that monster is not when he’s caught you by surprise.
I believe one reason we drift into lazier flying habits is simply because the gray area between “challenged” and “totally overwhelmed” is a tough place to be flying an aircraft. The mental fear factor is real. It can be downright awful if it happens outside of a controlled environment and is still often uncomfortable within the training environment. It’s a place where we are not entirely sure we are still the one driving the situation or not. We pilots like things black and white, the landing gear up or down, not somewhere in the middle. And so, I think many of us, if not most, tend to just enjoy what skill we think we have rather than toss ourselves back into a gray area to find out.
It doesn’t have to be this way! Every time you accept a training mindset, you push your personal tolerance for stress a little further out. Steve Krog made a gentle call out to instructors, students, and yes, those of you who don’t call yourselves student pilots anymore. So here it is again, a little less gentle, for all of us. Grab your favorite instructor, or even seek out a specialized instructor, and beg him or her to turn up the heat. Don’t just ask for a tune-up to convince yourself that everything is “fine” and you’re “good for another year.” Give your instructor permission to make it more challenging than usual, not with the intent to just get beat up, but instead to work hard, discover, and learn. Ask for a specific objective that’s out of your ordinary and hold yourself to a high standard. Make it so hard you might be lousy or even fail, and if you do, that’s okay, it’s almost the point; you’ve discovered a way to be better. When you do succeed, the grin will be wider, and confidence will be restored. For those of you that are firmly proficient in teaching such things, help your students rise to their potential and find that confidence in a healthy way. Please extend a hand and share some wisdom, like my mentor has.
I wanted to raise the bar for myself, and it feels like I have. I hope to encourage you to experience that restoration for yourself. For me, learning to fly as part of a respectable formation has been really hard but I’ve come a long way. And I’d be lying if I said it was anything less than incredibly fun, too. Who says the challenge you pick can’t be an exhilarating one? Everyone has something to learn and improve.
Go earn some extra confidence.
Go learn something new.
Matt Ringen enjoys getting professional pilots back into the “fun” seat of GA. He helps build, maintain, fly, and instruct in experimental aircraft in Denver, Colorado. He is a major airline pilot, CFI, CFII, and MEI.