The dolphin trainer at the aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut says the most difficult trick to get a dolphin to do is to jump through a hula hoop. Why? Dolphins are air-breathing mammals, and, they can’t swim backwards. If a dolphin is encircled in a tight space, it will drown. It’s brain is genetically wired to tell it never to be completely encircled by anything. Even a harmless hula hoop violates the genetic coding in a dolphin.
Like the dolphin, we – too – perhaps by nature – want to have a way out. We look at flying like the dolphin looks at a hula hoop. With flying, though it looks visually like there is no way out, there is an engineering way out.
Since you can’t see the engineering ways out, you need to imagine them. You need to know, as a pilot knows – that for everything that we know of that could ever go wrong, there is a backup system, and a backup for that. Though we don’t have a way out that you can see with your eye, there is always a way out you can see in your mind’s eye. Picture the pilot’s manual.
We have been flying airplanes for over one hundred years. Whenever there has been an accident, the cause has been investigated, and something has been done to make sure that can’t happen again.
That means, for something to go wrong these days, it has to be something that hasn’t happened in one hundred years of aviation. That’s why accidents are so incredibly rare. It is because we have ENGINEERING ways out. All the engineering ways out are in the manual.
Picture this. In a car, if someone comes at you, you turn the wheel. In an airplane, if something goes wrong, you turn to the manual. Anything that can go wrong is in the manual.
Pilots feel in control, not just because they have the wheel in their hands, but because they have a way out for everything that anyone can foresee ever going wrong.
For the above reasons, I am very confident flying, and you can be as well. In addition, I have found the teachings in the Panic Away program have also been very successful.
