Stalling Your Mind
We are all familiar with the idea that we can easily be a complete idiot in the air. I've done some really dumb things, and made some stupid mistakes. And you wouldn't believe some of the errors I've seen when coaching perfectly competent pilots. Even this week my student tried to take off with the canopy unlocked, and he couldn't believe what he'd done when I brought it to his attention. And we know that a surprising number of smart pilots have made incredibly poor decisions, and as a result have crashed their perfectly serviceable aircraft. What on earth is going on here? The heart of the problem is that before they crash their aircraft they have crashed their minds. Let me explain...
It's useful to start with an analogy. Imagine how a wing produces lift. A small angle of attack, a small amount of lift. Increase the angle of attack, more lift is produced. Still, more angle and still more lift, until...at some point, the airflow can't get around the wing cleanly, and..the wing stalls. More angle of attack and less lift is produced. And as you know, around the stall, interesting things start to happen, all the way from a little nose drop up to an instant rapid flick to inverted followed by a spin.
What has this got to do with your mind? Unfortunately, our information processing system performs in a similar fashion. Pay no attention to the task and it's like flying with zero angle of attack: no lift. Your mind isn't working, so you won't notice the canopy is unlocked, the brakes are still open, or worse that you haven't connected your elevator...or a host of other small but incredibly hazardous errors that are the result of inattention. This is easy to counter if you can be bothered. Pay attention to the task, follow learned procedures, work your mind a little, and you get results. Observation, decision, action. You can fly the aircraft, look out, climb, decide where to go for the next thermal, and so on. Now load your mind up some more - maybe miss a couple of climbs and get a bit low - and you have to work harder to stay airborne and make progress. But this is fun: you're working hard and you're "in the zone".
Now wind up the stress factor - "the damn thermal isn't working and I'm drifting away from the good fieldss and there's nowhere else to climb and nothing underneath I can land in". You are working even harder, trying to solve problems that maybe can't be solved at all...and the solutions won't come.
The brain isn't a computer, it's wetware, running on both electrical and chemical systems. When you become stressed like this your biochemical pathways change - you might call this "a shot of adrenaline". A biochemist would call it by a different name but the detail doesn't matter: the result is that when you start to get into difficulties when you repeatedly fail at a task or the world insists on delivering bad outcomes then your body chemistry changes. Eventually, this triggers what has been called the "fight or flight" response, or "the Amygdala hijack". Look it up, it's well-understood and documented. *
When your system is flooded with stress hormones (I'm thinking cortisol, but don't quote me) then your body becomes tense. You grip the stick, push on both rudder pedals at once and stop looking up and around. Familiar? Your hearing starts to shut down - perhaps you don't hear that undercarriage warning or your teammate trying to talk to you on the radio. Your peripheral vision deteriorates - you don't see the other glider climbing over there showing you the way out of this tight corner. You cease to make sensible decisions - you let yourself drift away from that good area of outlanding paddocks. And when you suddenly realise that you have to land right now!, and it looks like you're going to stick the glider in the wrong place and as you tighten up the final turn to change the approach path the wing drops the nose goes down and you are looking straight up at the ground and you snatch the stick back and...
As I said before, interesting things happen.
How can you stop this sort of thing from happening to you? Because it can, you know. The first step is to take in what I'm saying and to believe that you are personally in the firing line. It really can happen to you! This is biochemistry, not a personal lack of moral fibre. You wouldn't expect to be able to run around the airfield without getting out of breath: training helps you to run farther and faster but eventually, you'll have to stop, whether it's after 500 yards or five miles, In the same way, you can train to become a top performing pilot but if you become overstressed in the air by problems piling up one after the other your body chemistry will eventually shut down the cognitive processes and turn on the "fight or flight" response. You might simply make poor decisions: you might freeze, panic, pull the stick back, spin the glider, and crash.
This is all a bit depressing. What's the answer? Well, just as you can learn how to fly the glider in tight slow turns without stalling, you can learn to work hard at observation and decision-making in the air and stay "in the zone", flying at a high-performance level without falling into the fight or flight response: without crashing your mind.
In the next newsletter, I'll lay out a few key ideas that you can use to both improve your cross-country performance and at the same time be a safer pilot. If you want to jump ahead and get the information now I've been through this subject in detail in Soaring Engine volume three.
Talk soon
G
* Look up "the Dodson - Yerkes" curve, otherwise known as the "Performance / Arousal curve."
Banner photo by Sean Franke
G Dale is the popular author of The Soaring Engine book series. He follows the endless summer, working for the British Gliding Association, The Gliding Association of New Zealand, and the Gliding Federation of Australia, always teaching cross country flying. He’s also flown and worked at various gliding clubs around the world: at Nympsfield as Chief flying instructor, at Booker again as CFI, at Lasham as DCFI and soaring coach, and at Glide Omarama as head coach, with visits to Minden, Serres, Takikkawa, Narromine, Lake Keepit, and many other clubs as a peripatetic soaring instructor and mountain flying coach.
