380 Max Trescott on Aviation Safety, Judgment, and Human Performance on Dr. Tony Kern’s podcast + ForeFlight News
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Would you like to know what really separates great pilots from the rest? Or why safety professionals often sound the alarm only to be ignored until it's too late? If you're interested in aviation safety, sound judgment, and the human side of flying, this episode is for you.

Hello.

Hello again and welcome to Aviation News Talk where we talk in general aviation. My name is Max Trescott. I've been flying for 50 years. I'm the author of several books and the 2008 National Flight Instructor of the Year. And my mission is to help you become the safest possible pilot.

Two weeks ago in episode 379, we talked with ferry pilot Sarah Rovner about the complexities behind ferrying aircraft across the country and around the world. So if you didn't hear that episode, you may want to check it out at aviationnewstalk.com slash 379. And if you're new to the show, welcome.

And if you would take a moment right now in whatever app that you're listening to, touch either the subscribe key or in Spotify or the Apple podcast app, the follow key, so that next week's episode is downloaded for free. And of course, if you feel that you get value from this show, please do your part to help support the show by going out now to aviationnewstalk.com support.

Also, whenever you buy a new headset, make it a Lightspeed headset. Then when you buy, Lightspeed will donate to support the show, but only if you go to the website by first going to this link that we've set up for you, which is aviationnewstalk.com slash Lightspeed. We'll get to Tony's podcast in a minute, but first let me share an important piece of news that came out this morning.

According to a press release from Boeing, they have entered into a definitive agreement to sell portions of its digital aviation solutions business, including Jeppesen, ForeFlight, AirData, and Oz Runways to Toma Bravo, a leading software investment firm. This all-cash transaction is valued at $10.55 billion. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2025.

And of course, we have no way to know what impact this sale will have on any of these businesses. But it's not unusual in the software world for prices to go up after an acquisition. So it's possible that could happen at some time in the future. And of course, we'll follow this story for you as it progresses.

Now let me tell you a little about Dr. Tony Kern. He's a former KC-135 and B-1 bomber pilot and instructor pilot. After retiring as a lieutenant colonel, he joined the U.S. Forest Service and later became the founding partner and CEO of Convergent Performance, a veteran-owned think tank. Dr. Kern is one of the world's leading authorities on human performance and error and has lectured on the subject around the globe. And now here's my appearance on Tony's Only Human podcast.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Only Human. Today, we've got a special guest. In fact, for the next three episodes, I think we're going to have special guests on. But today, my guest is Max Trescott, and he is reciprocating because I was on his podcast the other day. And unlike this one, which I think he's doing pretty well, he has a really, really powerful podcast. Max is a host of Aviation News Talk Podcast.

And it's rated quite often on Apple iTunes as the top aviation news podcast. So congratulations, Max. He's also a published author, a bunch of aviation related books, computer training courses, glass cockpit stuff used by flight schools around the world.

And in addition to that, I'm going to get the year wrong. Was it 2008? You were the National CFI Certified Flight Instructor of the Year. And let me tell you, there's a lot of flight instructors in America, and to be the top one in the country is really something. So in general, Max is a seasoned professional with a ton of insights on human performance, not just in aviation. So Max, welcome to Only Human.

Tony, it's great to be here. And I always kind of feel like we're totally simpatico. You and I have a lot of very common interests and a lot of shared experiences in our past. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we both come out of aviation. And I want to start with our new feature. And I've actually mimicked a lot of this off of watching your podcast, Max. So I want to attribute it all to you're the inspiration for all this.

But we do a little news to start, too. And this feature is called This Week in Safety Land. This Week in Safety Land. I've got a couple of stories that maybe we can chat about a little bit, and then we'll get into some deeper interview questions. But pretty much I think everybody has seen the tragic images of the helicopter. I think it was New York helicopters were operating there.

that went down on the Hudson River last year. Structural failure, it looks like. Killed not only the pilot, but found tourists from Spain. And with that kind of location, that kind of public attention, the investigators got on it really quick. And they, apparently, the news is this week that they went to the director of flight operations and

And we're asking him some questions. And he took the proactive step to agree to cease operations until they could figure out what went on. And I'll tell you, having been the director of a large aviation program that had some fatal crashes in my life, I did exactly the same thing. I said, until we know, let's keep people safe. Well, interestingly...

The plot thickens. His boss, the CEO, fired him and retracted the agreement with the FAA to stop flying, to which the FAA responded and issued an emergency order of suspension. So, you know, as I think about this, and, you know, there's a lot of things that are out there on this accident, but as I think about it, the DO, Director of Operations, said,

knows that a lot of different things could have caused this, right? Now, there was some stuff going around that the pilot radioed in and said he needed fuel. I promise you, he didn't run out of fuel, right? If he did, you guys can have half of my next month's Air Force retirement check. He was just saying, next time I land, I got to fuel up before we go out again. Helicopters don't fall apart in midair because they ran out of gas, right?

So the DO knows this and he's thinking something might be wrong. Maybe it's a part, maybe it's maintenance. Who knows? Maybe it's a type model type issue, but he errs on the side of safety. There could have been a dozen reasons why that DO agreed to stop operations. But as I think about it, there's probably only one reason that CEO fired him and ordered them back in the air. And that's the classic profit over safety.

So I'll just stop right there and ask you, Max, have you been following this and what are your thoughts on it?

Sure. Yeah, you've described exactly my understanding of the situation. And I think what you're describing, it's not unique to aviation. It's a classic struggle that you find in virtually all organizations. And it's one that people who are involved in safety are painfully aware of. And that is that there's a dynamic that occurs in organizations, and it's particularly important in high-risk organizations, and

that there's a job to be done. Let's call that the production, you know, stuff has to be shipped or whatever it is the organization produces their output. And then there are people within the organization who are working to analyze any possible risk factors, try and mitigate them, put up what we call defenses or barriers to prevent accidents from happening and

And usually those things are done in a way to not impede production. And yet, particularly in organizations that may be perhaps running on either thin profit margins or which the executives are under lots of pressure to give good results for the stock market.

there's a tendency for the top level management to say, nope, nope, let's just keep producing. You know, we don't have to worry about what these safety folks are worrying about. And so I think that's something that everybody has to be aware of in whatever organization they're in. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more to the old dynamic tension between production and protection. Right. And I've always said you can't have them pulling in

cardinal opposites, right? You can't have one pulling 360, one pulling 180. They have to be sort of in the same quadrant. They're always going to diverge a little bit, right? And I could play this out a little bit and not to jump on big corporations because I'm a Boeing person. But over the years, we've watched the production side of Boeing

um, gain executive leadership. Uh, you had to go down several layers to find an engineer, um, in the Boeing hierarchy as they went through some of their recent, uh, challenges. So, I mean, I think we see this play out, uh, over and over again and being a historian and a businessman, I'll go all the way back and say, I'll blame one guy. Uh, and that was, uh,

Jack Welsh, when he wrote the book, The GE Way, right? The GE Way is maximize profitability for the shareholder, right? That's why we're here. And in a way, I can see that. But in another way, what I see is that short-term profitability, because when you lose your credibility, when you lose your reputation, how many billions has that cost Boeing, even General Electric? You could say the same thing about it.

And I don't know how you recover if you're this small tourist helicopter operator in New York from this situation. Now, I do know how I've seen other organizations recover. They declare bankruptcy. They sell their helicopters. They come back under a new name and they're back in business. So, you know, I'd be really careful of who you fly with out there on those helicopter tours for a while until we figure this all out.

Well, I got another one. This one's a little weirder. I maybe even like it more. So, Max, did you track the earthquake that happened in San Diego last week, a couple days ago? 5.2 magnitude earthquake struck Southern California epicenter right down around San Diego. The coolest thing that came out of this was a video of elephants in the San Diego Zoo who long before anybody else could feel it,

Perked up, stood up, got into what they call an alert circle with all the adults on the outside, facing outside, all the baby elephants in the middle. And I'm telling you, when you look at the video on this, their heads are going left and right and left and right. They have formed a protective barrier around the most vulnerable of them.

And that got me to thinking, well, if you look carefully at the video, you'll see one elephant whose head's not swinging back and forth. And the one next to him reaches out and taps him with his trunk. Says, hey, put your head on a swivel, ma'am. I just thought it was so cool because, you know, they have an innate protective posture.

And they're extremely intelligent animals, as we all know. And I think, you know, that heightened awareness, we might say in aviation, they had great situational awareness, right? Something's going on. We're not sure what it is. Put the big dogs out on the line, get the small dogs.

most vulnerable inside, and let's see what we can do to protect them. And I just think that that is a great metaphor for aviation, where we see organizations a lot of times that are going through a lot of change, right? And in fact, I'm going out to visit one here next week. And

You know, they're really super concerned about how it's going to affect their organizational culture. And I plan on actually using this metaphor, where are your stalwarts, right? Where are your mentors? Where are the people that have been through some other changes that have happened in the past? Get those guys out there. Let them know that they're at the forefront to keep their heads on a swivel and that you can report anything back.

back into the system and let us know if there's emerging risks. So that might be another weird one to comment on, but I'll toss it over to you, see what your thoughts are on that one. Sure. Well, it kind of reminds me of my first career. I spent 25 years working

working for Hewlett Packard, and I was always flying for fun on the side. And after I left the company, or I should say after they laid me off, after 25 years, I'd been teaching flying on the side for a couple of years. So aviation became my second career. But HP pioneered, I think, the concept of the open door policy. Now, different companies would call it different kinds of things, but

What we learned early on was that if there were an issue that we uncovered and we didn't feel that our next level of management was paying proper attention to it, we were encouraged to go higher up in the organization and let people know, hey, there's an issue. And I think those kinds of cultures that have...

an open door type policy that's open to hearing things from the grassroots where the business really happens. You know, as you move higher up in the organization, it's really tough to know what's happening down on the shop floor. And so I think it's important to have a conduit from the frontline workers to

up to an additional level of management, not just their supervisors, but people who hire up who can kind of take the big picture in and go, oh, yeah, this actually might be an issue we should be thinking about. Yeah, this is where my lateral thinking cap comes on, and you're going to think this is a weird one, but it reminds me, there's a book I read called Among Whales.

W-H-A-L-E-S. And it's written by maybe the smartest man in the world that studies whales. I think his name's Roger Payne. Anyways, in that book, I've got this thing highlighted and triple starred and underlined. He's got a phrase that exudes the ultimate humility of somebody in an executive office toward the line. He says, any observant local knows more than any visiting scientist.

Always, no exceptions. How cool is that? So I did a Tony Corollary that said, any observant line worker knows more than any visiting manager. Always, no exceptions. So that idea that Hewlett Packard had of saying, not only do we have an open door policy, but we want you to use it, I think, to pull us all the way back in. Man, that's how you circle the elephants around the aisle when things start to change.

Well, okay, that's it for our safety news of the week, I guess. Hey, listen, so you said aviation's your second career. We heard how it started, but how do you go from there to having the world's leading aviation podcast being certified flight instructor nationally of the year and having the kind of impact you have now? Kind of give us a little slow of how all that happened to you.

Sure. And I think I'd start off by saying that I think anyone who's got a passion of some kind that they want to share, having a podcast is absolutely the right way to go. I'm doing that. You're doing that. I've been passionate about aviation safety for a long time, but I think it really crystallized when a good friend of mine passed away. I was very active when I was at HP in a group called...

Los Medicals Voladores, which I can't pronounce correctly, but it means flying doctors. And we would fly a GA aircraft, four and six place aircraft down to Mexico to take doctors and dentists and optometrists to underserved areas. And for me, it was very meaningful. I felt that I was going to

giving back and helping in all kinds of ways. And a good friend of mine, Dr. Marv Weinreb was 73. I was a real man. She was just the most selfless individual I'd ever met. And unfortunately he made a mistake when they were flying down there and it killed everybody in the airplane. So himself and five other people. And I was on the scene of the accident within 45 minutes. And it was just, you know, it's, it's terrible thing to visit an accident. Um, and, uh,

I ended up going to four funerals that week, which was tough because I knew four of those six people. But I think that kind of set me on the road to trying to make a difference in aviation safety. I just really struck as I study accidents today.

that there are so many different accidents that occur that are avoidable, inherently avoidable, if a pilot only knew some little critical piece of information. And so my goal really has been to help save some lives, kind of try and disseminate information to pilots that can be of help to them. So my philosophy when I'm

put out the podcast is really to make each episode just so rich in information that anyone from student pilot to expert airline pilot or military pilot can find at least one little nugget in there where they can walk away and go, Oh, there's something I didn't know, or there's something I should have remembered. I'll try and remember more in the future. There's something I can act upon. And so my focus really is trying to make a meaningful difference in, in pilots lives and,

and just share the stuff that I learn every day when I'm out there as a flight instructor. I started 10 years ago as a co-host of another podcast, the Airplane Geeks podcast, which had been running probably eight years prior to that. It's one of the longest running shows in

aviation podcast. But I found that I didn't have enough time on that show to talk about the things that I wanted to talk about. So two years later, I started Aviation News Talk, and it's focused strictly on general aviation, which is not the military. It's not the airliners that we sometimes talk about those things when there's a lesson that can be learned from them. So that's kind of where my passion came from and what I try to do, just make an impact on other people's lives.

Yeah, I mean, I think I have a similar story. My safety journey began in tragedy. And I think that happens for a lot of people. I wish that there will come a day when people get passionate about it without that kind of incident or tragedy to have to motivate it. One of the things that has always struck me about safety is it's boring, right? It's

It's not cool. Like I grew up in the Air Force, right? And if you got named a safety officer, it meant you had the last incident or you were somehow physically not able to fly for a while, right? It would typically come with a statement like, I hate to do this to you, but I'm going to have to make you the safety officer. I'll get you out of there as soon as I can, right? It was really seen as a back room and safety.

And I don't know how we cure that. How do we make safety as glamorous as tactics, as sexy as breaking records? Or I don't know. I don't know. You kind of get where I'm going with that. How do we elevate the stature of safety in the minds of young people who come to fly and they're not thinking about safety? They're thinking about money or they're thinking about prestige or they're thinking about

whatever it is, that love of the air. And then safety comes along with it, but how do we bring it more to the forefront? Yeah. How do we make safety cool? And maybe it's through the, you know, a side, side door. I think that professionalism is something that's absolutely core to safety and there's a lot to professionalism, but essentially I think,

Doing your job well is kind of cool. And I think if we can inspire people to be the absolute best they can be at their particular job, then safety gets dragged along with that automatically because you can't be the best at your job as a pilot or any other job, whether it's a nuclear control plant operator or any other high risk type of operation.

you want to be the absolute best that you can be in your field. You want to take pride in being an expert. You want to take pride in knowing all the little details or being curious to find out all the little details. And I think if people kind of embrace the concept of professionalism and being the absolute best person they can be in their particular job and probably also in other aspects of their life, that's probably going to drag safety along with that.

So I love that. And two things come to mind as you were talking. The first one is, you know, we've got Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? And right at the bottom of it says survival. Maybe we need a professional pilot's hierarchy of growth or professionalism where safety sits at the bottom and then you kind of climb that ladder. But that's not the thing that's swung at me. This is where we're going to get to know each other a little better here. Have you ever seen the movie Fight Club?

Okay, so Fight Club was a movie with Brad Pitt and I think Edward Norton back, I don't know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. I don't know. It was a long time ago. But it's a cult classic. And there's the first rule of Fight Club.

Fight club basically is this group or a bunch of down on their luck guys meeting a back alley, beat the crap out of each other for entertainment, no money. It's like UFC before UFC. But the first rule of fight club was don't talk about fight club. So maybe that's the first rule of safety. Don't talk about safety. Talk about professionalism. Talk about expertise. Talk about what it means to be a

you know, a true professional and elite in our industry and bringing it to that side door. I really like that insight, Max. Thank you. I'll ask you another question or two here about safety, and then maybe we can move on to some other things. But, you know, it seems to me at least, I get probably the same newsletters that you get, seems like we're seeing more and more and more incidents and accidents, certainly more of them getting reported.

And I know a lot of the general aviation ones I never hear about, but you probably hear more about. Is that true or is the media just seeing more of it? And if it is true, what can be done about it?

Yeah. So I think let's divide it into two different categories here. Let's talk about airliner safety, which is probably what most people are most concerned about. You are much more likely to die in the car driving to the airport than you are on an airliner. You are much more likely to die in your own home. Yeah.

you are on an airliner. So I think what hasn't really changed is that airliner type aviation is the safest vehicular transportation mode in the world, shy of cable cars, which I think, you know, trams, I think have a slightly better record, but most of us don't take trams up the ski slopes to work. So if you're flying in the airlines, you are absolutely safe. Now, if you're

in a general aviation airplane. So I'm not flying in the military, not flying in the airlines. Everything else is general aviation. There it's a very different world. And there we still have lots of accidents. And that's what I focus on most of the time in aviation news talk is about these kinds of accidents.

To me, it feels like there are more of these kinds of accidents. And I'll tell you why. I keep seeing all kinds of business jet excursions. Just to give you a wild example, HondaJet, which makes a business jet seats, I don't know, seven, eight people, something like that. And there are probably no more than 400 of them in the fleet.

Three of them in a six-day period in different parts of the world went off the runway. You just got to look at that and go, wow, that's a lot of runway excursions for- That's a trend. Yeah, exactly. And in general, the biggest problem for business jets is people running off the end of the runway or running off the side of the runway. To me, that looks like it's getting worse.

And yet there's a story in USA Today, the newspaper, which you can also find online. And I just, it's coincidence that I ran across this this morning before we talk, but it says overall accidents are down and they, you know, pull out the numbers for the NTSB and they show you each month this year compared to last year. Now, what they're talking about is total accidents, accidents,

Total accidents doesn't tell the whole story because what we really care about as safety professionals is what is the accident rate? And that's usually characterized in terms of accidents per 100,000 hours flown. So we know that the total number of accidents is down, even though it doesn't seem like that. What we don't know is, is the rate down?

And to calculate that, we need to know how many hours are being flown. The FAA does surveys to come up with those numbers, but they're always at least a year or more behind. So, yeah, it's possible the media is just giving accidents more coverage. But to me, it feels like there's still a ton of accidents out there in the GA world. Yeah, I agree with you. And I think there's a lot of factors going on. And certainly...

You're right that aviation is, especially commercial aviation, part 121, the safest mode of transportation in the world. I did read somewhere that high-speed trains were right up there, but there's not very many of them.

Here's the point I always like to make when somebody says that, though. We didn't get to be that safe by resting on our laurels because we were that safe, right? We got to be that safe because people looked under every rock, right, and decided what needed to be trained and what we could turn over to automation. All of those issues continue on right now. And

You know, I'm a historian, so every historian thinks he's a futurist. And so as I look into the future, I try to figure out, you know, what's going to be the next trend. You know, 15 years ago, it was pretty easy to see that there was going to— the aviation community, professional aviation community, was very top-heavy for a variety of reasons. They changed the age out of the flight from 60 to 65.

We had all the furloughs in 2008 and the fuel crisis and COVID and all that. All the young people went away. All the old people stayed. And all of a sudden, we have this huge delta, and we're flooding it with young millennials and now Gen Zers. And so that was easy to see that that was going to be some challenges. And we've seen those challenges manifest themselves gradually.

I always like to say the only time you get a bad pilot is when you need one really bad. And right now we need them really bad. And I'm not saying that we're getting inferior people, but I'm saying we need to realize that standards are standards and they need to be met.

But looking into the future now, I'm not so sure where the big challenges of tomorrow are going to be. So I wanted to ask you that question. What are the safety issues, the big challenges of tomorrow that we have to solve?

Yeah, and I just want to mention real briefly two of the highest profile accidents, the midair collision over the Hudson River and the crash in Toronto with a Delta jet that rolled over on its side and ended up upside down. Both of those were flown by relatively low time pilots. Interestingly, in Toronto, that pilot had fewer than 1500 hours, which we usually think of as the normal minimum for getting an ATP certificate, though there are ways to get them with fewer hours.

So, and the NTSB says in general that people with fewer hours and type in an aircraft are more likely to have an accident. So, yeah, I think this turnover that we're having a lot of new folks coming in, hate to say it, new folks, we're not picking on you, but if you have less experience, you generally have higher accident rates.

But safety issues with tomorrow, I like, by the way, that you're always looking for trends. And I think that's an important way to go. In terms of safety issues, I think they're going to continue to be the same as they are today. And that is, I used to think incorrectly that if one worked really hard on safety, they could figure out all the problems, get to some static situation.

position where everything was now perfectly safe. And what I've realized over time, especially as I've taken more courses and studied safety is I realize that's absolutely false. One of the big challenges is that these diet, these environments are dynamic. The things are constantly changing. So even if you think, Hey, we got our organization perfectly set up, man, we got this safety thing nailed. We can now focus on everything else.

you're wrong. Absolutely wrong. Because things change. One of the big precursors of accidents is a change in the process or a change in the organization, which is why some organizations will do a safety analysis of proposed changes before they're implemented to just try and figure out what are the pitfalls in this seemingly minor change. Oh, well, it might lead to, you know, something else. And so we can see a lot of accidents happening.

Where when you trace back, you look at it and go, oh, look at this change that happened, you know, 10 days before, either in the environment or the processes of the personnel or something like that. I actually pulled up this quote. I use this in a article that I wrote for Flying Magazine. I've started writing a monthly column for Flying Magazine.

And I was quoting safety expert Todd Conklin, who comes out of the nuclear power industry, and he has a book called Pre-Accident Investigations. And he said that aviation accidents are the unexpected combination of normal aviation variability.

So I think it's pretty easy for us to say, wow, you know, the airlines, they're perfectly safe. Now, if we keep thinking that we're going to be in trouble because things are constantly changing, which is why safety professionals will always have a job. Yeah, I agree with you. I think.

You know, we've seen the mishap rates go down, but the percentage of mishaps by human error remain somewhere between 70% in 121 operations, and I've seen as high as 85% in general aviation. Give or take 5% or 10% in either direction for the year you're in. So the more things change, the more they—I don't mean to sound traitor, but the more they remain the same, people don't adjust well to change.

And so we're going to maybe be able to automate more and more things. I think there's a lot of discussion right now how artificial intelligence is going to change things. And I think there's some huge potential there. I'm a big AI fan, but I'm mindful that as we increase efficiencies through things like artificial intelligence, I'll use a case study of anti-skid brakes.

When ABS and escape brake systems came out, everybody thought rear-end collisions were going to go away. What happened was people just drove closer to the bumper and faster. It became an efficiency tool, not a safety tool. And I think when you're going to be able to get your training just in time, just enough,

tailored to what you know and who you are and all that, that's going to be great for efficiency, but it's not going to really tackle the core problems that you're talking about there. And I have this, I have this nightmare vision, or maybe it's a heavenly vision, I don't know, of Starlink suddenly becoming the air traffic controllers of the world, right? And, you know, if you, if

Sean Duffy went to Elon Musk tomorrow and said, do you think you could program a Starlink constellation that would automate air traffic control all the way down to when they're parked in the chocks? Elon would say, give me a year. And he'd go after that, right? And you know what the industry would do? They'd move planes so close together that they could make more money with it. So I think at the end of the day, my view of the future is that we're going to see some incredible breakthroughs.

in technologies and training and composite materials and all these wonderful things.

But they're not going to dramatically improve the safety because we're going to take advantage of them. Back to that thing we started with, right? Protection versus production. They'll be used as, well, we can cram more airplanes together. We can qualify an aviator with less time. You know, when I went to Air Force pilot training, I got about 200 hours of flight time. My son got a little bit.

maybe 75% of that. And now when he went into the C-17 world and even now flying MD-11s for UPS, they hardly ever get into the airplane until it's checkride. It's all simulation. And the instruction and the scenarios are now all computer generated and modeled. So

I think you're exactly right. People don't handle that kind of change very well. And as long as it's human at the operator end of it, we're going to continue to see those kinds of mistakes, which should keep our podcast going, right?

I think what you're talking about is human nature, by the way. I think it's absolutely human nature for us to, you know, hey, now we got airbags. So now we can go a little faster because they're going to protect me if I have an accident. So yes, that part of human nature, I don't ever, I don't ever see change. It's great to have the efficiencies. People are just going to try and use them to get a little bit more work done in the day, drive a little faster. And, you know, safety is not going to change that much. So yeah, big issue. Yeah.

It's interesting you mentioned that. My wife just bought a Land Rover Defender. And for the first time in my life, I'm in a car with more airbags than cylinders. But it makes you feel safe, right? Absolutely. That's good. So we're coming down the homestretch here, Max. We usually try to wrap this up after a half hour or so, and I think we could probably talk for the rest of the day. But

Looking back, looking forward, what do you see as the characteristics of a great aviator? Wow. So several things. Judgment. I always say I can teach a monkey how to fly, but that it's the judgment that really makes the pilot. And so I think if you talk about the 80% of human error in aviation, a lot of that is just poor judgment.

poor judgment. And so, yeah, sound judgment, I think all the time is, is important. Curiosity. I think a great aviator is constantly learning because as we talked about, it's a dynamic environment. We always get surprises, whether it's the weather or whether the automation doesn't work the way we thought it was going to be work. So, you know, I think it's important for people to be curious and to seek out, you know, knowledge, discipline and consistency and,

I heard someone say once that the best pilots are boring. I remember taking a teenager for a flight for a coworker and I said, how'd you like it? And he goes, well, it was kind of boring. And I thought I did my job. So yeah, not that the flights aren't fun, but I think good pilots who are very disciplined about following procedures, you know, kind of make it look easy, but they're doing that by following the processes all the time.

You mentioned situational awareness. I think that is critical. I'm constantly, when I'm flying, building a three-dimensional map of all the airplanes in the sky around me. And I'm also thinking about what the controller is trying to accomplish because he may say something and 95% of the time, I know why he's told somebody to do something. Oh, he's trying to accomplish this.

So I think that kind of awareness that goes beyond just where am I and what have I been told to do, but kind of being fully aware of the entire environment all around you and what all the other airplanes are trying to do and what the controller is trying to do. That's important. And then the last one, this is the hardest one, I think, for accomplished pilots is.

And that's humility. You know, aviation just doesn't tolerate arrogance for very long. I think we need a willingness to admit our mistakes, learn from those mistakes, learn from others, and just don't assume that any of us are invincible because the sky has just an incredible way of humbling us when we're overconfident. So I think that's kind of the formula for a good pilot.

Yeah, I love those. And I'll come back to one particular one I love the most. But I'm mindful of this idea of humility because we see it so often. And it's not just in pilots. It's in doctors. It's in firefighters. It's in doctors.

light infantry operations, all these things that we deal with here in high-risk industries, I call it the expert's curse. And that's that point where you get to where I've seen everything before, right? And you begin to pattern match when it's not appropriate. There's a great book out there called Sources of Power by Gary Klein. He was an Army psychiatrist, psychologist,

And he talks about how experts learn to feel things, kind of like those elephants must have felt the first tremor out there in San Diego, and how they make good decisions based on that. But he never explored the dark side of that. And that is how when those patterns don't match, it can lead you into places where I don't care how many hours you have, you're a novice now because you just put yourself in a situation you've never been in before.

But I want to go back to one of the attributes you said that I haven't really heard a lot of other people talk about and I just love. And that's curiosity. Because in a world that we operate in, in aviation, fly from point A to point B, follow the procedures, make sure you get the right fuel, fill out your logbook. It's boring, right? What's there to be curious about?

And I think what you're hinting at is that we're always curious about that next level of performance that we can make, right? We're curious about why we missed something on that flight or we're curious about how someone else does it. And that sounded so much better. And that radio call was so much more well-timed than the one I made where I stepped on another guy. You know, that kind of thing where you're constantly investigating what

will take you, in my humble opinion, well above the bar of mere compliance into levels of professionalism that only those that are curious can know. So I hadn't really thought about it that way, but I appreciate that curiosity. That's on my list now for sure. Well, Max, we're kind of running down the home stretch here, but I want to give the last word to you. Anything else you'd like to offer to our audience out here of people that are trying to close the gap between who they are and who they might be?

Well, that's exactly what I want to say. We've talked about aviation as a metaphor for human performance. And yet virtually everything we've talked about, I think, applies to many, many other aspects of life. And it applies to many, many, many different industries. And the only thing I also throw out is we've talked about aviation in a lot of the negative terms previously.

But I want people to understand it is so much fun to learn to fly. If you've thought about it, definitely consider doing it. And don't wait till you have the time or you have all the money because, you know, at that point you may not be, you know, fit to fly if you're starting it too late in life.

But also keep your mind active and engaged. Two years ago at age 66, I became a helicopter pilot just because I wanted to learn something new. And that has just been a phenomenal source of insight to me as well as joy. So I would say anybody who's interested in aviation, come on over to Aviation News Talk podcast because we talk about everything aviation and try to have a fun time doing it while we're also talking about a little bit of the darker side that we've talked about today.

Yeah, and I agree with you there, man. If you're out there and you're thinking about, well, you know, how much would it cost me to get a pilot's license and all that stuff? It's kind of like golf. If you ever get into it, it's going to cost you a lot of money or buying boats or back in my day, stereo equipment. Go take that dollar ride at your local airport.

Go up with a flight instructor. See what it's all about. If it bites you, you're going to realign your priorities. It may take you longer than others. There's a lot of relatively inexpensive ways to learn to fly out there, and it changes the whole world. What did C. Nexperi say? Once you have gone aloft, you'll never see the world the same as people who have not. So...

Well, Max, thanks so much for joining us today. It's been a great discussion and we're going to wrap this thing up. We come out every Tuesday at nine o'clock Eastern daylight time. Now we're going to have a continuing series of guests. We're going to talk about a lot of different things coming up with some CEOs of space companies and,

people that are down in the thick of it in business aviation, people that maybe even we're going to talk to somebody who invented a flying car and a lot of more interesting things. But I don't think we'll ever have a wiser or more insightful guest than we had here today. So thanks, Max. I appreciate it. For all of you out there, keep doing what you're doing, getting better every day with the resources at hand. And we'll see you soon.

And my thanks to Dr. Tony Kern for having me on his Only Human podcast. You can check it out on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, there are links to it in the show notes.

And just a reminder that I love hearing from you and I read many of your emails on the show. If you'd like to send me a message, just go out to aviationnewstalk.com, click on contact at the top of the page. That's absolutely the best way to send me a message. And of course, I also want to thank everyone who supports the show in one of the following ways. We love it when you join the club and sign up at aviationnewstalk.com slash support to

To support the show financially, you can also do that at aviationnewstalk.com slash PayPal. We also love it when you leave a five-star review on whatever app that you're listening to us on now. And of course, if you're in the market for a headset, please consider buying a Lightspeed headset and using one of the links in our show notes, because if you use those links, they will donate to help support the show. So until next time, fly safely, have fun, and keep the blue side up. And remember that you can always go around. Go around.

Coming down. Your side. Baby sliding upside down. You can always.