Most people don’t associate aviation and oral traditions. After all, aviation is very much about technology and machinery, especially once you start flying airliners and other jets or “just” multi-engine aircraft. And since powered, controlled flight began in 1903, that’s well after oral-traditions and oral history were important.
Most people would be in for a bit of a surprise.
You learn what the FAA and laws of physics require in order to safely operate an aircraft. And then you absorb, if you are fortunate, the tips, subtleties, tricks, and horrible warnings from other pilots. Some are told as stories, some arrive while watching someone else, or looking at aircraft on the ramp, but all are transmitted from pilot to pilot through speech, not printed text.
How do you land a twin-engine plane in a screaming cross wind, especially one with relatively low-mounted wings? For pistons and some turbo-props, you can use differential power, tapping the “pull power” of one engine to help hold the plane straight so you don’t have to lower the up-wind wing so much. I learned this from men who had flown DC-3s, Beech 18s, and other tail-wheel twins. It also works for nose-wheel planes. I have never seen it mentioned in books or magazine articles, and when I quiz younger pilots, they’ve not heard of the skill. Purely oral-tradition today.
Other information is explained in order to keep the new pilot from learning something the hard way. There are certain high-performance planes that are less tolerant in “slow flight” than are others. My commercial instructor walked me around one or two that were visiting Little Muni Field and explained what the quirks were, why, and the warning signs. I’d never get a chance to try slow flight in that kind of plane at Little Muni, but I now had information that served me very well at a later point in time.
[This was the same instructor who obtained permission for me to take a certain twin up (with said instructor) several thousand feet higher than we usually practiced and see exactly why the plane had a nasty reputation. We knew what it would do, and the plane did it. We were prepared and even so, we needed several thousand feet of elevation to recover into level flight. The plane provided plenty of warning, if you paid attention.]
There were other things, traditions, horror stories, truly useful business advice (“Always carry enough cash or in credit cards to be able to tell the boss to go to H-ll and still get home”), information about airports that was not found in the official airport guide (“When the wind is out of the west, there’s a lot of turbulence starting 500 feet down the runway,” especially when you are in small, a cloth-covered tail-wheel airplane), food warnings, (“Don’t get the pancakes. Burgers are great, pork-chops to die for, but the cook just cannot make a fluffy pancake to save her life”), social info (“They charge for coffee, the bastages”) and other important things.
Something I’ve wondered about is how much longer this will continue. As more and more pilots come from dedicated aviation schools and programs like University of North Dakota or American Flyers, and younger instructors who have never known CFIs who are not “school” CFIs, will we lose some of the tricks and techniques the third and fourth generation pilots learned the hard way and passed to 6th and 7th generation flyers like me? How much of the aviation culture is disappearing as the WWII and Baby Boom pilots age out?
*CFI stands for Certified Flight Instructor. They come in various flavors depending on how much training they had in what aircraft.
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Cat Rotator's Quarterly 
When I was learning to fly some of the best times were sitting in the “club house” soaking up the stories from the CFI’s (both retired RCAF pilots) and other older pilots of the same vintage. Heard all sorts of great stories about all sorts of different aircraft. Mistakes made by other students they had experienced and what not to do.
I miss flying and doubt I will ever again. At least I had that experience.
That’s a sad thought. And a warning that, as in many skilled professions, the average age of the practitioners is steadily increasing. A lot of engineering knowledge seems to be slowly disappearing as well. Once upon a time, engineers went to see practical demonstrations of new materials, with a test to failure.
O/T – Announcing the newest team in professional baseball, the Rocket City Trash Pandas! Yes, it’s real. Yes, their logos are awesome.
They must have adapted the NASA cargo shuttle patch – yep. It’s so them, gotta love the redneck attitude; now, if only Doc Travis would be a minority owner. “So we beat them by only 23 runs? Well, boo frackin’ hoo!”
McChuck’s cautionary tale applies there also. It’s turning into model and test for success; not test to failure, or test to the roll-off changes in operating characteristic curve. If you don’t learn from failure or from degraded response, you’re not learning. When bad things then happen in real life, there’s no recourse but a more expensive program to test to fail, analyze, and fix with reality in mind. Really … tired … of that.
Also, if you can’t recognize that degraded response, you might not react appropriately, when – as a hypothetical – you’re putting up a new bridge and it starts to fail.
I spent 30 years with IBM. So much of the job was experience. Problem determination is an art not a science. So much of what I ran into was related to something I had seen before. But, the company did not want to pay us dinosaurs. So, we retired, but the wisdom and customer experience was lost. If the new guys can’t learn from the old guys, then they have to make their own mistakes, over and over again,
This brings to mind the adage that the School Solution is not, in many cases, the solution that works. A lot of experience, hospital time, and lives purchased that dearly-bought lore on the tech side. The local customs and wind behaviors have to be learned from the “no kidding, I (or my CGI) was there.” Engineering works the same way. None of the books tell you why to use specific pipe diameters (rounding up( in schedule 40 or 80, until you see or hear the horror stories of using too small a size. Then there’s the maintenance chief who laughs hysterically at all the OT from trades hand-fitting nonstandard pipe, and tells the newbie the real price of the exact solution – to come out of *your* paycheck, newbie.
Makes me thankful for the experts who can look at a situation first, and ask the right questions or prepare for the correct set of bad conditions.
Yes, I agree – one of my professors in college said that real engineering was like street fighting; you do whatever works, and you don’t learn it in any school. He also said that for engineers, college teaches you how to learn so that when you’re on the job you can learn what is needed there.
I’ve worked with guys that insisted they needed a specific (aviation spec) bolt and wouldn’t listen to me explaining to them that just because you could spec the bolt from a standard didn’t mean anybody actually made the bolt; he steadfastly refused to find an alternate that actually existed.
Ran into something like that. I need to test an alloy found in old hardware. The alloy is no longer commercially available, even though a specification exists for it. I will never get it in time for the test, so now I’m working with materials experts to decide what alloy I’m really going to use, that will give me a ‘good enough’ answer for the one I want.
Regarding your guys and the aviation-grade bolts, some folks just refuse to learn. Sometimes right up until their bosses refuse to pay them.
Back when DadRed was training to be a chemical engineer, he was involved in the opening of a plant in [redacted]. Just before they started with small-batch processing test-runs, one of the senior guys said, “Hold up, we need to check all the valves. I heard what happened at [other older plant.]”
“But, delay, money, labor, trust us, money!”
All the valves. Every single one involved in the manufacturing process? Installed backwards despite the labels on them. Every. Single. One.
Think of ‘school solution’ as the lowest common denominator, the basics that can be taught to all. As an instructor I covered what was applicable to all. I didn’t have the time to teach about the idiosyncrasies of Ft Hood, Ft Riley, Ft Stewart, Grafenwohr, etc. You got that in the after class bull sessions or schmoozing at the NCO club.
c4c
There is a reason a Professional Engineer’s License requires 5 years of engineering experience in addition to a degree and an exam. Experience is always the best teacher, unfortunately she can be an unforgiving bitch and at times lethal. I can’t count the number of times i’ve taken a bright young newly minted engineer under my wing (so to speak) to impart knowledge they don’t or won’t teach in school. Being a bit of a bastard, I’ve let them make embarrassing, but non-serious mistakes, both for my amusement as well as their education. Hey I learned that way too.
I think our current society has placed too much emphasis on formal education, and is losing the necessity to foster apprentices. For those in the professions or trades, tell stories (if practicable over beer), they’re fun and for those that listen, educational.
Engineers need the school to get the fundamentals of math, physics, experimentation, and design so they can actually learn something useful in their jobs. Without the education, the learning will almost fall on deaf ears.
When I was first learning the oral tradition rules-of-thumb, here’s-what-you-can-do or never-do-this gouge sometimes came from folks who flew taildraggers with old avionics – stories included how much to correct your course when flying one of the old A-N radio range navigation beacons (so-called because if you were off the “beam” in one direction you’d hear a morse A, while in the other you’d hear a morse N, and if you were “on the beam” the A and the N would merge together into a continuous tone).
I imagine the stories future generations of pilots will get are how to not chase the needle on an ILS (“what needle?”), the different ways to fly a DME arc, how to listen to world series games over ADF receivers, or about the various non-approved “bootleg” approaches, complete with photocopied hand-drawn approach plates, that were worked out to use commercial AM station transmitter locations to get in when the official approaches either would send you to hither and yon or not let you get in at all.
It wasn’t the World Series. It was the Family Radio Rosary. Yes, the weather was that bad. Yes, it was a stronger, more reliable signal than [home base ADF].
Saw the same thing in the military… sigh… ‘New’ SMEs that had never done the things we did with the airplanes, and didn’t know the tips/tricks, and refused to take our ‘notes’, because they weren’t “approved”… One of the reasons I quit flying as Special Crew… sigh
Those who love flying will love Flight of Passage by Rinker Buck. Its about two teen brothers who fly a rebuilt Piper Cub across the U.S. in 1967. Much of their success they credit to the advice of experienced pilots they met along the way, confirming the point this article makes. Here’s the description from Goodreads:
Writer Rinker Buck looks back more than 30 years to a summer when he and his brother, at ages 15 and 17 respectively, became the youngest duo to fly across America, from New Jersey to California. Having grown up in an aviation family, the two boys bought an old Piper Cub, restored it themselves, and set out on the grand journey. Buck is a great storyteller, and once you get airborne with the boys you find yourself absorbed in a story of adventure and family drama. And Flight of Passage is also an affecting look back to the summer of 1966, when the times seemed much less cynical and adventures much more enjoyable.
About 20 years ago I went on a bicycle trip, and one of the other bikers was an 80 year old retired Navy pilot. He was in amazing shape. We were talking one night, and he told me his favorite thing was sitting with other pilots talking about flying.
Sometimes hard-earned knowledge is codified. I was reminded of the RAF’s WWII Pilot Officer Prune, the non-existent pilot who was awarded the Iron Cross by the Nazis.
At age 70 I can (thankfully) look back on an irregular life in flying and remember that I was schooled by 2 WW ll pilots….one a crusty Marine Corsair pilot who beat me around a beacon near Norfolk, VA trying to show me the magic of the NDB with 20 kt. winds aloft….the other earlier…Bill Mowry…took be into an unlight grass strip at night with his ‘home-made” approach. Would that I could sit by their knees tonight and just listen.
When I was in Navy flight training long ago, some of my instructors were Vietnam vets who had dodged missiles over Hanoi & Haiphong. They knew a few things that weren’t in any books.
Yes, the oral tradition is important for communicating knowledge.
In many ways, it’s also a way of maintaining an “in-crowd” feeling. You belong once you’ve sat and listened to a few “old-timers”. (Really listened and absorbed, not just heard and dismissed.) With the advantage that it’s a much lower barrier to entry than regulations. (Maybe the amount of regulations helps create a false sense of that, and so the practitioners feel like the less formal method is unnecessary?)
One of the sayings I learned in flying was that every pilot has two bags on their belt when they start. One is full of luck, and the other is full of experience. When you start out, the luck bag is full, and the experience bag is empty. You put a bit into the experience bag as you learn and practice flying. Occasionally you have to pull something out of the luck bag to make it down safely. The smart pilot doesn’t throw that bit away when it’s all over, but puts it into the experience bag. Because it’s impossible to replenish the luck bag. Some day it will all be gone, and the only thing you’ll have is in the experience bag.
– That oral tradition is like a +5 modifier for reaching into the experience bag, because that old guy shared his story of using the luck bag.
@Paladin – I miss it too. Though I have the advantage of working with a lot of former flyers, and we can still sit around and throw the bull. It’s fun watching the look on a young Lieutenant’s or Captain’s face when we tell stories. Because the age difference is enough they’ve never known a time when there weren’t glass cockpits and cell phones and the internet.
GA is now owned by China. Who cares about America’s oral traditions? Aided by the Bush and Obama regimes, your manufacturers sold the traditions, and more importantly, your history to China. Who won the American Collier Trophy this year? China. Ha!
Army logistics made a systematic effort to capture and pass on all sorts of general operator and 1st line repairman practical maintenance knowledge through the maintenance cartoon monthly, PS Magazine. It filled in the gaps between the service manuals and reality. It always had a good mix of general soldier maintenance tips, like how to hold an M2 machine gun to reassemble it the easiest way possible, and stuff for specialized troops, like errors to avoid when reloading your multiple launch rocket system so that you don’t destroy your boom. Even some of the specialized lessons were broadly applicable (e.g. “how to fight load shifting in your HETT truck and avoid scattering your cargo down the road”). That tip works whether you’re driving a supply truck, a hummer, or a CH-46.
Spurred by this post, I googled a few old copies of PS, and it hit me: each of their tips likely came from a forehead slapping “YOU DID WHAT?!?!?” moment in the motor pool, on the firing line or downrange. The monthly maintenance tips book was really an encyclopedic oral history of maintenance disasters. , which makes the sort of lame cartoons, At the time, I thought they were really weak, even the ineffable Master Sergeant Halfmast character. 25 years later… hilarious. Hoo boy. Unless you were *that guy* who inspired the maintenance tip.
NASA and the FAA and NTSB have a system where, if no one was hurt and the plane didn’t get too badly broken, you can report your oopsies without penalty (or get a penalty reduction). Yes, there are a lot of “Whatnthehell was he thinking?!?” and “Oh no, no, you didn’t, no,…” moments in the newsletter.
The RAF had something like the Army’s magazine back during WWII, with a character named Pilot Officer Prune.
My Grandfather flew for the USAF (from when it was called the Army Air Corps until he flew over Vietnam). There were questions that I’d always wished I’d asked him before he passed. In my youth and intemperance I lacked the wisdom to know it was important. Don’t get me wrong I gained a lot of oral tradition from him, it’s just that so much knowledge can be lost that is informal and cultural, not in any textbook. There are so many airframes he flew, from Curtiss Jennys to F-4 Wild Weasels. Cloth covered 100 mph kites to Mach 2 rocket ships, can you imagine the insight into he would have into how not to get dead.
Jeez, especially if he was a Wild Weasel. There’s a reason their motto is “YGBSM” (You Gotta Be Shitting Me)! When your job is teasing SAM batteries into firing at you so you can kill them your “How not to get dead” insights have to be first-rate!
One who is actively capturing the oral tradition is my brother, Colorado SkyMaster Drew Chitiea. His first volume, “The Aviator’s Bathroom Reader”, seems an able start. Maybe worth looking up.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Snagged it for reading! Another one that’s collected oral tales is CloudDancer’s Alaskan Chronicles – met the guy, and he’s definitely been there, done that.
And FE Potts guide to bush flying. That’s a book packed with collected wisdom and opinion about off-airport flying (as long as you keep in mind that some of it is opinion, and some is fact, and some is wisdom.)
My dad was a fighter/ instructor/ transport/ tanker/ test pilot through WWII to the mid 50s. He’s often read about the latest aircraft crash and say, “Yea, I survived that back in ’49. Wrote it all up, but nobody listened.”
The services have safety organizations that try to collect lessons from each mishap. These are turned into recommendations. Some of these are informally called “do your d@mn job recommendations”, because the mishap was driven by somebody not doing their d@mn job.
Out flying as a teenager in a J-3 cub in 1953–hazy, cool day,buzzed (my home), first mistake, and the engine started shaking and the windshield support bars were blurred–beat it back to base, talked with my old time instructor and he said–go ahead and fly it again and if it starts shaking again try pulling on the carb heat to see if that makes a difference–I did and it did—smooth as silk –never forgot carb heat again!! He knew what was wrong and, to instill an unforgettable lesson and to add some self confidence in future flying skills, he had the knowledge and ability to recognize a teaching moment and the wisdom to launch an apprehensive, fledgling aviator back into the unknown to solve a problem on his own. Still flying, after 60 plus years in aviation and many more experiences encountered and enjoyed over the years in many different types of aircraft throughout the world.
Carb ice is something we don’t have too much of out here, because of the lack of humidity. When I flew in the Southeast and Midwest, on the other hand…