‘Fixing’ Problem Pilots. Find The Solution From Within (If Possible)

In a flight department with less than 10 pilots, we can’t go more than a few trips before going through the entire flight roster. We will see these pilots again! Even in a large flight department, speaking out against another pilot is sure to generate friction. In some cases the bearer of bad news is labeled the problem. And we must all realize that today’s copilot could very well be tomorrow’s chief pilot. It is only natural that we would rather stay silent and hope the problem goes away on its own. But that rarely happens.

How do you get such pilots to self-motivate themselves to change when they are unaware change is needed? And how do you do that positively?

In his international best-selling book, Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday cites example after example where famous leaders have replaced rational thought with bluster and self-absorption. “Pursuing great work is often terrifying. Ego soothes that fear,” he says.

Flying airplanes for a living is not easy and having to keep abreast of the required knowledge and to keep proficient in the necessary skills can be a daunting task. Each of our pilot behavioral misfits is fleeing a shortcoming and their egos are allowing them to do that. At this point, a healthy pilot will ask, “What is there to be afraid of?” If honest, the ego-driven pilot will say, “Plenty.”

From the dawn of aviation, achieving heavier-than-air flight was a superhuman feat. From the moment a pilot first takes off solo that individual has done something no human had done prior to 1903 and relatively few have since when compared to the total of humanity. How can you not have an ego when you defy gravity for a living? 

Yet, Holiday observes, “When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes — but rock-hard humility and confidence.”

Another way to phrase this issue is to replace the word “ego” with its cousin: arrogance. Are you an arrogant pilot or are you humble? Select one of the following choices and find out: (1) “I have flying mastered and will never have an accident for which I am to blame.” Or, (2) “I will never have flying mastered, it takes most of my effort just to keep up in the world of aviation, and I will have to work even harder to keep things as safe as possible for every flight I have in my future.”

Chances are you are in the second category and will not personally need many of the lessons that follow. But chances are just as likely that you will be sharing the cockpit at some point in the future with a pilot who believes the first answer applies, whether or not he or she would admit as much. You might benefit from a new approach to getting through to these pilots who don’t respond well to training.

Creating Awareness: ‘We, Not He or She’ 

Approaching one pilot out of any size group of pilots singles that pilot out and sends the unmistakable message that “we” are not happy with “he” or “she” and are taking corrective action. Even the humblest and a most self-critical individual cannot help but notice and become defensive as a result. Once that emotional armor is donned, the effort may be lost. 

Another task may be to approach the entire flight department as a whole with suggestions for “we” as a group. You may say the guilty party will see right through this charade and that may be true. But the ruse will allow the pilot to play along and at least rationalize that the corrective action is aimed toward all.

In one of my flight departments, we had a pilot who always aimed for “brick one” when landing, making the rest of us a bit nervous when sitting in the right seat. He was arguably our most skilled and experienced pilot. We looked up to him and were willing to overlook the one chink in his armor. So none of us, his peers, ever spoke up. He inevitably planted the airplane in an overrun not authorized for landing, generating a “nastygram” from the airport.

The chief pilot then sent a “memo to all pilots” that revealed only that “we,” the flight department, had the landing incident. He made the case that “we,” the flight department, had to make a landing in the touchdown zone a priority. He even solicited our most experienced pilot to supervise the training effort. Our problem pilot became the most zealous preacher for the reasons the touchdown zone was so important. We never again had a problem with our former “problem” pilot.

The fact that this individual was a problem pilot in the first place defied all prediction. He was highly intelligent, had an uncanny air sense and was what many called the ideal combination of “hands” and “brains” in a pilot. He had a great sense of humor and could take a good ribbing on all subjects other than aviation. When it came to flying airplanes, he was humorless and notoriously thin-skinned. For that, the blame goes squarely on his military and civilian training history.

Encourage Humility

Despite what you see in the movies, most military instructor pilots are quite empathetic and in tune with their students’ inner psyches. You cannot train someone to fly fingertip formation in a loop while pulling 7 Gs without some sense of the student’s abilities. But it is true that many military instructors believe “fear, sarcasm and ridicule” are valid teaching tools. Unfortunately, this carries forward to the civilian world in subtle ways.

In many type certification evaluations, the “make it or break it” maneuver is the heavyweight V1 engine cut. A mishandled rotation or imprecise pitch control at V2+10 can end in simulated disaster. And a simulated crash means a very real flight evaluation failure. While practicing the maneuver, failures are inevitable. But so, too, are the subtle digs from the instructor’s position in the simulator. “You’ll have to do better than that!” But even on easier maneuvers, the digs can be just as penetrating. “Well, I’ve never seen that before!” 

While there are civilian simulator instructors with chips on their shoulders only too happy to play with the ground speed on downwind or compound emergencies in an effort to fluster a hapless student, they are the exceptions. But some of this intimidation happens innocently enough without the instructor’s intent.

Steep turns, for example, are a completely foreign event to most pilots who fly business jets and yet it remains a staple of simulator evaluations. Given a student’s inability to perform the maneuver plus or minus 100 ft., many instructors are all too willing to show up the student while hand-flying the airplane effortlessly from the jump seat. They might as well be saying, “I can do better with one hand while still operating the simulator from back here; what’s your problem?” 

Our upbringing as “right stuff” pilots and our continuing indoctrination in what can be a hostile training environment tends to create thin-skinned pilots too afraid to admit to mistakes in public so as to encourage improvement. We know that we need pilots who are open-minded, hungry for knowledge, willing and wanting to improve, and not afraid to ask for help when needed.

Instructors can encourage this attitude by demonstrating a little “bedside manner.” A simulator can be more difficult to fly than an airplane unless you spend more time flying the box than the airplane. Then it becomes an electronic game. A simulator instructor can learn as much from the students in the front seats as the students can from the instructor. That should encourage some humility on both ends.

A simulator instructor must play evaluator at some point; that is part of the job after all. The learning experience can be enhanced if critiques are shaped to emphasize the positive, note the difficulty of a maneuver and suggest common solutions. (Common, meaning they are not alone with the particular trouble.) I once saw a mishandled rudder during an engine-out missed approach critiqued with, “It looked like you couldn’t make up your mind how much rudder you needed. I thought I was going to get airsick.” After the critique was over I told the pilot, “I used to do that all the time! I finally figured out half the rudder gets you started and once the engines spool up you can figure the rest out.”

Train If You Can; Elevate If You Can’t; Ostracize If You Must 

When dealing with a problem pilot, your ultimate goal is behavior modification and if these “we, not he or she” techniques get the job done, great. If the simulator instructor is able to encourage the self-motivation process, that’s great, too. But if the problem pilot is unwilling to change, it might be time to get upper management involved.

 Seeing the boss about a problem is never easy and when dealing with personnel issues, it can be treacherous. The boss might already know about it or you may have just thrown his or her best friend under the bus. As the bearer of bad news, you might bear the brunt of the fallout. If the big boss doesn’t take this kind of news well, you might consider the “we, not he or she” approach on a new level. “We are a great flight department,” you can say, “and great flight departments encourage outside audits and observations to keep that leading edge extra sharp.”

If the big boss isn’t willing to help, or if the big boss is the problem, then you have what many would call a “career-defining moment.” If the problem pilot poses a safety of flight risk, you need to ask yourself how you will feel if you had to read about that pilot and a planeload of people entombed in an airplane you used to fly. Would that be worth taking a stand?

There are also steps short of the “nuclear option” that can let the problem pilot know some behaviors are not tolerated in a professional flight department. Even the most problematic pilot has strengths and can provide valuable contributions to the flight department. Focus on the problematic behaviors, not the pilot. If, for example, you witness a pilot willfully skip a flight control check required by the flight manual and push the throttles forward to taxi, what will you do? I have never seen this but I believe I would react thusly: Apply the brakes, bring the airplane to a stop and say, “We missed a critical step in the checklist. Let’s do that before we go any further.” 

A truly professional pilot knows flying isn’t easy and requires unrelenting dedication and constant study. The pros know they can make mistakes and lose proficiency; training is needed to remain on top of the game. A problem pilot will deny these realities with the false bravado or feigned coolness of an X-plane test pilot. But both of these traits are used to hide the fear of admitting they cannot know it all.

A problem pilot puts lives at risk and puts our profession at risk. If you are reading this article, and have made it to the end, you are probably not a problem pilot. You are still in the “learn mode.” But those problem pilots in your ranks are your problem. And it is up to you to “fix” them.