Helicopters helped me learn to think ahead

When you learn to fly helicopters in the military, the instructor pilots regularly roll the throttle off at the most inopportune times, forcing you to autorotate. Back in my day, many times, we would do touchdown autos. Most of my instructors were old grizzled VietNam veterans who seemed to take sadistic pleasure in catching us off guard and seeing how we react to the simulated emergency. Helicopters are more reliable these days, but my dad said when he started flying them in the early 1960’s, they were not. The old saying goes “helicopters don’t fly, they beat the air into submission” and their story was that they were preparing us to deal with the “stress of combat”. The ultimate effect was that we learned to always be looking for where we could land should the engine actually quit someday.

There is a lot to consider when you autorotate and you have to think quickly. Your altitude, the direction and speed of the wind, possible landing spots, the weight of the aircraft, are all important factors in whether you and your crew will walk away or not. The instructors liked to get us really busy inside the cockpit with radio calls or navigation or something else and then roll the throttle off to see what we would do.  We would have to quickly see if there were any openings in the trees and figure out the safest place to try to land. If, when you looked out to see where you could land, there were no obvious quick options, you had to start to guide the aircraft towards what looked like the best option and then look for wind indicators, airspeed, shape your descent to align with the longest part of the clearing, make your mayday calls and never ever stop flying until you were on…..the……ground.

Some folks have problems though. It is easy to get fixated not on the clearing where it could be safe to land, but rather on the obstacles. The obstacles draw our attention and if we are not diligent, they can cause us to crash. There is not a lot of time to get focused on distractions when you are coming out of the sky like a green Mosler safe. Some folks were not able to overcome it and they washed out. If they couldn’t see their way to making it happen, to zeroing in with all their focus on the safest spot to land and then willing the aircraft there, then they wouldn’t last long in the program. So, there were folks who could see where they needed to go and do whatever it took to get there and then there were folks who had stuff happen to them and they responded like a cork in the ocean being battered about by the waves.

Leaders tend to bend the spoon. I see this again and again working with entrepreneurs. They tend to make things happen in their lives and the lives of others rather than simply respond to whatever life throws at them. Leaders have a clear vision of who they are, what they care about and conversely, what is not worth worrying about. They have goals. They have ambition, and they overcome obstacles as a normal course of getting things done. They are moving with a purpose and they never ever stop.

As human beings, we have the gift of language and we live in the stories we tell ourselves. In every moment, we choose the clearing or the obstacles. We can shape the story in our heads and then bend the world to fit that story. Only humans have this ability and whether we are proposing to “land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth” or getting a cup of coffee, we own that story and the outcome. Situations can change quickly, but nobody should let go and just see what happens. We can and should make the difference for ourselves and others. Maybe those old instructor pilots were wise as well as sadistic. It was a painful lesson, but they taught me to keep looking ahead and thinking through all my options.