Adversity

“Pull your green ring!  Pull your green ring!”  That came through loud and clear over the radio despite all the other talking between the various jets and the controllers.  It was my Division Leader, one of our Squadron’s most senior pilots, on a night flight during my first period flying off the aircraft carrier.  I had unknowingly fallen victim to Hypoxia and was minutes, if not seconds, away from dying as I very much intended to softly land in a nearby swamp so I could get some much-needed rest.  Moments later, having pulled the green ring resulting in pure oxygen being delivered instantly I looked outside and said “Holy Shit.  I’m flying.  And it’s nighttime.”

So, how do you deal with Adversity in your daily life?  How do organizations and Teams deal with it?  What happens the moment something goes wrong?  The world could take a lesson from Naval Aviation.  Let me explain:

What happens the moment something goes wrong?  How do organizations and Teams deal with adversity?  How do you deal with adversity in your daily life?  The world could take a lesson from Naval Aviation. 

When I was traveling the country flying air shows with the Blue Angels, we would have the opportunity and the privilege each weekend to visit with groups at our air show location.  Typically, they were schools and colleges in the local area, but the groups varied and extended as far as civic organizations, hospitals, and various other scheduled events.  We weren’t there to sign them up to join the military, rather to share our experiences and why we’d each felt called to serve. 

As a way to introduce aviation and make some logical connections, I would talk about landing an airplane.  I would describe an ideal day, perfect weather, light winds, not a cloud in the sky and then casually refer to it as a typical day in the life of an Air Force pilot.  This served two purposes, one it usually elicited a laugh and relaxed the group and two, it reminded (or even instructed) them that the Blue Angels were Navy pilots and not flying in the USAF.  

After I showed a picture-perfect day with a nice long runway straight ahead, I would switch to the same picture, but at night.  I like to explain that flying is like driving in the sense that nighttime is no different than daytime for the vehicle, be it a car or a plane.  What is very different though is the operator’s ability to process external information.  Nighttime, regardless of your night vision level at any moment, is more challenging as you have significantly reduced visual cues.  It’s far more challenging to gauge speed changes, closure, direction, etc…. It’s significantly hard to merge onto a busy highway at night than it is during the daytime.  It’s also significantly harder to land a plane at night for all of the same reasons.  The picture I would show of a nighttime landing was that nice long runway, right in the city, with buildings lit up all around, a bright runway with glideslope lights, etc… all leading the pilot towards a safe landing.  

I then switch to a video but prior to doing so, I explain that there’s something even harder than landing at nighttime, and it’s doing it during the daytime but on a moving ship at sea.  The video is the last 15-20 seconds of a an F/A-18 landing on an aircraft carrier.  I explain while the video plays that the Hornet approaches the ship at 141 knots, roughly 165 mph.  It’s also descending at 720 feet per minute (fpm) and it maintains that descent rate all the way through touchdown which equates to a VERY noticeable landing.  If everything operates as it should and the Hornet catches a wire, one of 3 or 4 arresting gear cables, the jet decelerates from 141 knots to totally stopped over the course of 345 feet in under 2 seconds.  So, it’s a bit of a double whammy in the sense that the aircraft is literally crashing into the flight deck at a rate of descent that would open every single overhead panel on your average commercial plane in addition to probably dropping all of the oxygen masks and decelerating a rate that exceeds even the fastest car breaking you’ve experienced.  For those curious, hard breaking in a car is defined as decelerating 8-10 mph in 1 second.  So quick math shows that an arresting gear landing from 165 mph to 0 mph in 2 seconds is about 10 times more violent than even hard braking.  The closest most will get to experiencing this is on a roller coaster, but then again, they’re along for the ride rather than controlling the ride.  

After that video finishes, I typically show what most believe is a blank, or rather a black, slide.  I like to say that what they just witnessed is truly an incredible feat in aviation, but that in my opinion, the most challenging aspect in all of aviation is doing that exact same thing, but at night.  The screen they’re looking at is in fact not a blank screen, but rather what a pilot sees when approaching the aircraft carrier at night and that the specific photo was taken from 3nm behind the boat during a nighttime approach.  Because the carrier is usually 100nm or more from any land, there’s no ambient lighting, it’s just all black.  The closest thing I’ve even seen to that kind of true darkness is when I was spelunking in my youth, while with the Boy Scouts and we were far down into a cave when the guide said, “Okay, shut off your flashlights.”  For anyone who has experienced that level of darkness, it’s truly incredible.  That’s what the boat offers to those willing to be Navy Pilots, it offers total and complete darkness on approach.  

At the same approach speed of 141 knots, that 3 miles distance is covered in 1 minute and 16 seconds and over that period of time, the jet is descending from 1200’ high to the height of the aircraft carrier flight deck, which is roughly 60’ above the waterline.  My next video shows the last 15-20 seconds again, but this time at night and it’s wonderful to watch the reaction of those seeing it for the first time.  The aircraft carrier flight deck is kept in an extremely dark condition, partially out of necessity for being a US combat vessel that doesn’t want to be easily located, but also for the benefit of the hundreds of men and women working on the flight deck all night long.  They work in one of, if not the most, dangerous environments in the world in which there is almost total darkness and they’re surrounded by low-mounted jet engines, turning propellers and helicopter rotor blades in every direction.  Maintaining night vision is critical for their safety so as much as we might want a well-lit runway to land on, their safety is paramount.

As the video begins to take its effect, I mention that what they just watched is a night carrier landing, but in good weather.  It’s the bad weather days, the days with a pitching deck due to high seas that really gets your blood pumping as a Navy pilot.  Those videos wouldn’t be much to watch though, because you’d literally see nothing at all.  In those instances, it’s the men and women working as Landing Signals Officers who earn their pay through exceptional performance, but more on them when we talk about Trust.

And so let us go back to Adversity and how to deal with it.  The fact of the matter is, that no matter how challenging it might be to landing a plane, or to do so at night on a moving ship at sea, there’s something still more challenging.  That is, how to do that exact same thing but with an airplane that isn’t working properly.  That of course could be any number of things based on how complicated our aircraft have become.  For example, if your radios stop working, we have procedures for what to do, but there’s always this great unknown in terms of trusting the procedures will work and ensuring that everyone knows what’s happening and that the airplane that isn’t talking to anyone is in fact NORDO (no operating radio).  Losing your avionics or your electrical system is even more troubling as the flight information provided is critical to safe flight.  Finally, any sort of our hydraulic or engine failures can so drastically reduce the aircraft’s performance that landing it can prove very challenging and specifically the tolerance for mistakes is almost non-existent and most airplanes don’t have the power or flight control stability to recover once the pilot has made too large of an error in power or flight control input.  

So, what happens when things go wrong.  As I mentioned to begin with, Naval Aviation and even aviation in general, has an incredible way of dealing with Adversity and it’s built off 100 years of lessons learned in an arena that is unforgiving and never the same.    We call them EPs, or Emergency Procedures.