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If you meet a pilot who answers “No” to the question “Have you ever panicked while flying?,” watch them closely. They’ll probably lie to you about other things, too.
But let’s say you have never panicked or felt panic coming on while flying. “Good on ya, mate,” as the Australians say. I and some other pilots have kind of “made up” for your lack of panic, you heroic, stoic, seasoned, steady pilot, you, you pillar of mental strength, winged god. However, then there’s me.
Just what is this thing called “panic?” What happens if you do panic? And how can I not panic to start with?
Well, in my case, I’ve had a few little panic episodes, and it wasn’t because the price of my stock plunged, or I forgot that I left the oven on, or—gasp!—forgot to set the timer to record my favorite TV show. Nope, the times I felt panic were a little more, uh, “justified,” maybe, and they hit me right quick. I can remember them now, very clearly, many years later.
Let’s look at a fairly famous pilot, a one Samuel Clemens, who panicked. This was back in the 1800s, somewhat before the Wright Brothers. He was a still-learning riverboat pilot, not yet a captain, still a so-called “cub pilot.” But he was getting pretty good at piloting the steamboat—and therefore getting cocky. Conceited. So his boss played a trick on him to teach him a lesson on how to overcome panic, deal with stress, rely on what you know. He left the wheelhouse, leaving Clemens alone, and colluded with the man who called out the river depth, the “leadsman.”
The leadsman called out the wrong water depth on purpose, called out a very shallow depth, and getting shallower, at a place in the river Clemens knew to be very deep. The leadsman called out the curious-sounding depth measurements loudly: “Half twain, quarter twain, mark twain!” (aha!)—and Clemens panicked, thinking he was going to hit the bottom. (“Mark Twain” is twelve feet deep.)
Even though he knew the water was very deep there—knew it, knew it, knew it cold, and was cocky about his knowledge. But then he panicked, hearing the shallow depths called out.
Panic can take over, and blow intellect, knowledge, training—everything—right off the table, if a person isn’t careful.
Clemens had heard enough—he thought the boat was going to hit the bottom, and he yelled into the speaking tube to the engineer “Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortal soul out of her!”
Turns out the river really was quite deep at this spot—just like he knew it was. Mark Twain had to put up with people mocking him for months after that: “Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her!” Overall, it was a very good lesson on how to tamp down panic and think, he figured, though he hated the ribbing.
Panic is real, as real as can be. Panic takes over the mind in an instant, and rational thought is gone.
I was flying a T-38 solo at night as a student, returning to Vance Air Force Base. The base had switched runways from Runway 35 to Runway 17, so that when I came back into the base I was approaching the traffic pattern from the north. Of course. But I somehow had it fixed in my mind that I was approaching from the south, to Runway 35. Never mind the instruments, by the way, that showed me flying south. Oh, no, just go right ahead and panic there, Mr. Jet Pilot, Mr. Solo-At-Night Hotshot.
I was flying a T-38 solo at night as a student, returning to Vance Air Force Base when I panicked.
As I approached the base, “from the south,” I looked to the right of the runway for the familiar lights of Vance Air Force Base—the roads, the housing area, the lit-up parking lots, etc. Blackness. What!? How can that be? I searched the black Oklahoma ground madly—I could see the runway no problem, well lit-up in the dark. Flying at the pattern altitude at the usual 300 knots, solo, at night. I started to panic. I remember this like it was yesterday, but it was 1987.
I was going to be over the runway in seconds but there was no Vance Air Force Base nearby. Impossible. I couldn’t see any lights to the right of the runway and “Vance Air Force Base is to the right of the runway. The base should be to the right of the runway.” Where are the lights of the houses? Where are the lights of the roads? How can this possibly be!?
I was frantic—for a few long seconds, which felt longer. Then—oh. Relief, embarrassment both. There’s Vance AFB, off to the left—where it had to be, lights twinkling against the black ground in the dark. Vance—the “little prison camp on the prairie,” as I heard one pilot call it. Ahem, I said to myself, look at my HSI—it shows that I’m pointed due south.
Do I use the instruments big-time now, even in VMC conditions? Ja, you betcha I do.
I never told anyone about that mini-panic—thinking I was coming in from the south instead of heading south made me panic for a few seconds. I suspect now I told.
Another time I was out flying VFR solo as a student in the T-38, and coming back to the base, there was a solid white cloud deck at maybe 6,000 feet that ended a few miles before the base. Cool, I thought, and flew just a few feet above the deck and slapped the stick to the right.
Now that T-38 would roll twice per second, a 720-degree-per-second roll rate, and I aileron-rolled it about five to six times right over the cloud deck, THE COOLEST SIGHT EVER, then rolled out. My head was swimming from the rolling, my “gyros tumbled.” I saw only the white cloud deck beneath me, and where the heck is Buffalo? The VFR entry point ground reference was Buffalo. (It’s near a town named helpfully named “Bison,” Oklahoma.)
I panicked a bit, breathing quickly, rocketing along over a solid white sheet. Shucks, forty-five more seconds at this speed and I’ll blow right past the VFR entry point, right into the center runway approach, then on to Arkansas. Then I suddenly thought “Ask for vectors, dummy!,” keyed the mic, and asked air traffic controller (“RAPCON”) for “vectors to Buffalo.” No one did that, by the way.
Buffalo was straight ahead, about eight miles, it turned out, and I got vectored there. My classmate ribbed me about it on the ground, saying in a pleading voice: “RAPCON, this is Speedo 25, I’m lost, could you please give me vectors to Buffalo?” I deserved the taunting, doing aileron rolls like that, getting discombulated.
I recently re-watched the movie “Titanic,” and the scene where Rose (Kate Winslet) tries to get a uniformed Titanic ship steward to come with her to rescue the handcuffed-to-a-pipe Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio). The steward, dressed in an all-white uniform, grabs her and drags her by the wrist with him through the knee-deep water in the corridor, the opposite direction from where she wanted to go, yelling “THERE’S NO NEED TO PANIC, THERE’S NO NEED TO PANIC!” his eyes wide, bugging out, his face contorted.
Out of his mind.
He was the one really panicking, his mind racing, but didn’t realize it. (Now Jack—he had every right to panic when Rose swung an axe at his handcuffs. But I digress.)
Soldiers in the Civil War were found dead on the battlefield after a fight, some of their rifles loaded six and seven times, one load tamped down on top of the other. They panicked as the other side attacked, bugles blowing, flags flying, men yelling, guns and cannons firing. They watched the oncoming horde, the frenzied mob—whoa!!—and loaded and loaded their rifles by the muzzle, one wad, powder and ball on top of the other. The rifles were jammed up solid, couldn’t fire them.
Terror. Panic. It can happen.
On the other hand, one can read about “battle-hardened soldiers” in various war stories. The ones who learned not to panic, stay calm under fire.
“Oh, I’ve never panicked, never will,” a person might say, sitting in a chair at home. Oh really? Everyone who has ever panicked was sitting at home at one time, I guess. Sitting at home not in the Civil War, or getting attacked by a shark, or seeing, say, their little child chase a ball right into a busy street. Not in a bank when a masked man with a gun enters and shouts “THIS IS A ROBBERY!”
Speaking of non-flying panic: at Beale Air Force Base, California, I had to do what was called “recurrent water survival training.” Every so many years—a refresher course. The people that I did the water survival training with were SR-71 pilots, seasoned 40-something-year-old KC-135 pilots, T-38 instructor pilots, and some non-pilots who are also required to do water survival training every so often.
We wore flight suits, tennis shoes, and helmets, and jumped off the diving board and came up underneath a parachute that was stretched taut across the swimming pool surface, and tied to the side fences, the fabric sucked down tightly to the water’s surface. Guys were hootin’ and hollerin’, laughing, jumping off the high dive, some of them, coming up underneath, making an air pocket, tracing a “riser” (one of the many cords leading from the center of the chute to the edge of the chute.) Just like we were briefed to do—make an air pocket, trace a riser. Simple.
Then it happened.
A woman jumped into the pool, came up under the parachute in the deep end, and started screaming. Very loudly. At first I thought, and so did everyone else, that she was kidding around. Joking. And she screamed again and again. Somehow, screaming goes right to some part of the brain that says “Go!!”
The safety airmen dove into the pool under the parachute lightning-quick, grabbed her, and got her out of there to safety. She was spitting water, and sobbed a little bit.
I was next. I thought “What the holy heck just happened there? How could she possibly get in trouble doing this? How could anybody? We all got the briefing on what to do! It’s easy!” Turns out it wasn’t easy.
I jumped into the deep end of the pool feet-first, came up under the canopy, and pushed up to make an air pocket to breathe in, and started to breathe in. Only there was no air pocket. When I pushed up on the parachute, it didn’t break the surface. Instead of the parachute moving, I moved—down.
I pushed my head back deeper under water, is what I did. My head underwater, I breathed in, since I was thinking there was a pocket of air. I breathed in a little water. Let me just say, “breathing” water and “drinking” water are very different.
And I panicked—right now. Big time. Never been so scared.
This panic was the worst I ever felt, or close to it. (The “It’s going into mach tuck” episode going 0.99 mach in a KC-135Q ranks right up there, though, gets “honorable mention.”)
My mind raced, and I thrashed my arms and kicked my legs and pushed back up on the parachute as hard as I could. It went up off the pool surface, creating a small air pocket under the orange and white fabric, and I stuck my head into the air and coughed and gasped and spit and breathed in air, this time. And out, and in. I was OK! Whew!
I treaded water in my little air pocket, panting, holding the chute off the water above me with one hand, and calmed down little by little.
Instantly I knew why the woman had screamed. I didn’t scream—oh no, not me. This was only because I didn’t think of it.
I followed a “riser” (a cord) from the center of the chute out to the edge of the parachute, got out of the pool, saying nothing about my mini-panic episode, and then the next person jumped as if nothing had happened. “Waterboarding,” basically—that was what happened to the woman and me, and it was terrifying. Unless it happens to you, perhaps you won’t believe it.
How to stop the onset of panic when it hits? Revert to training. I got lucky, and somehow remembered to swim up and push up on the parachute again after gagging—but maybe the panic totally overrode the woman’s mind, or she didn’t push up quite hard enough on her second effort—not enough to snap that darn chute off the water surface.
So if I ever parachute into water now, which, let’s see, let me check my schedule—nope, no immediate plans to do that in the next one million years—I do have that training, scary as it was. Push up on the chute and create an air pocket, hold my breath until I make darn sure my head is above water, then breathe.
How about flying already, you ask?
Let’s look just a bit at two ugly crashes—Atlas Air Flight 3591 near Houston, and Air France Flight 441over the Atlantic ocean. A person can read all about them on the internet, which I’ve done, and have been guilty of thinking “I would never do that!”
The pilots—some, not all—in both crashes panicked. Remember how panic overrides thinking? And I must remember that these are only two episodes. Two, out of all the flying done so far in the world, just two “real-world” panic stories. I suspect there are others.
The pilots of Atlas Air Flight 3591 near Houston, and Air France Flight 441over the Atlantic ocean panicked.
From the black boxes we hear things like “Oh. Woah! My speed my speed? Lord help me!” on the Atlas flight. The jump seater yelling “PULL UP!”
On Air France, one pilot: “I don’t have control of the aircraft anymore!”
Both aircraft had good engines.
Panic. It’s no joke, though I do love to joke around.
Reading the accident reports where pilots panic and make fatal mistakes is helpful. But—the most helpful thing to do—for me, anyway—to ward off panic and build flying confidence is train, train, train. Drill, baby, drill. Flashcards and chair-flying and flying are my friends.
And I must remember that I am perfectly capable of panicking—I’m not immune to it. But if I practice the aircraft emergency procedures, over and over, so they are second nature, when something happens—like rapid decompression—I’ll hopefully be ready and calmly deal with the “something,” like rapid D, and slap that quick-don on.
Oh—please don’t tell anyone about me in the pool.
- Panic, and How To Not - October 23, 2024
- Icing, the face of God and illusions - August 19, 2024
- A Newbie CFI, Disco Fever, and My Inner Voice - June 21, 2024
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