I travel to and from beach life every week, and recently at 30,000 feet I took this photo as we broke through the clouds heading back west towards Orange County’s John Wayne Airport. This was southwest of Chicago, and we were very happy to see sunshine and find smooth air.
Even as a pilot some of the long range travel can get fatiguing. Long flights at high-altitude can sometimes get very boring in the cockpit. Other times it can be extremely busy, looking for other airplanes, finding holes around thunderstorms and just running the normal checklists. The old saying was “A pilot is paid to fill the seat for 99% of the year. The other 1% he earns his keep”. Now that computers run more of the flying this is even more true.
Some days just feel worse than others. You can end up in the clouds bouncing around in very “tight” airspace so you are changing radio frequencies every few minutes and looking at a computer screen covered with little white dots that represent “traffic”. There is a 2 minute video that shows all the commercial air traffic in the world over a 24 hour period on the NASA website that is an eye opener. The “big sky theory” no longer applies. There are hundreds of thousands of other pilots out there dodging the same weather and traffic you are.
Then it happens. Just like a golfer that double bogies all day and birdies the last hole, or the driver stuck in traffic that stops in a new diner to find the best T-Bone Steak ever, you break out of the weather, get “on top and smooth” only to find a computer screen completely void of traffic. That moment makes all the work seem trivial.
What is it about what you do that can make all of your troubles just disappear. How can you find time to do more of that? What can you do to avoid turbulence and traffic? How can you climb above it all and get “on top and smooth”?
Scott Bourquin is the Author of “So, Now What?” and the CEO of Rustic Creek.
http://www.sonowwhatscott.com
http://www.rusticcreek.com
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