Flying a 172 with my dad as co-pilot, 2013
On October 16, 2015, my dad died eating a taco, watching Dances with Wolves and drinking a beer. I was there, sitting next to him, checking emails and thinking about work. To this day, I regret not making the most of the last few seconds with my dad. But who could know that right then and there, while enjoying his mid-afternoon lunch, he would collapse and die.
Why share something so personal, and what does it have to do with flying? Just one day before this incident, I had flown my Mooney M20 J to San Antonio with two of my kids to visit my parents. After the emotional toll of his death and the funeral later, piloting the Mooney back home with my kids was not an option.
(Stinson Airfield – San Antonio, Texas)
The trip started when my mother called me earlier in the week and asked to see her grandkids. We live in Louisiana, and we make the trip to San Antonio often to visit my parents and my siblings, and their kids. Having the Mooney made the trip easy and enjoyable.
The weather was nice and starting to cool a little bit with Fall on the horizon. Arrival into San Antonio was a little bumpy in the afternoon air, but landing was uneventful. When I exited the plane, I was shocked to see how frail my dad was compared to a month earlier, when I saw him for the Labor Day weekend. He was now walking with a cane and was unsteady on his feet. Fortunately, both my sisters and most of their kids also live in San Antonio, so we were able to gather most of the extended family that night for dinner. My dad sat at the head of the table and was mostly quiet, only interrupting periodically to talk about a movie or a book he liked. At the time, his quietness did not alarm me, and I thought he was just tired.
The next day, we decided to go for a family lunch. My dad opted to stay home and asked that we bring him a taco – this is San Antonio after all. Arriving back home later in the afternoon, my mom fixed him a beer, warmed his taco, and took it to him in the living room. I sat down next to him on the couch. He was watching Kevin Costner trying to coax the wolf into his camp, and he commented on how much he loved the movie. A fourth-generation Texan, my dad loved movies like this.
For a second, I turned to take a phone call and check a few emails since it was a workday for me. I heard my mom cry out. My dad was on the ground and could not get up. I tried to lift him and administer the Heimlich Maneuver, thinking he had choked on his lunch, but his weight was too much for me. My older sister ushered the young kids out of the room and upstairs to spare them from witnessing anything more than what they had already seen. My younger sister called her physician husband to come home immediately. He worked down the street and had just left to walk back to his office after lunch. He arrived within minutes and knew immediately that my dad had not choked but instead suffered from some massive medical event.
We called 911 and waited for the police and EMS to arrive. I called my wife in tears and told her what happened. She packed up with our other daughter and began driving to San Antonio. Emergency services arrived quickly, took control, and the family began the process of coming to terms with what happened.
I was obviously an emotional basket-case and would remain so for the next several days as funeral arrangements were made, my sisters and I wrote the eulogy, and we grieved as a family. Over the next week, family members and friends arrived, the service was planned, and the funeral was held. In just a few days, I had been on a frenetic rollercoaster of emotions. Now it was all over, and I had to get home. But how would I get the plane back to Louisiana?
I took mental stock of my emotional health and quickly concluded I could not make the flight back to Louisiana. I was simply not in the right frame of mind to fly. Imagine the pain index we all see in hospitals and doctors’ offices. It’s the linear chart showing a smiling face, which indicates no pain, and moves right with increasing frowning faces depicting heightened levels of pain. At the end is a grimacing face representing a 10 on the pain scale. The same type of chart should be available for pilots to characterize emotional health. For me, at that time, I was on the far-right side of that chart, depicted by the most severe pain. That meant in my go-or-no-go decision matrix, I was not going to fly until I could safely say my emotional health was back on the left side of that chart. I had never had to think about this before, but I knew instinctively that my mental health was not good enough to fly that day.
After I sold the Mooney, I bought a 1989 Piper Malibu Mirage and was introduced to pressurized flying and the insurance requirement of annual recurrent training. My initial training instructor, Hank Gibson from Texas Top Aviation, introduced me to the Malibu and Mirage Owner’s and Pilots Association (MMOPA) Flight Risk Assessment Tool (FRAT) developed by MMOPA to aid their pilots in assessing flight risks before taking off. The app allows pilots to fill out a questionnaire about an upcoming flight and weighs factors to determine if the pilot should undertake the flight. Questions in the app consider total flight hours, time in type, weather, physical and emotional health, and other factors. The app then issues a score with green being a low risk factor, yellow is cautionary, and red being a no-go unless the risks can be mitigated.
All good pilots do advance research on flights and risk assessment for the particular trip. We anticipate and research weather on the flight path, we pre-flight the plane and check the oil, review runways and wind patterns at the destination airport, and check NOTAMS. In addition, we take stock of our physical health. Do we have a cold? Are our ears bothering us? Or have we had the flu, making us weak, such that we would choose not to fly? I would bet, however, that most of us do not think long and hard about our emotional health before flying. Even small things like an argument with your spouse or kids can interrupt the pre-flight mental flow, increasing the risk of that flight.
Stress and anxiety from events like a death in the family can impair judgment, decision-making, and overall performance. The human mind simply cannot isolate or box out the grief, such that all of your attention can be focused on flying the plane. There are enough factors outside of our control that make flying dangerous, without adding additional dangers by flying when our mind is occupied by such a strong emotional loss. In this condition, we simply are not thinking clearly to mitigate the inherent dangers of piloting an airplane.
On that Thursday in October after my dad’s funeral, I knew immediately I would be out of the cockpit for a while. My dad had inspired my passion for flight. I remember going to the FBO in San Antonio as a kid and watching him get the plane ready to fly. He and his father both flew in the Confederate Air Force (now the Commemorative Air Force), and as a family, we routinely flew in the Beech 18 that he flew in air shows for the CAF. We nicknamed that airplane as kids “The Chocolate Airplane” because of the World War II paint scheme that still decorated the fuselage. My dad had ratings in all sorts of planes and helicopters, and I know he would have cautioned me against putting my family in the Mooney that day. I did not feel confident that I would perform to the best of my ability, and anything less than total confidence when flying is unacceptable.
Luckily, my partner in the plane and a friend came to San Antonio to pick up the Mooney and fly it back home. I hopped in the passenger seat of my wife’s SUV, and we all drove the seven hours back home. It is the only time I can remember that I had no desire to fly instead of drive. I cannot remember another time that I was not looking up in the sky and whispering to myself something like “we could have been home by now if we were flying.” Instead, I was happy to ride silently, lost in my memories.
Next time you are pre-flighting your trip, stop and add an emotional assessment to your own FRAT checklist. Are you on the smiling side of the emotional scale or the other end of the spectrum? Just because the weather is perfect, the plane is mechanically sound, and you just have to get to your destination, doesn’t make it a good day to fly. If your emotional engine is not in peak performance mode, consider driving instead.
