Our streets would be safer if more drivers took flying lessons

By Gordon Clark, The Province July 29, 2013 1:09 AM  

There's a joke about pilots some people may have heard: "If you go to a party, how do you pick out the pilots? Answer: "Give it five minutes, they'll tell you."

I'm a pilot. Damn! See what I mean? I've been flying for nearly 13 years, having dreamt of becoming a pilot since I was little. I blame watching all those Apollo moon missions during my formative years. Those astronauts seemed larger than life, not to mention cool.

Like most people not in the Royal Family (who all seem to get free, taxpayer-funded flight training as one of their many perks of birthright) cost kept me from flying for many years until one day in my 30s, my wife and I lost a friend to cancer, one of those poor unfortunates who don't get the second half of their lives. She was the first of our contemporaries to, as the French say, "eat her birth certificate."

With that stark lesson in living your dreams before it's too late, I talked to my wife if we could sort-of afford for me to take flying lessons (we couldn't but she's a great sport), checked if my life insurance would cover me making a big hole in some Langley field (it did) and made an appointment with an instructor at Pacific Flying Club.

I now have a commercial licence and recently got trained to fly float planes, which is so much fun that if I had to pick between float flying and sex I'd seriously consider celibacy. You have not lived until you've flown up our province's gorgeous coast while 400 feet off the water. Flying is so much fun, I wish everyone could do it, but there's a more important reason beyond the pure joy of it that makes me wish more people took flight training and that is the way it instils in people a culture of safety while operating motor vehicles. In short, I think there'd be a lot fewer lousy drivers on our streets if more people took flying lessons. I'm not exaggerating to say that every time I drive these days someone nearly hits us.

There are few statistics available showing that pilots are better drivers, short of the fact U.S. insurance adjusters reportedly offer lower auto-insurance rates to commercial pilots. But I do know that I became a better driver after learning to fly from applying what I learned about safely operating an aircraft - don't rush, know and obey the rules, be aware of what's going on around you, look after your machine, be courteous to others and don't fly when upset - into my driving. I remember heading home on Highway 99 after my lessons far more aware of not speeding, leaving more room between me and the car ahead and being more careful when changing lanes.

Aviation is safe only because pilots look out for and are courteous toward one another - both things that seem to decline every year on our roads.

Can you imagine if pilots behaved like the average Metro Vancouver driver? You'd have two jetliners racing each other on final approach to land, each giving the other the finger through their cockpit windows, swearing over the radio, while trying to cut each other off. It would sure be exciting for passengers.

Cyclists could also gain from taking flight training. The way some of them drive is the aviation equivalent of an ultralight trying to swerve in and around jumbo jets near an airport. You might get away with it for a while, but eventually you'd get sucked though an engine or knocked, spinning out of the sky.

When flying, especially in light, single-engine aircraft, height offers safety: if your engine quits you have the time and ability to locate and glide to a spot for landing. (You're trained to constantly identify emergency landing spots as you fly along your route.) If you fly too low, you lose that edge in safety. In cars, as my late stepfather Don, a Second World War bomber pilot, used to say, the same thing happens if you drive too fast - it reduces your ability to react to emergencies, whether it's one of your wheels falling off (which happened to one of my uncles), someone cuts you off or a moose runs out in front of you on the highway. As any Mountie in northern B.C. can tell you, hitting a moose in a car is more or less the same as driving into a windshield-height I-beam. It's not good to take a moose in the face at really any speed.

Not everyone can be a pilot, but I bet driving would be a much more pleasant, safer experience if more drivers behaved like them.

Story:  http://www.theprovince.com