96 SA Flyer

All pilots have the

procedure for when

the powerplant

suddenly goes silent

drilled into their

heads during ab

initio training.

HE single-engine

pilot has it fairly easy:

Cessna has their well-

known ABC checklist

which starts with

setting the Airspeed

for best glide while we

gure out what to do next.

Then there is the WOSSS checklist,

which we use to gure out the Best place

to land by doping out the Wind, Obstacles,

Surface, Slope and Surrounds when our

dream of ight turns into a fearful ght to

stay alive. Finally there is the Checklist for

what might have caused the engine to lose

power.

For the multi-engine guy, he is usually

distracted by all that ‘dead foot, dead

engine’ stuff before he starts thinking about

the ‘dead pilot’ part as the working engine

takes him to the scene of the accident.

TAKE A PAUSE

One challenge we face as pilots is that

we cannot pause the game when things

go wrong. Unfortunately, in an emergency,

we have to become autopilots and rely on

our pre-programming to get us through

the immediate problem. We develop this

programming by simulating those problems

long before they actually happen, by sitting

quietly and thinking about it, getting our

minds to focus on the best responses,

by revising our actions over and over in

our minds, so that when the unthinkable

happens, we don’t need to think – we just

do it.

TAKE A STEP BACK

But there is a bigger picture which the

pilot is also able to absorb and analyse.

Nobody likes pessimists and doomsayers,

but there are some real prospects of ill

‘Winds’ in the entire eld of aviation and

even bigger economic and socio-political

infrastructure.

We are surrounded by numerous

‘Obstacles’ to maintaining ight, like

regulatory overload, nancial collapse (tried

nancing an aircraft lately?) and prohibitive

operating costs.

We are surrounded by rocky ‘Surfaces’,

crime, poverty and the lack of business and

employment opportunities.

The world economy is on a downhill

‘Slope’, a less than ideal place to land up

safely.

Our ‘Surroundings’ are also increasingly

hostile with few safe places to run to.

Oh look, we’ve just listed the items on

that familiar WOSSS checklist again.

SCIENCE FICTION

In the golden age of science ction

there were some writers who showed some

amazing prescience. Decades ago, author

Arthur C Clarke was best known for the

1968 movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.

Even earlier than that, Clarke

envisaged things we take for granted today:

smartphones, geostationary satellites,

tough monomolecular bres and a host of

other technologies.

But Clarke was an optimist. He thought

the space mission to Jupiter would already

be under way in 2001 and that there would

be a large populated base on the Moon.

In reality, the biggest aerospace event in

2001 was the demolition of the New York

World Trade Centre by airliners hijacked by

terrorists.

Perhaps the rather more cynical 1909

short story by EM Forster, ‘The Machine

Stops’, was a more accurate predictor of the

world we currently live in.

Forster quite astonishingly foresaw the

Internet and instant messaging 107 years

ago. But the denizens of Forster’s future

world lived in windowless chambers which

they seldom left. Direct human interaction

was rare. However, communication with

other humans was frequent, but was

facilitated through technological marvels

that Forster generally refers to as ‘The

Machine’.

Although his world physically isolated

people from one another, things were pretty

comfortable:

“For a moment Vashti felt lonely.

Then she generated the light, and the

sight of her room, ooded with radiance

and studded with electric buttons, revived

her. There were buttons and switches

everywhere – buttons to call for food, for

music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath

CHRIS MARTINUS, PRESIDENT AIRCRAFT OWNERS AND PILOTS ASSOCIATION – SOUTH AFRICA

The machine sts

Has the machine failed and

is aviation crashing?