Long one today in the Input sections, so I’ll keep it short up here. We’re into Bowl Season, which I both love and regret, as the culmination and conclusion of the college football season. It’s great to see teams get the chance to celebrate a season and play one final game for joy, but it, to me, marks the true beginning of the darkest part of Winter. Here’s to the kids, and the games (and #GoBulls! 🤘).
What I read
This article in the Washington Post, “Pilots hide mental health problems so they don’t ‘lose their wings’”
My father was an airline pilot. He started out flying as an officer in the Air Force, then took a job at Republic Airlines, which was bought by Northwest, which was later merged with Delta. As such, I’ve heard many, many stories about the business from the flight deck. And everything in here tracks.
I remember stories about pilots he worked with with hidden drinking problems, with mental health issues, and one very memorable one about a pilot who would, he told me, claim to “float outside his body to examine the plane” like some sort of transcendental out of body experience.
My father flew wide-body jets much of his career. 747-400s, with hundreds of passengers on board. He used to tell me that his biggest fear was making a mistake that hurt people. That there was a persistent worry about “bending one.”
Towards the end of his career, and then his life, he went on a medical leave, for mental health issues.
At first I thought it was some sort of ploy. He was an expert at flying the contract, finding all of the advantageous rules and policies to maximize his earnings. Picking up trips at the last moment that the airline was desperate to staff, finding the right patterns of back-to-back flights where it was likely they’d have to replace him for delays and pay for his whole trip. He was a good pilot, but he went to school for computer science. He knew how to work a logical system like a pro.
But, in talking with him more, I learned that he was getting to a point where the stress and the mental weight of the job were catching up to him. Delta was retiring the 400, and he’d have to retrain on an entirely new airframe after a decade of experience, and didn’t know if he could do it. If he still had it in him.
More than anything, he was worried about doing something stupid in the sky. Hurting people. Hurting himself.
He took leave for the last few years of the job, then took a buyout rather than retrain. And then he died, not a year later. It was a heart attack, but I’m certain no small part of it was the stress of the responsibility, the pressure of the job raising the pressure inside him, until it finally gave out.
I sincerely hope this article can be a wakeup call for the FAA and the industry, especially as a massive chunk of their workforce ages out of the job. It’s time to make the changes needed to ensure the continued safety of the industry, the crews, and everyone that flies. The industry has adopted Just Culture as a way to improve procedures and mechanisms without the fear of hiding from blame. I hope they can extend the same to the role mental health plays in the lives of their employees, see it as an opportunity to treat the issue without judgment, and renew the faith of all in a system meant to keep everyone safe.
What I watched
Caught the first two episodes of World War II: From the Frontlines on Netflix. It’s incredible seeing some of this footage from theaters of the war that get short shrift in America.
From the invasion of Poland to the defense of the Russian frontier, to movement in North Africa, most of the American cultural experience is tangential at best. Our media and Hollywood love to focus on Europe from D-Day to VE Day, ignoring much of the African front, Italy, and the Allied experience in the East.
Hearing participants, from both sides of the war, discuss their personal experiences, alongside footage embedded within the conflict, is a sight to behold. Highly recommended.
What I listened to
Listened to albums from Blondshell and Sincere Engineer on the recommendation of Patrick Hicks, who I follow on TikTok. Patrick is a music historian and fan, and tells amazing stories about interesting backgrounds and crossovers and emergences in music.
A favorite is his story about how three fundamental components of black culture in the 90s all came through the same call center: https://www.tiktok.com/@patrickhicks82/video/7292817678169869610?lang=en
Projects In Progress
Webapp: Put some work into defining the classes and, thus, all the collected information I’d need defined to display data to users.