Don’t use your bag of luck

“You start your career in aviation with a bag full of luck and
an empty bag of experience. The trick is to fill the bag of
experience before you run out of the bag of luck”
-Anonymous

When I first started my flying training in the AFTT at

prestigious National Defence Academy, this was one
of the first things we were taught. I remember my
instructor clearly explaining us the importance of
constant learning in an ever developing industry like
aviation. Combined with the ever changing
environment of the modern world the rate of change
in military aviation becomes simply difficult to fathom
to say at least. Now, coming to the quote or one of the
earliest learnings of mine about flying, the quote
highlights the importance of the times the luck plays
out on your side. The luck may play by your side most
of the times but not always! And it will always be the
case unless it's your first time because when it
doesn’t support you, you live possibly and mostly only
in tales to be told and lessons to be learnt
But things are not all that simple. They are in no way
just a story or rather I should say one odd instance in
aviation. Things need a much deeper analysis and
much deeper understanding as to why the accidents
or incidents happened the way they happened and
most importantly what could be done to mitigate them.
The Human Factor Analysis and Classification
System Or HFACS model currently employed to
analyse any accident/ incident is extremely successful
in finding out what happened. It clearly tells us why
someone took the decision that they took and what all
are the contributory factors to the decision making at
that time. However, one key flaw is that it may
highlight that the crew took the decision to say persist
on approach despite deteriorating weather or even
deteriorating navigational aids performance. It
considers that the crew might took the mission to be
critical when it clearly wasn’t especially when you
consider that the error took the life not only of the
crew but of multiple passengers in some cases. I want
to focus primarily on accidents/incidents attributed to
human error aircrew because as an aviator I
personally feel that these things are possibly the best
ones I can control and thrive to minimize. I will also
agree that in some cases the other contributory
factors have a pre warning before leading to the
cascading effect and finally ending up into the
situations where as an aviator it requires superior
skills to come over. If your bag of luck runs out that
day then you are welcomed to the elite fraternity of
“bold pilots”. But remember as they say, “There are
bold pilots and old pilots but no bold old pilots!”
Now, coming to key question in hand and the one I
would like to try to answer with my limited knowledge
and experience. I had always wondered as to why
would someone and above all an aviator be foolish
enough to pursue with a mission against all odds
despite the mission effectively not that very critical in
most cases. I have heard numerous times the “old
pilots” of the fleet advising the young “bold” ones that
there is always another day, especially in transport
stream unless it's a casualty evacuation or war. But in
more often than not there seems to be someone who
is bold enough to believe it to be the last day and
ensures it to make it one. But is it simply the
boldness, the “will not happen to me” attitude or
simply firm belief in ones skills? I believe it is a bit of
both. The first two reasons are personal attributes and
I personally believe that although a small amount of
all of these attributes can prove to be extremely
helpful and handy to especially military aviators the
excess of them needs to strictly avoided. Remember,
your “will not happen to me” attitude only survives till
your bag of luck empties and your boldness will only
help your story to be either more interesting or foolish
but in neither case will it help you tell your story. Now,
coming to third and one of most important factor, that
is belief in ones skill. Although, I agree a lot of it is
required to do any specialized job rest assured
aviation. A belief in ones skill becomes a lot more
important when you have a vintage fleet, tough
environment and a lot of other factors working against
you. But sometimes, we fail to realise that these
factors are self induced and we let those factors pile
up on ourselves only due to the firm belief that our
skills will sail us through.