284: Stop Fighting Your Mind

I was given...

Uh, somebody shared with me a fascinating video recently, and it was of, it was from the inside of the cockpit of a plane, and there was an instructor pilot training, uh, a rookie pilot.

And the instructor pilot, I, um...

Now this is roughly what happened, but they were up at about 6,000, 7,000 feet, and the instructor then deliberately was putting the plane into a spin.

So he, uh, was... kind of did that, and you can see...

I mean, like, even watching the video [laughs] I was feeling s- seasick watching it 'cause it just, the world started spinning.

And, um, he was gonna train the rookie pilot on how to get out of this, uh, crazy spin.

So they're going down, and they're dropping fairly fast, and the world is going upside down, inside out.

And you can hear the, hear the instructor speaking very calmly to the trainee pilot, "Okay, put your eyes on the altimeter now and call out what height we're at." And so he's like, "Okay, 6,000 feet." And you can see also that the trainee pilot is really holding, uh, the joystick, that's what I'm gonna call it, I haven't got a clue, but anyway, the joystick really, really tightly.

And as he's counting down, the guy says, "Keep your eye on the altimeter." And he's co- counting at, like, 5,500, and then you hear, um, the instructor say, "Okay, okay, when we get to 5,000 you're gonna let go of the joystick." And the trainee says, "I'm scared.

I'm scared." The guy says, "It's okay.

It's okay." So eventually the guy, they get to whatever, let's say it's 4,500 feet, something like that, and the guy says, "Let go of the joystick," which the trainee does reluctantly [laughs] and then he says, "Put your hands on the dashboard." So they both put their hands over on the top of the dashboard, like the dashboard of a car.

It's got all the se- all the, uh, different instruments on it.

And you can hear the guy said, "I'm..." Like, "Th- this is crazy," right? So he's putting his hands on the dashboard and he said, "Look," he said, "nothing has changed." So the plane is still going into a spin.

It...

N- nothing actually changed.

So the guy holding the joystick, it wasn't doing anything.

That's the first thing.

So he said, "Look, nothing has changed.

We're still doing the same thing." He says, "Now, just very gently," he said, "put your hand on the rudder and just gently push.

Just gently push." So the, uh, trainee eventually, reluctantly, puts his hand on the rudder and he starts to gently push, and very quickly the plane comes out of this spin.

It's quite incredible to watch.

Now, if you're into flying you probably know this already, but I'm guessing most people probably, who listen to this, probably aren't.

But I found it fascinating, and I went off to do some bit of research on it and I realized, oh, this is a thing.

And I also found some really interesting, entertaining stories where instructors were talking about situations with some people where they literally had to kind of like scrape their hands off the joystick completely.