What I Learned from Airplanes

Image via Wikipedia

Airplanes have made it into many conversations lately. They are absolutly fascinating little contraptions. When you stop and think about how heavy those things are, it is amazing they can get off the ground at all. They are fast, safe, fuel efficient, expensive, and cool. But, inventing these things was quite the project.

To invent an airplane, you have to come up with a way to make it move really fast without touching the ground. As a matter of fact, wheel based propulsion is barely fast enough anyway, not that it matters because the wheel cannot push you anymore once you leave the ground. Flight requires something different.

Planes have to go fast, and they have to keep going fast. Slow is not an option, and stopping mid-air is not even possible. By the time you manage to stop moving forward, you will have already started moving back toward earth at a fairly terrifying rate.

To build a plane you must also find a perfect balance between many competing goals and objectives. The wing of an airplane provides the lift needed to fly by making the air above the wing travel farther thus faster than the air under the wing. Since the air underneath is traveling slower it is more dense and pushes the wing up toward the thinner air just above the wing. The problem is, this process also creates drag slowing the plane down, and remember if you go too slow you are going down. You also have to balance strength versus weight, capacity versus fuel efficiency, and hundreds of other variables.

As important as careful balance and calculated compromise are, some situations require you to go all out with no compromise. Sometimes the safest option is full-throttle. For example, landing on an aircraft carrier. The landing strip on an aircraft carrier is less than half the length of barely safe, so it would just make sense that you would come in as slow as possible. But “as slow as possible” is not slow enough. In order to make the stop, the jets have a tail-hook that catches a cable on the boat’s deck, which stops them right quick. Problem is, sometimes that hook misses, and then you fly right off the other end of the boat. If you are going slow at that point you are going to take a bath, so just in case the jets approach the runway at full take-off speed. If the hook misses, they fly around for another try.

So to fly you have to:

1. Discard a tried-and-true method. You have to ignore the old truism, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” You have to take risks and do something different.
2. Commit to a course of action and not stop until it is complete.
3. Balance many competing priorities and become a master of win-win compromise.
4. Know when compromise is not an option and take big risks even if (especially when) that is the scariest thing you have ever done.

Flying and being successfull in life have a lot in common. If you want to live the ordinary life, you can drive or walk. You will feel a lot safer (although statistically you are not), but you will not get anywhere fast and may not achieve as much as you would like.

If you want to be successful though, flying is the only way to go. You will have to take risks, do things differently than anyone before you, keep going when you don’t feel like it, balance, compromise, and when the time is right, throw caution to the wind and risk everything on something you know is right and worth the fight.

What I learned from…. was invented by Robert Hruzek. To learn more or participate click here.

Related posts:

1. You know you have to take risk to achieve anything. So do it already.
2. Quotes, Role models, and Principles
3. Quotes, Role models, and Principles
4. Let's go fly a kite
5. What I learned from metaphors for life