Navigating the skies of self-discovery: Reflections on the Dunning-Kruger effect and my flying adventures

As covered in a prior newsletter, the Dunning-Kruger Effect states the less we know about a particular topic, the more we think we know. It’s what won David Dunning and Justin Kruger the Nobel Prize. The effect was discussed in the above-referenced newsletter on motorcycle riding, so I’ll not elaborate much here, other than to say this critical cognitive bias is present in all humans. I’ve been working hard to catch myself before walking into this soup.  The result is I find myself listening more and talking less.

Another area in which I’ve been exposed to the impact of Dunning-Kruger is in the area of flying. I mean mostly airplanes, but other things one can use to navigate in the air. Like my discussion on MC riding, I dipped my toe into flying, too, but not nearly as far.

In October of 1960, dreaming of flight

From an early age, I dreamed of flying like a bird. With a dish towel from my mother’s kitchen tied around my neck, I’d race up one side of a dirt mound in our backyard and launch myself into the air at the top, hoping to soar off like Superman. It didn’t work, but not from a lack of attempts.

In my twenties, Cessna offered a low-cost path to getting your pilot’s license and soloing an airplane through its Cessna Pilot Center program. The classes were cheap and subsidized by Cessna using their 172 training plane.  The goal of the program was to stimulate interest in flying and expand the market of people who could buy airplanes. The highly discounted classes ended soon after your first solo flight but a few lessons short of your private pilot’s license. (Sneaky.)

On graduation (after just 10 hours of flight time) the cost increased even more, especially if you wished to take anyone else up for a ride or travel very far from the home airport. So I quit. Besides the cost, I’d learned that airplanes were noisy and mechanical, not the “fly like a bird” experiences in my dreams.

A few years later a friend purchased a hang-glider. After a few hours of practice with him, he let me try it.  I ran most of the way down a short hill before lifting off, climbing to an altitude of, at best, perhaps 6 -10 feet in the air lasting for less than a minute.  On landing, I once again had to run like hell to keep from falling. This was in Minnesota. There were no mountains to jump from.  In the end, this did not feel good and I quit.

The car mechanic working on my Lotus Elan enticed me to try parachuting.  He was in a club and they were anxious for new members.  One Friday I went through their jump school, learning everything you were supposed to know and do.  The next morning was my first jump – a static line jump.  This is where you jump from the open door of the airplane with a rip cord attached to a line on the plane, making the chute open automatically as one fell. This was fun.  The experience provided a host of firsts and was followed by a few more jumps.  I even got to the point of opening the chute myself.  But the club was focused on free-falling in a group, holding hands, and forming circles. I found free-falling noisy, and windy, and controlling myself in the air was hard – I had a tendency to tumble. I preferred to open the parachute soon after exiting the plane and gently float down under the canopy, admiring the view and the incredible and total lack of sound.  I soon abandoned my sky-diving phase.

A customer of mine at Schaak Electronics in Rochester, John Kaplan, was building a fixed-wing glider in his basement. I was fascinated, and soon I was joining him and his glider club at a small airport near Northfield, MN, taking lessons and flying the club’s Schempp-Hirth, German-made gliders. Fun, but still noisy – not from an engine, but from the air rushing over the glider’s surface areas. But I fulfilled one dream, giving my father a glider ride, which he loved. One weekend when I was not there, they had an accident, killing a glider pilot, damaging the tow plane, and destroying one of the gliders.  I never returned.

My final flying experience was paragliding in Los Angeles.  It was the closest to a bird-like flight for me.  The group I joined frequently launched from Soboba Mountain southeast of Riverside, CA.  On July 3, 1991, the LA Times featured me with a on the Sports Page of the newspaper.  I loved paragliding.  It was the closest to flying like a bird as in my dreams as a kid. I was getting better at it, too.  So good I began to show off a bit.  One day, waiting at the top of the mountain for a group of students to launch, I easily inflated and collapsed my wing, showing off.  On one inflation, a gust of wind picked me up and I found myself being pulled backward, toward the backside of a mountain, where a drop would have likely killed me.  Thinking fast, I collapsed my chute from a height of about 20 feet and dropped like a rock into some desert bushes, spraining an ankle and scratching my arms and face. But not dead. And so again, after a few days of thinking about it, I quit paragliding.

I have many friends who fly, both recreationally and for some it was a part of their jobs.  I admire and appreciate what they do, what they’ve learned and the mindset needed to fly safely and be prepared for emergencies.  My pilot friends meticulously go through pre-flight checklists, paying attention to everything. It takes little effort to recall the shortcuts and abbreviated checks I made on my gear and metal preparation before flying.  Describing me as “an accident waiting to happen,” is not altogether wrong.  When my pilot friends are together and start talking about flying, I know to keep my mouth shut and avoid being an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Under the canopy in the early 1970s.