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Lost on a Low Level Flight
Back in the last century, when I was in flight school in the Marine Corps, I was stationed for a time in the vacation destination of Kingsville, Texas. At one point, Mother Nature decided to send a massive hurricane our way.
With the hurricane inbound, a young instructor and I—he was 25 years old and I was 23—were told to take one of the jets and go away and get some training done. The instructor decided we were going to practice low-level flights to Houston and Meridian, Mississippi, on our way to Atlanta where his girlfriend lived.
And so, with the hurricane imminent, we took off from Naval Air Station Kingsville as my newlywed wife drove north, by herself, to Dallas to escape.
The low-level flight to Houston was good. We got gas and launched out of Houston.
Now remember, this was last century, way back in the days before GPS and digital cockpit displays. Low-level navigation flights were designed to teach you how to navigate using a paper map, a compass, and a stopwatch. You flew high-altitude to the start point, dropped down to 500’, accelerated to 420 knots, hit the stopwatch and used the compass to fly the heading to the next checkpoint.
You navigated by flying the correct direction for a certain amount of time where you would, hopefully, find your checkpoint. When you got to the checkpoint you turned the airplane to a new heading and flew that direction for a certain amount of time.
How did you know where you were? By flying the right direction for the right amount of time and looking out the window for terrain features—maybe a road or powerline or river or bridge—that matched your paper map.
Louisiana is flat, so there’s not many hills or mountains to help you stay on route. There are a lot of towns and roads and they all look the same.
We were about 10 seconds late hitting our first checkpoint—a river.
Crossing our second checkpoint—a highway—we were about 25 seconds late. The terrain wasn’t matching what was on the map very well. At one point, I saw a long line of numbered, colored boards go under the airplane. They looked somewhat familiar, but they passed so fast that I couldn’t tell what they were.
Flying the rest of the route was much the same. We were pretty sure we were lost. We got to the end-time for the route and were getting low on gas, so we started our climb to 15,000 feet and called air traffic control to get vectors to Meridian. It took air traffic control some time to find us. We were not where they expected we would be. We had been way off course.
After we landed at Meridian, the tower called us while we taxied and told us to give the Army base, Fort Polk in Louisiana, a phone call.
Fort Polk was quite unhappy because we had flown our orange and white airplane, 500’ high, right through the middle of their tank gunnery range.
While they had tanks lined up and firing.
Those colored, numbered boards? That was the tank range. Fortunately, tank rounds have a flat trajectory and went under us.
We figured out that the compass in our airplane was about 8 degrees off. That caused us to fly a bit north of our intended route. The deviation was small at the beginning but got bigger and bigger the further and longer we flew—until we were way off course.
It almost got us killed. We didn’t know where we were until we climbed to altitude. Air traffic control found us and gave us the reference points we needed to get to Meridian.
There are about 100 good lessons from that flight. Let’s talk about a few.
Lessons From Being Lost
Small Deviations Can Kill You
First, a minor course deviation is insidious over time. It can kill you.
If you start off headed completely the wrong direction, you can realize it quickly. The deviations are big and noticeable. If our compass had been 90 degrees off, we would have figured it out quickly.
When you’re only a little off course though, things are only a little bit off. Especially at the beginning. So, you keep going on your way. You think that things will figure themselves out as you go further.
Over time, however, the deviations get bigger and bigger. You get further off course. The terrain looks less and less familiar. You feel a growing uneasiness that you’re lost.
Bad things—like flying through a tank range while they’re firing—can happen. You can easily run out of gas while looking for a place to land.
Minor deviations in your direction are insidious. They slowly get worse over time. It can kill you.
Keep Your Reference Points
That brings us to lesson number two: Always keep an eye on your reference points. They will tell you whether you are on or off course. If you’re off course, they’ll tell you how far you’re off and how to get back on course.
We got lost flying this low-level route and didn’t read our short-term reference points—the checkpoints and timing—well. In the big picture, however, we knew that if we got lost, we could always climb up to altitude, ask air traffic control to find us, and get vectors to Meridian.
Air traffic control was our most important, strategic, reference point. As long as we didn’t run out of gas, we’d get to Meridian. When we did get lost, that air traffic control reference point got us back on course.
So, keep your reference points—especially the long-term strategic ones. They will save you.
Debrief Your Actions
Third lesson. When the flight is done, debrief what went wrong. After we landed, we sat down, went over the history of our flight, and figured out what went wrong. We realized that our compass had slewed about 8 degrees off over time.
We canceled that low-level into Atlanta and flew at high-altitude instead, cross-checking our compass heading with air traffic control.
Remembering what happened during your journey is critical for understanding where you are, how you got there, and how to stay on course.
Lesson One: Small deviations are insidious and can kill you.
Lesson Two: Keep an eye on your reference points so you can tell if you’re lost and get back on track if needed.
Three: The history of your journey is critical to understanding where you are, how you got there and why you’re there.
If you don’t remember these things, if you don’t keep these reference points, you run the risk of being perpetually lost with tragic—even deadly—consequences.
***
I think these lessons are critical as we think about our lives and our nation.
We’re lost. Disoriented. We don’t know where we are, how we got here, why we’re here or even where we’re supposed to be headed. We’ve lost our reference points.
Lost in Life
If you’re like most of us, life moves so fast that it is difficult to keep up.
Most of us go through life chasing what we think—what we’ve been told—we’re supposed to chase.
Go to the right college. Find a job that is prestigious, changes the world, pays well and is in a hip city.
Make sure your kids are in Honors classes in the best schools while you chase unending travel ball tournaments. Hire private coaches so your kid—who is highly ranked nationally in the U8 group—remains highly ranked when she gets to U11.
Are you saving the whales and dolphins and dogs and elephants and not using plastic straws or single use containers? Are you embracing meatless burgers, kombucha and tiger-nut milk as part of your keto-paleo-south park-adkins-intermittent fasting diet?
Sorry. Kombucha is so 2014 and tiger-milk is so 2018. Swap those for orange wine and milkshake IPA’s. Those are 2019.
Don’t forget to outperform in the workplace while avoiding weekend email and saving time between your wine-tasting micro-vacations, meditation, you-down-time and HIIT to get to those weekend travel ball tournaments.
By the way, a heads-up that cool people in 2019 may start replacing their Pelotons with a return to retro treadmills.
Drink the latest drinks. Dine at the latest restaurants. Take the latest vacations. Drive the latest cars. Electric cars.
Another heads up: If you haven’t planned your conscious travel, curated experiences or tech detox vacations, you’re behind.
That’s the first part of a long list of the things you are supposed to do in life.
Don’t forget to post it all on social media so everyone knows just how successful you are. You’ll know you’ve really made it when you’re able to sell ads on your social media.
How are you doing on that success list? Feeling the stress and anxiety of not measuring up?
No wonder that our stress and anxiety and suicide and unhappiness rates are rising.
All this even though we have more wealth, education and technology than any time in history.
How did we get here in our lives? Where is all of this supposed to take us?
America: Lost as a Nation
Then there is all the conflict going on in America. Our nation is falling apart into warring factions that only seem to yell at each other. Friendships have fallen apart. Families have fragmented.
People are quiet, afraid that they might say the wrong thing in front of the wrong people and get torched by their fellow Americans.
People feel like America is headed the wrong direction. They feel like American morality is collapsing.
What happened to American ideals and justice and common sense and just being nice?
We’re lost as individuals and as a nation. It’s overwhelming, confusing and makes us uncomfortable.
What’s the solution? How do we find ourselves?
The solution is straightforward.
We need to go back to our reference points and get oriented.
From our reference points, we can figure out where we are, where we took a wrong turn, and how we can get back on track.
That’s why this is called a Brief History of the Conflict in America and How We Fix It.
The Conflict is Not Liberal vs Conservative or Democrat vs Republican
As we go through history, we’re going to find that our current battle isn’t liberal versus conservative or Republican versus Democrat.
It is absolutely critical to remember this, so let’s repeat it: This battle in our society is NOT liberal versus conservative or Republican versus Democrat.
We are so used to framing everything in political terms, that it can be difficult to avoid automatically seeing everything in those left-right, Democrat-Republican terms.
The real conflict goes much deeper. It is a battle between an understanding of life—a paradigm—based in wisdom and love versus an utterly opposed postmodern paradigm of life that is focused on power.
That’s why this is called Wisdom and Love vs. Postmodern Power.
From here on, we’re going to call reference points anchor points. That’s because these points really anchor our understanding of life and reality.
As we prepare for the next session, remember some key points:
- Small deviations in course can lead to much greater deviations later. Small deviations can kill you.
- Keep an eye on the anchor points so you can tell if you’re lost and get back on track.
- We’re going to go back through history and use our anchor points to find out where we are, how we got here and how we fix it.
- As we go through the story, you’re going to see that the conflict we’re in is not a Democrat-Republican, liberal-conservative thing. It goes much deeper.
We are in a big mess today because we have three different paradigms—three fundamentally different understandings of life—in conflict in our society.
What’s in our next session?
Imagine walking on an athletic field and watching a team practice dribbling a football through a sand trap and a coach talking about the proper golf club selection for the free throw line and goal line.
Or imagine walking into a repair shop where the technician is trying to fix a gasoline engine with parts from an electric motor and jet engine.
What’s going on? Stay tuned for the next session.
I’m Pete Bowen.
Comments
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Jay Klohe On July 31, 2019 at 12:42 am
Love you, Brother! Truly looking forward to the next chapter . . .