Embracing the new, seeking quality initial training and practicing are keys
It has been fun for me to be reintroduced into the world of pistols. As a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army, my assigned weapon was the Beretta M9 (9mm) for my entire 26-year military career. I was reasonably good at shooting it on the pistol range, but I never really knew the nuances of being a good handgunner, thankfully never defending myself with it in real life. I knew the basics and had good eyesight (which allowed me to qualify each year) on the range. I was much more refined at deploying the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk than at deploying the 9mm.
A few local friends of mine are true professionals with the pistol and with their encouragement I’ve joined a world that I have grown to enjoy: competitive pistol shooting. It has been so much fun to dive deep into a hobby that I think is fascinating! What has been most interesting is how the intricacies of aviation and shooting are similar. Thrust, weight, drag, gravity, airspeed and wind correction are terms that we use in aviation every time we fly and those terms are synonymous with terms that are used in the shooting world, such as ballistic coefficient, wind correction, drop, grain weight, projectile energy and terminal performance. A pilot will find easy translation between the two fields of study.
Although not as expensive as horses, skiing or aviation, pistol shooting does come at a cost and the first is buying a pistol. Just as in aviation, you’ll hopefully find a quality instructor to guide you through the myriad makes and calibers. The next big decision you’ll make: Will you use open sights or a red dot? Don’t underestimate the weight of this decision! It has huge downstream ramifications to your approach to shooting.
Traditional open sights are still prevalently used with pistols. Line up the rear sight with the front sight and your target then pull the trigger. It’s a little more nuanced than that, but a newbie to pistol shooting can usually group some shots with that rudimentary knowledge alone.
Humans have been doing this for centuries (arguably millennia) with success and it works. It works because it is easy to acquire the target and line up the sights. But there are problems. The human eye can only focus on one depth of field and when shooting we are supposed to focus on the front sight. This means the rear sight and the target should be slightly out of focus. This is not a big deal if you are shooting steel targets, but it can be a real problem if you’ve got an assailant (target) charging you and you need to defend yourself. It can also be a problem if you want to shoot your pistol at longer distances. It is hard to line up that which you cannot focus perfectly! But now we have a red dot available in the marketplace.
Improving with technology
A red dot is the colloquial name for a reflex sight that casts an illuminated reticle (usually a red dot, but I’ve seen a green dot too) on a glass lens mounted on the rear of the pistol. Look through the lens and place the red dot on the target and then pull the trigger. Assuming a proper bore sighting, the bullet should hit the target. The red dot is the new-fangled way to do it and it works really well. Like open sights, though, there are problems. Until the shooter has lots of practice, the red dot can be hard to find in the lens when indexing the pistol at a target. Also, the reflex sight is mounted on the pistol slide which slams back violently with each fired round. The red dot takes an immense amount of abuse. Manufacturers get better with every product iteration, but any electronic device can fail under such torture.
So, if you buy a pistol, should you buy a red dot for your pistol? In the field of practicality, the red dot certainly is more accurate. Shooting tests repetitively show that an amateur pistol shooter will shoot closer groups, be more accurate at greater distances and gain confidence faster with a red dot. As with aviation, the younger crowd loves the technology and has gravitated nicely to the digital red dot. The older crowd has been far slower to migrate to the red dot.
The problem with the older crowd is habituation. Habituation occurs when patterns are created from repetitively doing an action for a long time. Old-timers have indexed open sight pistols thousands upon thousands of times, and it is simply an action that works. Changing to a red dot seems like an insurmountable obstacle, especially as we get older.
There is a lot of truth to the old axiom, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks!” It is not an ironclad statement that applies to everyone or every situation. But the older we get, the more habituation imprints and we simply don’t want to change. Or, worse, we begrudgingly change. Anything you do begrudgingly will be done poorly, without heart and without gusto. And so it was when I went to a pistol competition recently.
There were about 20 competitors and I brought my Heckler & Koch VP9 Match pistol with a new red dot mounted. I practiced for about two weeks prior to the competition and felt secure with my burgeoning ability. I finished the competition in last place! Last place!! I felt so humiliated. My problem was my inability to acquire that red dot in the lens quickly. Even when other shooters used open sights, they were able to align their hand and eye with the target faster than I could, allowing them to shoot more accurately and consistently at a quicker pace. Although I had a really nice pistol and the latest gadgetry to ensure I was competitive, I found myself in last place!
Applying this discussion to King Air flying
Habituation is found everywhere in the world of aviation and it is important. We love to do what we’ve always done and we begrudgingly adopt the new and better ways of doing things. Sometimes we are forced to make a big avionics panel change when the attitude indicator fails with gusto and we are told the device is not supported any longer. Or, to get that digital autopilot you’ve been dreaming of, you must also purchase the newest digital primary flight display that is completely different from what you had before. Does your spouse want Autoland installed in your King Air? The only way to get that functionality is to upgrade the entire system to Garmin’s G1000NXi and add autothrottle.
All this added functionality is fabulous, but it comes with the requirement that you learn some new tricks. If we are being truthful, it’s not just a few tricks that must be learned – an entirely different scan must be developed.
A scan that works great for a six-pack flight display won’t work for a digital Garmin display. The Garmin display will force your eye to move to different places on the panel to get the data you need. You will effectively have to learn an entirely new scan. And that Garmin display will provide you with a gob of data that was not available in the six-pack display. I absolutely love the flight path marker, the blue banana and the track vector. I think Synthetic Vision is singularly outstanding and I credit it to saving my life on a flight to Narsarsuaq, Greenland, when the weather was atrocious and my chips were down.
None of those fabulous offerings are available in older panels. Moving up in digital capability is great, but you must embrace the new. This is where we have problems in the King Air world.
To get good at your new-fangled panel, you must go flying and you must fly approaches. Approaches are flown at lower altitudes where you can visibly see the fuel gauges moving due to the high fuel burn. It’s expensive to turn two PT6s simply so you can practice approaches, but no one said learning that new panel was going to be cheap! If you are to overcome habituation, practice is not suggested, it is required!
What this really means is that you must start some new habits, you must become newly habituated. It means that you should become habituated properly the first time. If you begrudgingly adopt new technologies or fail to get quality initial training to create the new habits, then you stand a strong chance of being in “last place” on your next flight, as I was at my pistol competition. If you get last place shooting steel targets in a pistol competition, you are just embarrassed. If you make a “last place” performance in your King Air with that new avionics panel when the weather unexpectedly turns sour or your chips are down, it could spell disaster.
Applying habituation to the real world
A good example of habituation that caused me grief is related to the use of autothrottles. In a King Air, we’ve been briefed on the importance of setting the power on takeoff and then adding friction to the power lever quadrant to keep the power levers from migrating aft. Tom Clements has been accurately articulate about the importance of adding the friction on the takeoff roll to preclude power lever migration. But when autothrottles are installed, the quadrant friction is not to be applied as the friction will inhibit the throttles from advancing or being adjusted by the autothrottle.
On a recent flight, I advanced the power levers, added friction and soon discovered the autothrottles failed on the takeoff roll. I’m now rolling down the runway at 50+ KIAS and had to abort the takeoff to figure out what happened. I announced my aborted takeoff, exited the runway and discovered that my habituation of adding friction on the takeoff roll precluded the autothrottle feature from working.
It was a simple problem, but change those conditions slightly (short runway, low visibility/ceiling, heavy) and this could have been a dastardly accident, all created because I had not created new habits. I was habituated to add the friction and I got “last place” on that takeoff attempt.
Moore’s Law states that technology doubles every year and we’ve moved to a place in aviation where some truly incredible advancements are available to the King Air pilot who is willing to embrace the new. Are you one of those pilots? Do you like the new? If so, you’ll have to overcome habituation to become truly good at the new. Will you be better for it? Certainly. But only if you get initial training from a great instructor and then practice, practice, practice.
Another interesting and relatable observation from my pistol competition is that the top five shooters all used the red dot. The top red dot shooters dominated the best of the best open sight shooters. If you want to win in competitive pistol shooting, you must shoot with the latest gadgetry. But you’ll not just mount the red dot and go to the competition; you’ll mount the red dot and then learn to shoot with that red dot.
The same goes for flying. If you want to give yourself the most advantage when shooting that precision approach to minimums in terrible weather with your family or employees in the back of the airplane, when the conditions suck but you really want to fly that flight, you’ll want the best equipment on your airplane. You’ll want to be equal to the task. Are you willing to overcome habituation to be as good as your aircraft?
If you own a King Air, you have arguably the greatest business and personal airplane on the planet. Are you up to the task of flying it well? My prayer is that you are. Don’t just buy that new technology, learn to use all of it. Overcome habituation.