SLUMBER YA LUMBER
My first in-flight brush with mental fatigue happened quick as a big league fastball. Finishing up yet another long day of soaring rides and lessons, thoughts of warm food and iced tea on that last flight were distractions I fought to ignore. Then rolling to the tiedowns I dragged a wingtip before full stop, something I always try to never do. Aw heck. At that moment in Time, my name had become Miller.Just as I reached to turn off the radio they called from the office and asked if I wouldn’t mind taking one more double deluxe ride. Now that I remember, it might also have been the first time I felt less than entirely eager for any excuse to get back up in the air. But it wasn’t the first time I told a fib. “Sure,” I replied. They were newlyweds after all, so there wasn’t much choice.On breathless summer evenings in Vermont the way to keep a loaded 2-32 in the air more than a few minutes is to stay on tow forever, so that’s what we did. Ten miles out, over the Green Mountain state's highest peak I released and turned upwind. Coincidentally, a broad deck of stratus we’d watched for hours was just then arriving from the west and I privately welcomed the shade. Then two heartbeats into our separation turn we began falling through smooth clammy sink.Swing and a miss.We were angling away from the most formidable obstacle around, putting it behind and between us and our airport. I could have fixed that with a quick reversal and dive back across the ridge while we were still high enough, but decided otherwise to avoid startling the newlyweds. (They may have loved such a thrill, but no one wished them to lose their champagne...)Strike two, called.That polite airline turn amounted to a simple 270, but completing it seemed to last several minutes. By the time we faced the mountain again its ridge top stood well above us. There would be no more direct sunlight until tomorrow and even at this height the breeze was too light for ridge lift. Only eleven air miles from home and less than a minute off tow, we’d sunk below line of sight and out of radio range! There were plenty of places to land but, characteristic of New England geography the nearest real airport in sight lay two counties removed from our own. Though fully expecting things to turn out okay I decided to come clean ahead of time just in case, said I’d made a mistake and might have to land somewhere other than where we started.Strike three?No. Actually that was one of the few smart things I did on that flight. Faced with an unhittable pitch, all I could do was foul it off and wait for the next.It’s terribly important for passengers in a glider to have genuine confidence in their pilot. Even where a situation is perfectly safe, doubts about the pilot can make anything… everything scary. My knowing that the newlyweds were safe didn’t help them feel better. They deserved more. Would their longest lasting memories of this day be marred by the fool who frightened them crazy and blew their reservations for a honeymoon suite, or enriched by the steady captain who saved their wedding night with calculating proficiency? Besides, if we did have to land in the wrong place, declaring that possibility well beforehand should seem somewhat less incompetent than doing so only after it became obvious even to them… And even if their certainty of my ineptitude was terminal they still had no one else to get them down, and needed to believe I could accomplish at least that task safely.The bride screamed a little, but her doughty groom soothed and assured as if he’d already mastered the art. My gratitude for that was immense as my embarrassment, and I tried to express both with some kind of jovial quip. Whatever I said seemed innocuous enough – until we all heard it. Then something about its content or tone plopped in the back like a P-bomb jettisoned in wave sink. The silence back there was so powerful it seemed to absorb even the eternal, infernal white noise roar of our 2-32’s canopy. Censury depradation. “Wow,” I said, “bad humor as a noise suppressant, who knew?” More silence.Shut up and fly, I told myself. No one was listening anyway, least of all me. Undeterred, my voice sputtered on like fluid leaking from a ruptured vessel into the emptiness behind. For me a coping mechanism? For them a lunatic rattling to himself on the subway, though this loony happened to be driving the thing and seemed waaay off the tracks.“Which would you rather have," I asked, "a good pilot who’s a lousy comic or a bad pilot who can make even that hilarious?” (Sure it bombed at the time but, stack of Bibles, years later I heard the exact same joke get laughs on TV!)We had to go miles out of the way, around another range for a straight shot at our airport. Gliding along beside forested slopes sustained my flow of BS until we rounded the end of a long spur into our home valley and I sighed, “There you go, straight ahead.” From aft came the faintest applause, oddly sarcastic.As we glided lower across the flat, faint vestiges of buoyancy forced me to suggest that a chance thermal might keep us up till sunset. That was virtually impossible, I knew, but they didn’t. And they were sure to decline either way…They did, thank Gaia, opting instead to be down and in their room as soon (and away from me as far) as humanly possible. My personal sentiments were identical at that point, except perhaps in degree of intensity.All to illustrate that mental fatigue can be a hazard as insidious as any other. This episode hinged on a too-casual decision followed by failure to retreat from sink aggressively and soon. Both were ‘conservative’ actions, less imaginative and slower-witted than I’d have taken two hours earlier. Most student pilots last about one hour of soaring time before the complex and disorienting environment they're unused to exhausts them mentally. Experienced pilots may take that long just settling in for an all-day flight. But even marathoners are subject to fatigue, and marathoner or not, so are YOU.The solution to mental fatigue is simple, if not always convenient. Take a nap.Just be sure you land first.