What I Learned Today

Another great tidbit that I gained from reading Joshua Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein, is the Major system for memorizing numbers.

Briefly, the Major system is a series of rules for converting numbers into words (usually concrete nouns) which you can then lodge in your memory (or even better, memory palace). For example, if I wanted to remember that the 17 items required for VFR (visual flight rules) flight in an airplane are in paragraph 91.205 of the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations), I would create two words using the consonants B,D and N,S,L, like “bed” and “nasal”. Then I combine them in some graphic way, like imagining sticking a bed up my nose before getting in the plane.

Effectively, the Major system gives you the ability to memorize arbitrary numbers, for the cost of memorizing a mapping of 10 digits (0-9) to consonant sounds. If you need to remember longer numbers, you end up with a chain of images, which you can place into a sequence of memory palace locations to remember them in order. (I already tried out the memory palace method just to remember what those 17 VFR items actually are, and it seems to be working!) I’m looking forward to exercising it some more.

In Joshua Foer’s excellent book on the art of memory, Moonwalking with Einstein, he mentions the “OK Plateau” as something that all humans learning anything will encounter. This is the stage you reach once you’ve moved past “beginner” and are able to execute a task with some degree of automation. For example, when you first learn to type, you look for and consciously press the right keys. But at some point you learn where they are and can type without looking (or really thinking about individual keys). Foer pointed out something I’ve always wondered — if we tend to get better at something over time, why doesn’t everyone end up being a 100+ wpm touch-typist?

The “OK Plateau” is reached when you are doing a task “well enough” for your needs, and your brain moves on to focus its conscious effort on something else. So even though you might be typing every day (email, reports, documents, forms), you probably will settle into some particular typing speed that never really improves.

Excellent depiction by imagethink.

This is fine for tasks in which “good enough” is, well, good enough. But there are some things in which you want to become an expert, or at least push your performance to a much higher level. To do that, it seems, you must push yourself back into a conscious awareness of what you are doing and examine and explore where you are making errors or performing suboptimally.

“[Those who excel] develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant immediate feedback on their performance.” (Foer)

This means constantly pushing yourself to do more, work faster, tackle harder examples, and so on, and then to learn from your failings or mistakes.

I have been thinking about this in terms of my pilot training. There are significant parts of flying that I can now do with some degree of automation, and it is tempting to declare them “learned” and move my tired brain on to the other big poles. But it is also clear to me that complacency is not something you want to develop in flying – nor in driving – nor anything else that requires a good depth of experience and tuned reflexes. I’ve come across advice in different pilot venues that urge you to continue polishing and refining. How precise can you make your short landing? How precise can you be on airspeed and altitude? If you picked out an emergency landing spot, fly low and actually check it out. Is it as obstacle-free as you thought from higher up?

I expect there is probably a transition you hit once you get your pilot’s license. You go from regular lessons with an instructor (with performance expectations and critiques) to absolute freedom to fly when you want, where you want, with no one watching over your shoulder. At that point, it is up to you to maintain that same level of scrutiny and to critique your own performance. My instructor told me to always have a specific goal when I go out to do solo practice. I’ve encountered the recommendation that, after landing, you give yourself a grade for every flight. What did you do well? What was borderline? What new questions came up that you should research?

Foer describes chess players who learn more from studying old masters’ games (and reasoning through each step) than from playing new games with other players. Studying past games can be more mindful. Pilots can benefit similarly from reading through accident reports to gain knowledge about how things go wrong. AOPA offers a rich array of Accident Case Studies that provide a wealth of scenarios to think through and learn from.

For any hobby or skill, there are similar opportunities to make your practice time more effective at increasing your ability. Instead of playing through your latest violin piece, try doing it 10% faster and see what happens. Try transposing it to a different key on the fly. On your next commute, grade yourself on whether you maintained a specific following distance, how many cars in surrounding lanes you were consciously tracking, how well you optimized your gas mileage, or some other desirable metric.

Employing this approach to everything you do would be exhausting and impossible to maintain. But for those few things that really matter to you, for which the OK Plateau is not good enough, it could be what catapults you to the expert domain. If you’re interested, check out Foer’s short talk summarizing the OK Plateau and his advice for escaping it.

I recently took the written FAA Private Pilot exam. My first challenge was to find the testing location. My registration confirmation indicated that the test would be held at Mt. San Antonio College, but it simply gave a street address, without a building or room number. When I arrived, the college had no idea what I was talking about. When I called the CATS service with whom I’d registered, they didn’t have a building/room number either. However, they gave me a local phone number and I was able to call in and get additional guidance. Whew!

The proctor escorted me into a glass-walled room with three computer terminals. She checked my ID and my logbook endorsement, then spirited them away for safekeeping. She went through some paperwork and then called up a “demo” test (one question was “Who is in Grant’s tomb?”) to show me how the interface worked. Then I was left alone to dive in!

You are given 2.5 hours for the test. I had taken 3 practice tests, consuming about 45 minutes each time. But this time was the real thing, so I went slowly and carefully and took about 1.5 hours. I got 62 questions (60 graded and 2 “validation” questions, which are not distinguished). There were questions about weather and aircraft systems and instruments and flight planning, VOR navigation and airspace regulations and aerodynamics. I was surprised that I *didn’t* get a question about computing the heading to fly from A to B given winds of X. In fact, I didn’t get to use my protractor nor my E6B at all! :(

I spent a lot of time, like 15 minutes, on a single thorny question. It asked:

What is load factor?
A) The ratio of the bank angle to the stall speed
B) The ratio of the bank angle to the power-on stalling speed in a specified configuration
C) The maximum weight that the aircraft can support divided by the aircraft’s weight

At first glance, all three seem to be wrong. The first two can’t possibly be right just given a units analysis. Load factor is a dimensionless multiplier that is a function of bank angle. Options A and B are angles divided by velocities (degrees / knots?). Also, stalling speeds are not fixed values, so you wouldn’t be able to compute either one.

But option C has problems too. As bank angle increases, so does load factor. By this definition, an increase in bank angle would have to increase the maximum weight the aircraft can support (???) or decrease the aircraft’s weight (?!??!).

After the test, I looked this up, and I think option C was meant be worded “the maximum weight that the aircraft MUST support,” due to banking, and assuming that altitude is maintained. I am pretty sure that my test didn’t have “must” in the answer, but it’s always possible that I misread and then misremembered it. Anyway, I guessed C and either that was the answer they wanted or this was one of the validation (ungraded) questions. Either way, I think this is a terrible question since it doesn’t get at what load factor really captures — that banking trades vertical lift for horizontal motion. Wikipedia much more intelligibly states that “the load factor is defined as the ratio of the lift of an aircraft to its weight”.

I found these books to be very useful study aids. Do not simply dive into the prep book and trust that to get you through! It is (necessarily) a simplistic skimming of topics more thoroughly covered in the PHAK. But it does give you good example questions to practice on. I found that at least 40 of the 62 questions I got were in this prep book (or slight variants), and the remaining ones were on topics covered by (both) books. There were no surprises.

In the end, I scored 59/60 (98%). I missed this question:

The radius of the procedural Outer Area of Class C airspace is normally
A) 10 NM
B) 20 NM
C) 30 NM

I selected 10 NM because class C usually has a 5-NM low-altitude radius and a 10-NM radius above that. I didn’t recognize “procedural Outer Area” as referring to the larger 20-NM radius within which you’re encouraged (but not required) to establish radio contact. I am now required to receive remedial training on this subject from my instructor before I can proceed to the checkride. :) And maybe that will be one of the things the examiner zeros in on during the oral component!

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why my spin training lesson was so enjoyable. I think it comes down to feeling that much of my current regular training is fear-oriented: don’t get too slow, don’t get near a spin, don’t retract the flaps too fast on a go-around, don’t deviate from the centerline, don’t bank more than 45 degrees. This isn’t a criticism of my instructor; much of that fear is self-imposed due to the newness of the experience and the awesome responsibility of controlling a large machine in the air. And those warnings are about avoiding dangerous boundaries and, in some cases, experiences that have killed other pilots. Further, I understand that as a beginner, those boundaries need to be very conservative. But it’s taken a while to move past induced terror to some degree of familiarity, and that is a stressful place to operate in.

Spin training was different. Even though we were doing things that *should* have felt terrifying, it wasn’t scary at all. It felt like pure play. I got to just fly the plane. The plane was so responsive that I felt smoothly in control, even though all the controls were different from what I’m used to.

This has inspired me to do a bit more “flying the plane” while I’m doing solo practice. I’ve experimented with finding the true best rate of climb (when it’s just me in the plane, the speed is much lower than Vy!). Now I can sense when the plane starts to climb or descend by pitch changes in the engine noise. I *still* want to get better at sensing (lack of) coordination (why is that so hard???). I really like slow flight, with that feeling of breath-held tiptoeing, careful attention to rudder, and oh-so-gentle turns, because I can feel that the plane is in an altered, nearly wobbly state.

I also try to come up with variations on the things I regularly practice, to see whether there’s a boundary there or just an unexplored option. I ask my instructor first, to ensure I don’t do something stupid: “Can I try power-off stalls with no flaps? Can I try a power-off stall recovery without using the throttle? Can I practice coordinated rolls?”

But ultimately, I want to learn more aerobatic skills and really feel where those boundaries are. This article captures some of what I’m looking for:

“Aerobatic training will give you a feel of what it’s like to be at the edge of the envelope, and you will eventually be able to feel the changes as the aircraft passes in and out of its flight envelope, thus reacting appropriately and therefore avoiding any life-threatening stall or spin accidents.” From Why fly aerobatics?

Instead of “just don’t do that”, I can learn “here’s how that happens, what it feels like, and how to get out of it.” And maybe even “here’s how to do it on purpose”, like Patty Wagstaff :)

So now I just need to finish off my pilot’s license, and then there’s so much more I can learn!

I recently learned that there is a *maximum* age at which one can start training to be an air traffic controller. While a minimum age for various efforts is common, specifying a maximum age seemed curious, and especially given that the oldest you can be to start ATC training is 30 years old. So young!

Naturally, I wondered why this limit had been chosen. After some digging, I discovered that it derives from studies done in the 1960s and 1970s such as

• “Problems in Air Traffic Management: III. Implications of Age for Training and Job Performance of Air Traffic Controllers” by Trites and Cobb (1962)
• “The Relationship Between Chronological Age and Aptitude Test Measures of Advanced-Level Air Traffic Control Trainees” by Cobb, Lay, and Bourdet (1971)

Trites and Cobb (1962) conducted a study of ATC trainees and their subsequent job performance (in the first year of work) that showed a marked increase in training failure rates with age, up to age 45:

They do not speculate about reasons for the reduction in performance, concluding that

“Whatever the nature of the casual factors associated with chronological age and underlying the relationships of this study, there is no doubt that the number of potential training failures can be reduced and undesirable controllers eliminated by specifying a maximum age for entry into air traffic controller training. In the best interests of air safety and financial economy, establishment of an upper age limit is recommended.”

The FAA must not have heeded this advice, because nine years later, Cobb was still working to persuade them of the dangers of older ATC trainees. The Cobb et al. (1971) study is of 710 air traffic controllers, aged 21-52, that concluded that “age correlated negatively with 21 of the 22 aptitude measures and with training course grades.” This is a study of a biased sample, however: “because of their highly specialized pre-employment experience, these men were not required to qualify on the CSC ATC Aptitude Screening Test.” It is perhaps unsurprising that they might have lower aptitude measures, since these were not used to screen them as applicants. However, the negative correlation of performance with age is there. In Figure 2 from this paper, black means “failed basic training course”, hashed means “course grades comprising the approximate lower half of pass group”, and white means “course grades comprising the approximate upper half of pass group”:

The numbers in the right column are the number of subjects in each age group. “Although the subjects over age 34 represented only about 23 per cent of the 710 men involved in the entire study, their failure rate (31.1 per cent) in Academy ATC training was about three times that of the younger trainees.”

Cobb et al. went on to test these subjects on a variety of mental tasks, including simple arithmetic, spatial reasoning, following oral directions, abstract/logical reasoning, and a job-relevant task described as follows: “A highly-speeded test consisting of two parts of thirty items each. In each part, the subject is presented a flight data display for several aircraft and must determine whether certain changes in altitude may be directed without violating a specified time-separation rule.”

Performance on every single test, except arithmetic, was negatively correlated with age.

Maybe this result, or others like it, did the trick. The right of the FAA to establish a maximum age for its air traffic controllers was passed into US Law in 1972. The current version of the law states that

“The Secretary may, with the concurrence of such agent as the President may designate, determine and fix the maximum limit of age within which an original appointment to a position as an air traffic controller may be made.”