Recently I was accused of being a bit flippant about flying, due to the nature of some of my articles. The two people who took me to task over this were both pilots, one was an older guy doing it for fun, the other a professional. They both said one of my pieces in particular exhibited a blase attitude to flying, while in my defence some showed I was a concientious pilot concerned with the more serious aspects of aviation. I was quite taken aback. How could they possibly have thought that perhaps I took it seriously?

Though, seriously folks, does it have to be so serious? Most of the time very little is going on. Sure, there is always the possibility of something going wrong. But to spend every minute inside an aircraft wondering what might happen next is counter-productive. The pilots who fare best in an emergency are those to whom the normal run of the mill flight is no effort at all ; if you spend your whole time being over-alert, there's not enough brain power left to deal with the extra workload when the recycled food hits the cooling device. If you were relaxed before the incident began, all those spare grey cells can get to work on solving the problem.

A large percentage of pilots who lack ability do so mainly because they place themselves in a high state of arousal (I ain't talking sex here) every time they open up the throttles and point it down the runway. Put them in a sim, and they get even more stressed out, so , at the end of the two days, they've scraped through their check, and done nothing extra. You can tell who these guys are when you get in the aircraft after them. The seat is high, the seatback upright. You have to get the wipes out and clean up the yoke.

In contrast one Captain turned up in the sim having done no preparation whatsoever. He'd been out for an Indian the night before and then watched TV until one in the morning. The previous night he'd been down the pub.When he admitted this to me, I asked him if he wasn't worried about his check.

"How much time am I going to have to prepare when it happens for real?", he asked me.

Needless to say, he sailed through his check-ride.

The strangest thing, though, there's even people flying for fun, in microlights, gliders, light aircraft, whose pulses rise dramatically every time they encounter anything remotely unusual. Like a few knots crosswind. A shorter than normal strip, but one well within the capabilities of their aircraft.

Come on, people, lighten up, you're doing it for fun.

Flying is a serious enough business without us making it more so.

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