Has Pornography Taught Us All to Live Track Up?

It occurs to me that pornography is the obverse of checklists.  Everyone talks about checklists, but no one uses them.  Everyone uses pornography but no one talks about it.  But that’s a sidebar.  I have been thinking about pornography lately.   Really about how culture affects the way we live and even how we fly.

I was working with a young flight student recently who had a difficult time seeing any merit to paper and pencil flight planning.  Having grown up with turn-by-turn navigation in his hand, he saw no purpose in calculating true course, wind correction, magnetic variation, airspeed, ground speed, and the other basics of getting from here to there by air in a fluid world.  We will teach him the basics and we will teach him how to use all of the marvelous digital tools available today and we will make every effort to help him become a safe pilot, but he brings to our training a view of the world and a set of assumptions and experiences that are much different than those of an earlier generation   I cannot help but wonder if he will always be missing something – a positional awareness, a sense of where he sits on the chart, on the landscape, on the globe, in the world.   North and south will have less meaning for him.  He will make all the turns but they will be merely disembodied numbers or, even less meaningful, merely twists and turns on a magenta line.

I have often espoused, here and elsewhere, a view that fundamental skills are essential to successful piloting, whether it be stick and rudder skills or basic navigational skills.  Yet I am reminded nearly every day that I am betraying my age in that view.  As an instructor, I notice that the pilot world is divided into “north-up” and “track up.”

Pilots of my generation are comfortable, sometimes even prefer, a north-up display on a moving map.  Pilots of younger generations prefer track-up displays.  Of course, this is a gross generalization, but I do note that younger pilots are almost lost with a north-up presentation.  North has little meaning for someone who has spent his life being told, “Turn left.  Turn right.  Your destination is on your left.”

Experience and enculturation matter.  As a culture, at least that part of the culture that populates the readily-available news sources, we have recently been engaged in a discussion about sexual politics, sexual harassment, assault, and generally boorish behavior.  All necessary, and probably long past due, although I doubt ruminations in The New Yorker trickle down to protect the women on the factory floor.  We see behavior in offices, workplaces, schools and fraternities that, entangled with sexual behavior or not, just seems brutish.  Think of the recent hazing deaths in fraternities, the sexual assaults by young men on physically and mentally compromised young women, the simple cruelty that seems at the root of behavior by young men these days.  I read today of a Cornell fraternity placed on probation for engaging in a practice these privileged young men call “hogging.”  Look it up.  I’m not going to talk about it.  Who raised these louts?  One wonders.  And one wonders what has created the boorishness that women tell me they have encountered from men their entire lives – and which, in young men, seems to be increasing and in some populations, endemic.

I have to wonder if the ready availability of pornography plays a role.  Although the more serious social scientists seem to have debunked the hysteria promoted by the Puritans and fear-mongers who warned us that pornography leads to sex addiction and all manner of deviant behaviors, a recent New York Times Magazine article, “What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn,” by Maggie Jones,  raises the question of whether the ready availability of pornography has at best confused and at worst warped the ability of young people of different genders to see each other as people.

I find myself glad that I grew up in an era when the underwear pages of the Sears catalog was as risqué as it got.  (Remember the Sears catalogs the size of the New York City phone book?  Remember phone books?  Remember “good,” “better,” and “best”?)  I am glad that I was not poisoned at a young age with the idea that women are props, that brutality was arousing, that friendship could not cross the gender barrier.  That’s about as personal as I’m willing to go, but I have to think that we who grew up in my era are better able to separate reality from fantasy, have a grounding that makes our understanding a little deeper, a little more humane.   Or maybe it’s just that by now we are older and have lived longer and have come to understand that we all hurt about the same.

Similarly, I think pilots who grew up in the era of the watch, the compass, the E6B, and the chart are better equipped to employ the technology now available to us without losing our soul to it.    Just a thought.

I have been working lately with a pilot of roughly my age, retired from a varied career in the airlines, who might prove my thesis.  He has been working toward an understanding and a mastery of the avionics installed in a Bonanza he has recently acquired.  Having flown Boeing and Airbus products with flight management systems and flight directors, having flown Cat II and III approaches, he is not unfamiliar with automation, but he respects the need to take its understanding seriously, and he is always cognizant of its limits.  We have had lengthy conversations about the appropriate use of automation in his flying.  We have parsed the flight manual supplements of his equipment, written procedures for its use, and carefully and progressively tested those procedures in flight.  He asks perceptive questions about the best way to utilize our tools, “How low should we trust the autopilot on an approach?”  “How will the GPS perform on an early missed approach?”  “Should we re-engage GPSS on the missed or hand fly?”  And the conversations are always multi-faceted and reasoned, never rote, never pat.   He has made it clear that basic airmanship, flying by hand, is his default, that he would not rely on the automation in his airplane to attempt anything that he could not do competently with his own hands.  And he acknowledges that his own hands may need some practice.  This, to me, is a worldly pilot, with a desire to learn burnished by years of experience, with a determination to use the tools in his airplane to achieve mastery, not to pretend to a mastery that, left to his own skills, he could not achieve.

Which brings us back to my thesis that, having grown up in aviation in an era when the fundamentals were all we had, we never became children of the magenta line, but rather will always be airmen on the yellow brick road.   And will be, now and forever, agog at the wonder of this relationship we have with the wind in the flying wires, the sky around us, and the landscape beneath us.  And we will always know where North is.