Learning To Trust the Instruments

Every pilot loves good flying weather. Picture this day: deep blue skies with small puffy clouds 3,000 feet up. The air is cool and dry, and you can see clearly for fifty miles. The windsock gently waltzes with a lazy south-west breeze. Everybody wants to fly in this weather.

Every pilot also knows that most days are not this pretty. A pilot who wishes to dependably serve others must be capable of flying when the weather is not so nice. That is why I have been training for an Instrument Rating. An instrument rated pilot can safely fly when there is nothing to see outside the airplane.

What is instrument training?

When flying visually, you look outside and intuition tells you where are and where you’re pointed. The mental process is entirely subconscious. When flying in clouds, all of the cues are needles, dials, and numbers. How do you know you’re right-side-up? The instrument pilot learns to process the abstract data into a concrete mental picture. It must be trained into the subconscious so conscious thought can be used for other critical flying tasks, like talking to Air Traffic Control or eating peanut butter crackers. This is the challenge of instrument flying.

To practice, we fly around with a hood that blocks the view from the windows. It resembles an grossly overgrown bill cap, and simulates flying in a cloud. The instructor then assigns routes, maneuvers, and approaches. Early this week I got the opportunity to actually fly in the clouds. When we got back, it took at least 20 minutes for me to wipe the grin off my face. That was fun. Here is a time-lapse with a lot of the middle edited out. (I’m not wearing the hood in this one, because it’s not a simulation.)

 

Is there a moral to this story?

There sure is.

As I’m learning to fly in this new way, I’m also learning to walk with God in a better way. God asks us to trust what He has written down, even when we can’t see it clearly around us. A pilot must trust his charts, maps, and instruments enough to know when he should start descending to the airport, even if there is a mountain down there that will hurt really bad if he hits it. God’s truth sometimes feels a little abstract. Can I really trust it in my situation today? What if God is wrong just this once? What if the skeptics and the critics see something that I’ve been missing?

Walking with God takes faith, and that doesn’t mean striking out ignorantly into the clouds. It means understanding the charts, maps, and instruments so well that trusting them is as natural as looking out a window. It takes a lot of discipline to trust your instruments. No one says it’s easy. It takes practice. So does faith.

“…take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ…” 2 Peter 3:17-18