100 Hours of Doubt

I have to build up 100 hours of air time before I can do a tandem paraglider rating, allowing me to take passengers. I’m currently only at 17 hours, but it’s goal I want to focus on while I am here in India so one day I can take my sister for a flight, and share the experience with others.

I’m excited about all the things I’ll learn over the next 83 hours flying. I already know some of the things I have to learn and how I will learn them. For instance my spot landings need improvement. That will come partly with practice and familiarity with the equipment and locations, and partly with new techniques that I am currently only vaguely aware of.

But I’m even more excited that I will learn things that I don’t yet even know I need to know about.

I’m sure there will be some scary moments and mistakes I make along the way, but hopefully the consequences will be no more severe than a few sobering flashbacks and lessons learnt, making me safer for the passengers who will one day trust me to fly them.

There are 2 ways of making mistakes. If you are unsure, you take your best guess in the knowledge that it might be wrong. But the more dangerous type of mistake is when you are sure, and it turns out you are wrong in your conviction.

Far from making me more confident, this journey from the UK and the encounters with people of different beliefs and practices has made me even more unsure about how the world works. There is so much variety and countless right and wrong truths. If there is one thing that I have become certain of, it’s that people who are convinced they are right are the most dangerous. Be it political, religious, environmental, or philosophical; any fervent belief belies a very narrow view the world and an intolerance of diversity. We are too varied a planet to be intolerant of diversity, and too varied for one set of ideals to work universally.

Perhaps leaders would do a better job if they were more uncertain and indecisive, ready to procrastinate more. As I’ve always said, if you put something off for long enough, you won’t have to do it at all. Probably not the most effective approach, but it’s useful to temper every decision with the humility that it might be wrong no matter how sure you are.

Soaring a ridge in lighter wind is a balancing act. The closer you get to the hill, the more lift you are likely to find, but there is always a risk you can hit a pocket of sinking air when you are too close, and end up dropping onto the slope below; a lovely euphemism for crashing. Every inch of the way you are feeling the lift while adjusting your position and direction, assessing the terrain ahead and predicting what the air is doing over it. Even though you might know the contours of the hill well, the nature of wind is too variable to assume any certainty in the air’s behaviour.

At university a fellow student wrote his dissertation on how to make decisions based on uncertain information. It was such a theoretical paper that I think the practical engineering professors failed him, but in essence it said that you had to make decisions that firstly kept your options open, and that secondly allowed you to move to a position of less uncertainty so you could make a better decision.

So bring on the next 83 hours full or confusions and re-evaluated certainties. Whatever lessons I learn, I’ll always be moving to a position of less uncertainty, but I’ve already accepted that whether I’m on the ground thinking about the heavens, or in the sky thinking about the world, I should cherish and nurture my doubt as much as I cherish and nurture my truths.

Gliding

“When you start, Paragliding is 90% physical and 10% mental. But it becomes 10% physical and 90% mental” TJ is giving a pep talk to the students starting their first day training course and as usual I’m eves dropping to see what I can pick up.

My first flight was about a year ago, but the poor conditions in the UK meant my training never moved much beyond the 90% physical stage. Then in Annecy the mountains, thermals and ridge lift transformed my understanding of the sport, and opened my eyes to what paragliding was really about.

Sitting on launch sites feeling for the slightest changes in wind, looking at the hills and clouds and theorising about what might be influencing the airflow has become such a pleasure that it almost feels like the game is half over when I decide conditions are right for launch. In the air, pulling neat flat turns is no longer as important as deciding when to make those turns. The satisfaction of searching for and finding lift along a ridge after you’ve dropped below takeoff to nurse your way back up again with smooth flying and well timed turns, is immense. “I did that”, I tell myself as my perspective on the launch site comes level and then rises over it. Well me, and the wind, and my wing did that.

Arriving in Kamshet I was full of courage, but not confidence. I’d try launching my glider in strong winds, but I’d be nervous, relying half on luck and half on skill, that the inflation would go as planned.

Ten days later I’ve had great conditions to build up my airtime and practice ground handling; inflating and deflating my wing, adjusting my position for the best takeoff line and feeling for the nature of the wind before trusting it with my gravity. It’s the ground that hurts when you hit it, not the sky, so it’s often said you should practice ground handling for as many hours as you spend in the air, but in reality hardly anybody matches it hour for hour.

This week I almost did, and now my ability to launch in stronger winds has improved immensely. I’m no longer wracked with nerves before I pull on the risers to lift the wing above me ready for takeoff. My actions are now more intuitive than reasoned, and therefore faster and more effective.

I’ve even become an honorary member of the Temple Pilots flying team. My time with Avi, TJ, Tom and the others have given me confidence and skills to feel like I am a real pilot now, instead of just a guy ready to throw himself off a hill. I’m very proud of my progress.

Before each session Tom leads the instructors and students in a stretching session. In truth it’s a 10 minute yoga routine, but I’m too curmudgeon to admit I’m doing yoga so I call it a warm up. During that time Tom invites us to “visualise” us accomplishing our flying tasks. It’s the sort of voodoo mumbo jumbo talk I’ve always sneered at, but standing on the edge of a launch area 200m up, in 25km/h winds it really makes sense, and provides a meditative moment that calms and focuses me.

Watching an eagle effortlessly gliding a few feet along side me, I realise I have some way to go before the 10% physical/90% mental stage, but the weeks’ experiences have also convinced me that flying in the thermals and updrafts has a large spiritual component too. Once in the air, understanding how the air is flowing becomes less of an intellectual puzzle and more about feel. The privilege of playing with something as big as a mountain and all its forces is both elating and grounding. Nurturing that spiritual sense is as important as learning how to pull aerial manoeuvres.

The Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics Coma

It’s one of those geeky subconscious thoughts that you have while you are doing something else. Distracted, you don’t even realise your mind has wondered into the subject until the thought resurfaces later and you track it back to what fired it in the first place. The philosophy of machine maintenance.

During a conversation my eye is drawn to the worn truck tire behind the guy I’m talking with. The conversation continues while I’m looking at the construction of the cross matting visible where patches of rubber are missing, thinking about how many plies the tire has, how much rubber is left before the steel inserts pop through, and if the rolling surface will puncture before the cracked sidewall splits over a pothole. It’s a 13 tonne Indian truck which means it’s probably loaded with about 40 tonnes. My guess is the side wall will go first. In fact my guess is that the side wall should have gone a long time ago.

When I was starting my brief career as a manufacturing engineer, Planned Maintenance (also known as Preventative Maintenance or PM) was the newest thinking from Japan. By having a schedule for maintaining your machinery you could pre-empt breakdowns and reduce the lost running time, increasing the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of your line. I was never that convinced that applying PM to every machine was for the best. It meant stopping the lines to fix things that weren’t necessarily broken, and with some machines they’d spend more time stopped for maintenance than they ever would have for unexpected breakdowns.

The secret was to have a good PM schedule, that understood the design of the machinery and the lifespan of the components, but even then, the rated lifespan and load tolerances of components are always underestimated with safety factors so PM schedules are inevitably an overcautious approach. Nonetheless from a commercial point of view having a line stop when you are expecting it costs a lot less than having a line stop when you aren’t, so PM makes good businesses sense.

And then Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics was born. CMD involves having sensors on machinery that give you an indication they are about to fail. For instance you might have a vibration sensor on a bearing that detects the increase in vibration which indicates it’s worn and about to fail. Marry that with a neural logic controller that learns how to predict failure rates based on the severity of the vibration and you have a system that can dynamically extend the schedule for maintenance shutdowns if the machine is running fine.

The dashboard indicators on cars that tell you when to service the vehicle work on similar principles, but they are mainly dictated by time elapsed and miles covered, unless something starts to go badly wrong in the meantime.

I don’t have a PM schedule for the bus other than regular servicing, oil and water checks, and I certainly don’t have a CMD controller in my 1989 truck. So my approach is similar to the Indian truck drivers that listen out for problems and carry enough tools to fix whatever situation might arise. I’ve seen drivers rebuilding engine blocks by the side of the road. I couldn’t do anything that extreme, but I don’t quite have the drive-it-to-destruction attitude that the truck tires here suggest, so hopefully I won’t need to.

Effectively I am the CMD neural logic controller. My ears and arse are the sensors that listen out for new noises and vibration, my right foot detects changes in performance and my hands feel for alterations in the handling. Any new behaviour is worrying, but unlike a well designed CMD system I’m not necessarily able to immediately identify what’s causing the symptom. In Turkey I first noticed a squeak from the alternator bearing. I wanted to change it there and then, but the mechanic I showed it to said it would last for 5000km. That was 8000km ago and it’s not getting any worse. That’s my neural feedback loop, learning how the extremity of the symptom relates to the remaining lifespan.

My journey isn’t paced against a tight schedule. I don’t have to be somewhere at a given time, so I can afford to have unexpected breakdowns which delay me. In fact as long as they don’t happen too regularly I love them when they do happen as it flings me into a new adventure with new people. Heidegger, a German philosopher said our minds function in an auto-pilot sub-consciousness most of the time until things don’t work as we expect and then we have to snap out of our slumber and actually think. Opening your front door is an automatic action that doesn’t require thought, but imagine the key won’t turn. You have to mentally change your plan, from entering your house, to figuring out how you are going to open the door. He called that moment “breakdown”.

Mechanical breakdowns cause me to snap out of my slumber and look again at where I am and what my plan is. I think Heidegger said that these moments of breakdown are the only times when we are really alive. If he didn’t say it, then I do. CMD, and the other engineered solutions that keep things running to the expected standards, and without surprise interruptions, also keep us in a relaxed mental state where we don’t have to think. Kind of like a coma. Maybe knowing you are only one pot hole away from a deadly 40tonne blowout conversely keeps you alive.

Child Labour

Shaylar hill is a sloped paraglider take off site half way up a sharp black granite cliff. To get there you turn off the road at Kamshet, a small market village on the old road between Pune and Mumbai, and bounce along the rock road for 30 minutes. It gets its name from Mr Shaylar, a toothless granddaddy who dispenses shot glasses of sweet milky tea for 5 rupees, and dirty laughs for free to the elated pilots in the landing area.

The site starts “working” in the afternoon as the westerly wind starts hitting the ridge and is diverted vertically upwards. It’s usually too strong until about 15h30, until the first pilots feel confident enough to wrestle their wings over their heads getting lifted vertically off the take off area. From there it’s best to head to the right and do a few beats over the U-shaped dry waterfall which directs the wind upwards even if the direction varies a few degrees. Then with enough height you take the plunge to head all the way left, back over the take off site, now with 50m altitude above it, to the far end where the ridge forms a ‘V’. It’s like an elevator taking you up 50m. A flat weight shift turn and you won’t lose altitude before a beat close to the granite cliff face and you are up another 100m along it, and soon above it with the view over the agricultural plateau stretching out for 20 or 30 miles below you. Once you’re up there you can potter about in the sky for 2 or 3 hours, or practice wingovers or spiral dives down 200m, before working your way back up again.

At most sites the car drops you at the top and picks you up from the bottom, but at Shaylar the dirt track is 2km away from take off, and in the 30degree heat, the walk from where the cars park can’t fail to soak you in sweat. Fortunately a gang of village kids besiege the cars as they arrive. “Carry? Carry?” they ask pointing at their chests with cutely furrowed foreheads. A simple “No Thanks” is all it takes if you don’t want their services, but herein lays the Shaylar dilemma:

Do I engage this child labour for 50 ruppes (£0.60) to carry my 15kg wing and harness 2km across fields and then up the steep 10minute hike to the launch site, along with the clear message that they are wasting their time doing anything else, like say school, and are much better off hanging out here for half the year? Or do I succumb to my middle class guilt associated with paying poor people to do things I don’t like doing, and sweat it out myself depriving them of this meagre income?

I can’t help feeling that the village school is probably a waste of time for most of these kids anyway. T-J the head instructor with Temple Pilots flying club is originally from the village and he certainly doesn’t have anything positive to say about his school days. Luckily he got into flying and now is a formidable pilot and instructor, and has a respectable career teaching, while his counter parts are tending the sugar-cane fields.

I carry my own wing, mainly because I need the exercise, but secondly it makes me feel like I’ve earned the flight. The one time I let one of the kids carry my wing, the wind died just as I took off, and I missed any lift, so there’s a bit of superstition mixed in to my decision too. And then there is the ethical minefield over how much I should pay. The going rate is 40 or 50Rs from the car park to the launch site, but at first they’ll ask you for more, so should I haggle with these 14 year olds barely bigger or heavier than my pack, and maintain the price integrity, or should I just give them what they ask and introduce inflationary pressures to the incentive dynamic, and probably kill off the prospect of any future farming as well as any education. In the end I don’t give the kids any cash despite the fact I do think they are probably wasting their time at school.

Sure they need to learn to read, write and add up, but the best hope for the kids around Shaylar hill, is that paragliding develops more thoroughly; perhaps someone will set up a little bar serving cold cokes at the landing site, perhaps even a little hostel. A permanently tended landing site clear of shrubs and rivulets, with a fee for private pilots and schools wouldn’t be unreasonable. Nor would a smoothed gravel track to the site paid for with a parking fee. And how about a training academy via the local flying schools to help a handful of the kids become tandem pilots and instructors each year. It’s such an amazing site, pilots are getting a bargain flying there at the moment, and no one could complain if the village earned more than the random payments the flying schools make to the farmers every now and again. Happily, I think there’s a good chance that some of this will happen.

Everywhere I’ve flown, I’ve learnt a new way of packing my glider, Woldingham, Annecy, Olu-Deniz, Tehran, Yazd. In each place pilots are adamant that the origami they follow to fold the wing away is the only correct way to do it, and any other method is foolish heresy. In India there is a different technique again. You hand over 20Rs to one of the kids that come running as you land, calling “Packing? Packing?”. Again I’m paralysed by the guilt of exploiting of the economically vulnerable, whereas the Indian paragliders have no qualms about paying the youngsters to pack and carry their gliders back to the carpark. The transaction isn’t exploitation but part of greasing the big Indian wheel, redistributing wealth, filling in the rich-poor divide.

I like to pack my own glider. It gives me a warm glow, and a chance to check it over, but also it’s a good physical routine to go through while I come down from the mental high of flying. Another Zen-for-an-excuse reason not to support the local economy Andy? Yeah, these kids should be in business school, learning how to market T-shirts printed with “I flew Shaylar”. Some have already graduated, selling me and other dehydrated pilots premium priced bottles of water and battered fried vegetables, which perfectly compliment the sugary pick-me-up tea Mr Shaylar serves in his botulism glassware with a smile.