“The Right Stuff” – How Much Of It Do You Need?

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How much of “the right stuff” do you need? It’s been a long time since Tom Wolfe’s book about test pilots and astronauts, “The Right Stuff,” came out, but its premise is unchanged. In fact, the movie version of the book is being redone and will be out next week. Here’s a link to the trailer: https://airguide.info/video-the-right-stuff/

People who face life and death challenges successfully need an ability to remain cool, calm, and collected enough when in trouble, in order to think their way out of it, and get out of it, if it is possible to do so.

When I was a fighter pilot, after a crash was reported, there were always discussions about what the pilot did right and did wrong. If he got out of it, the discussion was about what he did right. We filed that information away to be used if we were caught in the same situations. If the pilot didn’t survive, we tried to figure out what he might have done differently. Did he do something to get him into a bad situation? Did he make the wrong move to correct what went wrong? Did he wait too long to bail out? We filed that away, too.

I finished F-100 training with a dozen other pilots in my class. A year-and-a-half later, there were 9 of us still alive. One of those who wasn’t alive was my friend, Bob. During training, Bob spent his spare time watching cartoons. His cartoon favorite was Yogi Bear. When discussions got serious, Bob would often chime in, “Smarter than the average bear.” I spent most of my spare time fretting about past accidents, and figuring out what I would do if something similar went wrong.

Bob ended up at the bottom of the class and got assigned to a crummy job at an airbase where those of us who were in combat-ready squadrons visited twice yearly to practice our skills. Bob got stuck towing a dart-shaped target for us to shoot at. The dart-shaped target was about ten feet long. Bob took off with the dart tucked under the wing of his plane. After flying out over the ocean, he reeled the dart out behind his plane on a thousand feet of cable. After the dart was trailing behind Bob’s plane, other pilots took turns shooting at it.

One day as Bob was returning to the base to land, his cockpit air conditioning malfunctioned. It started pouring extremely hot air into the cockpit. The procedure for handling that is well-established. You first try to reset the temperature. But it that doesn’t immediately reduce the temperature of the hot air, you pull a handle that blasts the cockpit’s canopy off the plane. In other words, your plane becomes an instant convertible.

Bob didn’t do that. He tried to land the plane with the canopy still on the plane and hot air coming into the cockpit. As he neared the field, he passed out. We don’t know how long he was unconscious. But he did come back to, and was able to land.

I was furious with him. Why did he do such a dumb thing, risking his own life – and his plane – to save the Air Force the expense of replacing the canopy? He brushed it off as no big deal. Then a few weeks later when towing a dart out over the ocean, his engine quit. He had no choice. He bailed out. But he did not survive. We think he got tangled up in his parachute in the water.

Fast forward four years. I was flying an F-105-F, a two-seat version of the F-105. I was in the front seat. Bob Beckel. an ex-All-American basketball player, later to fly with the Thunderbirds, and still later become the commandant of the Air Force Academy, was in the back seat. So there are two guys named Bob in this story.

What happened in my classmate’s first emergency happened to us. The air conditioning system started blowing hot air into the cockpit. I reset the temperature. That didn’t help. I had already decided if I had an air conditioning failure, I was not going to take any chances on passing out. So I jettisohed the canopy off the plane. Still, I made a mistake. I didn’t tell Bob what I was I was going to do. I couldn’t tell him what was going on after I jettisoned the canopy because, without it, the wind noise in the cockpit was so loud we couldn’t communicate over the interphone. After the flight Bob told me all he knew was we were flying along and the canopy disappeared. He thought he might next see my ejection seat zipping me out of the plane. If that happened, he said he wouldn’t know what should he do.

So I apologized to him for not telling him what I was going to do before jettisoning the canopy. But I wasn’t sorry I didn’t wait around to see if the heat made me pass out.

But back to the right stuff. When stress hormones are released in an emergency, we are shocked by feelings of alarm. That’s OK. Alarm gets our attention. But – and here is where the right stuff comes in – to be able to think our way out of an emergency situation, we need our high-level thinking to kick in.

Our high-level thinking is called executive function. I like to call it our “Inner CEO.” But whatever we call it, it cannot function until the feeling of alarm is dispensed with. There are two ways for the feeling of alarm to go away.

1. Wait 90 seconds for the stress hormones causing the alarm to burn off.
2. Activate the calming system, the parasympathetic nervous system that can override the stress hormones and stop them from causing alarm.

Ninety seconds is too long a time to wait to figure out what to do in an emergency. In an emergency, we need the right stuff to kick in immediately. For that to happen, we need pre-established mental programming that automatically activates the parasympathetic system when we feel alarmed, so the parasympathetic can override the stress hormones, quiet that alarm, and let us think clearly.

I wonder, as I write this, if my classmate Bob wasn’t able to activate his parasympathetic system. I wonder if the reason he watched cartoons instead of pondering options in an emergency was thinking about an emergency caused feelings of alarm his parasympathetic didn’t neutralize. If his only way to think clearly in an emergency was to wait 90 seconds for the stress hormones to burn off, no wonder he got into trouble he couldn’t get out of.

So what about you? What happens when you think of being on a plane, not in control, not able to escape, and having something go wrong? Do you feel alarm? If so, that’s fine. But how long does the alarm last?

Someone posted this question on Quora: “It’s not a panic attack, but it’s a small blip, a glimmer of anxiety or fear, for a few seconds at most. What am I experiencing?

I answered, “This is wonderful. I’m so glad you asked this. What you are experiencing is the mind working exactly as it is supposed to.

We are supposed to feel momentary alarm – as you call it, “a small blip”- that grabs our attention when the amygdala senses something unexpected.

To make an accurate assessment, the feeling of alarm that alerts you needs to be quieted down to curiosity. You described it perfectly: “a small blip, a glimmer of anxiety or fear, for a few seconds at most.”

If you didn’t automatically down-regulate from alarm to curiosity, you would be unable to make a balanced assessment. If you stayed alarmed, the feeling of alarm would influence your assessment. Continued feelings of alarm might convince you that a threat exists when there is no threat at all. (This is what happens in a panic attack.)

You are fortunate, You have internal resources that bring the parasympathetic nervous system (the system that counterbalances stress) into play whenever down-regulation needed.

So back to you and the right stuff. If your feelings of alarm do not immediately down-regulate to curiosity about what is going on, you need to do some work. You need to train your unconscious procedural memory to automatically activate your parasympathetic system as soon as you feel alarm. This is so you can think clearly and deal with what is going on to the best of your ability, rather than to freeze, expect the worst, and panic.

In theory, when we felt alarmed as little kids, if a caregiver quickly calmed us and found a solution, we model their behavior and intuitively learned to shift from alarm to finding a solution.

If that didn’t work out, we can train the mind, even now, to do that. It is important to do so because if thinking of flying causes alarm than isn’t quieted, alarm leads you to expose yourself to the dangers of driving that you could avoid by flying.
It is important to provide yourself with this mental software so you can have an MRI if you need to, or go to the dentist without great stress, or take an elevator without risk of panic.

Now is a good time. Now, because you are at home more, you have time to fix this well ahead of travel plans that might, if you don’t fix this now, cause anxiety and bad decisions later.

And for non-flying issues, get a copy of my book. If the pandemic is causing undue anxiety, check out this book, and you can read some of it free at this link.

By Capt Tom Bunn MSW LCSW