I’ve been asked through the years to tell stories gathered in my aviation career, specifically my 20 years of Air Medical flying. With deference to HIPPA restrictions and keeping patient confidentiality in mind, here’s one of the more instructional missions I flew. Instructional because it taught me a lot about myself and the too-common tendency pervasive in society to judge others. Yes, this even happens in helping professions, sad to say.
This story in particular stands out as a flight on which I was not just the pilot of the helicopter, but a student of that same too quick to judge society. Early in my flying career, an instructor told me I’d be wise to learn something every time I took off. That advice was prescient; every time I took off, especially on medical missions, a lesson waited in the wings. Many of those lessons taught me how to fly better; many more of them taught me how to live better.
The mission in question involved a traffic accident on the Interstate in which the victim had lost control of his pickup. He’d entered the median and flipped the vehicle several times. When I landed near the accident at 11 pm, several rescue vehicles with lights flashing, and swarming with EMTs and Paramedics ushered my crew to the victim. I shut off the engine, prepped the cabin to receive our patient, and watched as my flight nurses took over the scene.
Minutes later, they’d placed the injured fellow on the helicopter cot and were trudging toward the aircraft with rescue personnel assisting them. Shortly, the man was put into the aircraft. The flight nurses hopped aboard. I buttoned things up, climbed into the cockpit, and fired up the engine. With the rpm at 100%, gauges in the green, and my crew giving me a thumbs up, I lifted the collective and took off into the night sky, headed back to the big hospital.
On the way to the base, the nurses told me more about the accident. The man had indeed flipped his truck into the median. In the middle of all those flips and impacts, his ten-year-old son had been thrown from the truck. When the EMTs arrived, the boy was dead.
During the twenty-minute flight, the man yelled about his truck. Several times he screamed, “What about my truck? Is it totaled? Is it okay?”
His questions about the wrecked vehicle were ongoing and constant. As I cruised toward the trauma center, he yelled to us above the helicopter noise. The man was badly injured with orthopedic issues, a head injury, and loss of blood. But as he screamed about the condition of his pickup truck, I tuned him out, amazed at his indifference to his dead son. It became more irritating the longer it went on, until I became angry at his nonchalance and misplaced concern. A damn truck? His son is dead, and he’s worried about his stupid truck?
I slowed to land at the home base, stopped above the home helipad, and landed the helicopter. Shortly, the flight nurses and waiting staff eased the man onto a waiting gurney and wheeled him to the emergency room. I refueled the aircraft, prepped it for the next mission, and secured it, all the time mumbling about the man and his beloved pickup.
Some time later, I heard another tale of trauma, the details of which escape me now. Nonetheless, the story flicked on a flashing light in my head.
The moral of the tale was our collective inability to ponder the tragedies and sorrows that befall us as human beings in a direct way. Our curious tendency is to speed away from our own misfortunes while slowing to gape at someone else’s.
When I heard that story, the reference to our haste to divert our gaze from painful realities brought me immediately back to that night on the Interstate. The owner of the totaled pickup truck wasn’t focused on his vehicle at all; he was simply unable to grasp the reality that his young son was dead and that he was responsible in large part for it. The truth was just too harsh and painful for him to look at, so he kept asking about his ‘stupid truck’ as I’d referred to it, much to my later chagrin. It turns out the man’s misguided reflection was an entirely sane response to such a personal tragedy.
I’d done the same kind of deflection. Instead of looking at my judgmental attitude in his apparent anguish over his demolished truck, I’d directed my judgment at him, deciding…What? He was an uncaring, superficial man? A reckless father? Someone whose priorities were egregiously wrong? Those negative attributes and the judgment had come from my own poor attitude and lack of awareness.
Realizing what the truth was at the time, that the man simply could not face the death of his young son, I’d decided he was misguided as well. I knew I had work to do on my own lack of compassion and understanding. Judgment, it seems, is often a better teacher than we care to admit. Being aware that the lesson works both ways, its exam is valuable to all parties; it is sobering, and it is something else we should consider when others experience the reality of life.
My instructor in flight school was more right than he knew. Learn something on every flight, he’d said, and your career will be a lot more satisfying.
