Motorcycles and Situational Awareness

[Colonel]

NB  Like "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance", this note isn't really
much about motorcycles, though it might start off that way.  I promise you
I won't be as long-winded as that idiot Bob Pirsig.

I live in a place that's an absolute paradise for motorcycle riding.  My wife
has a car, but I actually don't.  I ride motorcycles to work pretty much every
day, all year 'round, except when it rains sometimes in the winter, and then
I take an Uber, because I'm a pussy and it's a hell of lot less work than having
a second car.  I spent almost the whole day at the DMV yesterday, where I
found out to my great surprise that my state doesn't recognize the federal
government but that's a story for another time.

You can even legally lane-split where I live, which is the absolute cat's ass
for traffic.  Nothing more satisfying than sliding inbetween the stopped Ferraris
and Lamborghinis and McLarens and Porsches and Mercedes.

But I tell people that while this is a heaven if you already know how to ride,
it is a very, very bad place to [i]learn[/i] to ride.

Why is that?  Well, TC doesn't think I should hold an instructor rating, but
I know a little bit about teaching people to operate vehicles.  When you
first start riding a motorcycle, 95% of your brain (think CPU usage) is
going to be required to operate the motorcycle.  It's got a sequential
manual transmission, for god's sake.  Have fun stopping and starting
on a hill.

But as time goes by, the percentage of your brain required to operate
the vehicle drops to 5%.  This is very good on a motorcycle, because
it allows you to spend 95% of your brain on threat analysis.  You need
to keep your head on a swivel, avoid target fixation, and you spend all
your time thinking about what other people are going to do, and how
you're going to deal with that.  You cannot relax in traffic.  As Andy Grove
of Intel said, only the paranoid survive.

No one will see you on a motorcycle.  You will be killed by someone turning
left that claims to have never seen you.

Now you might be asking yourself, why the fuck is this asshole dumping
this cheery stream of unconsciousness on an aviation website?

Well, riding a motorcycle is EXACTLY the same as flying an airplane.  At
first, 95% of your brain will be required to operate the vehicle, leaving you
precious few brain cells for anything else.

But after some decades and many thousands of hours of flying, you will be
able to fly an aircraft using only 5% of your brain, leaving you 95% of your
brain available for other tasks.

One of these important "other tasks" is looking for traffic at uncontrolled
airports.  This is a HUGE concern for some pilots, whom I suspect are
using 95% of their brain to simply fly the airplane.

Now, there are some homicidal idiots that think that instead of maintaining
situational awareness in an airplane at an uncontrolled airport, by

LOOKING OUTSIDE

for other traffic, instead you should have your head down, reading an incredibly
long, redundant and badly written "how to fly" book, oddly referred to as a checklist.

[img width=500 height=283][/img]

A checklist is an offensive euphemism for what is foisted upon low-time pilots, in
some nasty and murderous attempt to distract them from

1) flying the aircraft
2) looking for other traffic

Both of which are far more important than reading any book.

No one reads a book on a motorcycle.  Below 10,000 feet, I personally think it is
careless and reckless to read a book in an airplane, instead of flying it and looking
outside, and apparently I am something of an expert on careless and reckless
operation of an aircraft, so pay heed.

Please, get good at flying an airplane, so that you have plenty of percentage of
your brain left over, to do other things, like think about the weather, check your
fuel, plan your approach, etc.  It helps to learn to fly when you are young.  IMHO
you should be flying when you are 10, solo when you are 14 in a taildragger.

And from time to time, please look outside.  Mid-air collisions are a really stupid
way to die.  If you must die in an airplane, try to do it in a glorious and original way,
like delivering medicine to an isolated outpost where hundreds of children are dying,
and you have to land an SR-71 on an uphill, one-way 1500 foot gravel strip on a
mountain in bad wx.