Building Resilience With @pilot_ems

Resilience

noun

1.   the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.2. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.

Resilience is something that airlines love, but it’s also one of the toughest things to learn, train for or acquire. And here’s why… you have to actually experience tough times, difficult situations, or hardships to be able to build resilience. You have to go through the uncomfortable situations, you have to live them and be exposed to them to be the person who can survive and thrive. And I don’t think there’s anyone out there praying for bad things to happen to them?!?

So why do airlines love resilience? Because when you’re faced with an emergency or an unusual situation in the air, an airline wants to know you’re someone whose resilience will kick in and you’ll have the capacity to deal with what you’re faced with and still be able to find a safe solution to the issue. They don’t want someone whose capacity gets saturated when something happens. They want someone who can bounce back, refocus, adjust and adapt to the situation at hand.

It’s something that they try to train pilots for in the simulator, by giving lots of different scenarios and seeing how the pilots deal with them. Of course, it’s very hard to simulate a real situation as the pilot will always be expecting something to happen in the simulator, so the ‘startle factor’ is already lost. But it’s as good as it can get to train for these things and build resilience.

The truth is, we all have resilience within us. But until it’s put to the test in real life, we don’t even know it’s there, or how strong it actually is.

I spent 12 years building up my first aviation career from first officer to captain of a dash8 q400, and I loved it!

I absolutely loved my job. I didn’t even call it a ‘job’ because I enjoyed it so much, it didn’t feel like work. I would fly with people who were also happy to be there, we flew people around the skies to go on holidays, for work, to visit family and it was such a pleasure. Of course, there were tougher days than others, dealing with different weather conditions, technical issues, unexpected circumstances. But we fell back on our training, we followed SOP’s, we were professional, we got the job done safely and mostly with a smile on our faces.

So after 12 years, at the start of Covid, when Flybe went into administration, I felt like I had had the rug pulled from under my feet. I was suddenly in a very uncomfortable situation. And it did take some time for me to really appreciate what had happened. At the time I had two young kids, a mortgage, bills to pay and literally overnight I lost my income. 

My resilience had to kick in and I had to figure out a way to get through that uncomfortable situation.

It definitely wasn’t an easy time, but I knew that I had to find my way back into aviation at a time when very few airlines were taking applications. And the way for me to do that was to keep myself current on type with my Dash8 Q400 rating, update my log book and cv, keep up to date with industry knowledge and work on making the best applications I could. I didn’t loose hope; I knew that I would get back into the air, no matter how long it would take.

It was just over a year after losing my job that I was able to apply to Wizz Air, and thankfully a few months after that I was invited to an assessment with them in Hungary.

And although they only gave me a few weeks to prepare for the assessment, I felt like I had been preparing the whole time I had been out of job; with research about airlines, ATPL theory knowledge, assessment preparation courses and industry information.

I was unbelievably ecstatic when I passed the assessment for Wizz Air and they offered me a start date a few weeks later.

It all came down to my resilience. 

And now I am not only back in the air, but back in the left hand seat as an Airbus Captain.

I love this idea of our life being elastic; things keep coming for us and we keep bouncing back. And that’s exactly what resilience is! Being elastic and building that toughness. Life tries to knock you down, but you become the person who gets back up. Again and again.

It’s your capacity to withstand or recover from difficulties; your toughness.

It’s your ability to spring back into shape; your elasticity.

No one can predict what life will throw at you. But by building your toughness and elasticity you can get through almost anything. 

You’ve got this! I believe in you ❤️

Peace and love, Pilot Ems