SAFA Skysailor Magazine

12 SKY SAILOR September | October 2019 as a way to determine your goals. SMART stands for ‘ S pecific, M easurable, A ttainable, R elevant and T ime-based’. When setting SMART goals, ensure you have a realistic and balanced perspective on each aspect of the acronym. Setting a high level goal in a short time frame is conducive to high levels of risk taking behaviour/decisions and also more likely to result in failure. It is important to note at this junction that your goals should be personal goals, and in the early stages of your flying life you should not create any goal that directly compares yourself to other pilots. Later in your progression you can do this, and using competitions as a vehicle for such learning can also be quite helpful. Setting goals also ensures that you see evidence of your progression. We all go through peaks and troughs with our learning progression, and having goals keeps us on track and motivated through the troughs where we feel we are not learning/pro- gressing. Be patient, you’re set for your next ‘Aha’ moment and your learning curve will steepen again. After this, it is time to re-set your next goals. 5. Learn from your mistakes Learning from your mistakes is crucial to progress in any skill or sport. A vast majority of people will often take the easy way out (of learning from their mistakes) by externalising the reasons for failure. For example, ‘I couldn’t climb out because too many pilots were getting in my way!’ Be brutally honest with yourself as to why you did not succeed in your set task. As a starting point for finding your mistake, you should look at your own skills, decisionmaking and you own mind-set first before looking onto the other areas, such as meteoro- logical and other external factors. Then, if there are re-occurring trends in the reason you’re too often on the ground, work to fix these areas. Using goals is a good way to do so. Also remember, much of the time, if we re-wind the clock five to 10 minutes, we can find the deci- sion that put us in a difficult position. For example, ‘It wasn’t the fact that I couldn’t climb out from that low ridge, it was the decision to leave the last climb early (10 minutes ago) that put me low, in a difficult situation, and eventually on the ground.’ Learning from mistakes is the reason the best pilots are the best pilots. They’ve done the hard yards and made many mistakes over many years and hours of flying. They have no secret to their mastery of the sport, just experience. The other side effect of experience is not only airmanship wisdom, but the learning of physical skills. One cannot skip to long distance cross- country without first knowing how to thermal well and this is not a lesson/skill that you can skip through. It’s a skill that takes airtime and practice. Progression of learning must be logical and without ignoring the basics. A very experienced pilot once told me that he considers a pilot as ‘low airtime’ until they have about 500 inland hours. This statement tells me that it takes many hours of practice to learn all the required skills and make all the ‘standard’ mistakes in order to become ‘experi- enced.’ Frommy experience these hours take five to six years to amass, therefore you can see that the learning curve takes time and patience. 6. Mind-set The mind-set of a pilot is by far the most important aspect of progressing safely in our sport. If a new pilot enters the sport with a patient attitude to progress, then they are quite likely to stay in the sport for the long term. It also means that they’re building a solid foundation of skills and experience on which to rely on later in their flying progression. In addition to this, due to the fact that the sport is experience based, it is quite important to listen to the advice of experienced pilots. Sure, experi- enced pilots get things wrong from time to time, but the fact that they’ve stayed in the sport long enough to become experienced demonstrates that they’re more likely to know a few more things than a low airtime pilot. In fact, it is often stated that the most cautious pilots are both the very new pilots (straight out of school) and the very experienced pilots. Freshly licensed pilots are in the careful process of discovering the sport without instructor supervision. Experienced pilots have seen, met and dealt with all sorts of conditions, mistakes and pilots in their flying career and sadly, have probably seen a number of their friends perish in the sport. At the end of the day, it is for ourselves, our family and loved ones that we should all exercise a safety-conscious attitude towards flying. The art of progressing slowly requires patience and modesty. It will be filled with frustration as well as elation, but it will mean that you’ll fly for life. Flying paragliders is a beautiful and wonderful sport as well as a lifelong obsession, but in the end it is only that – a sport, to be enjoyed, mastered and shared, but not for the sake of life itself. Photo: Dave Bateman [davebatemanphoto.com ] Shane Tighe at Mt Borah