A Tour of Aviation Safety with Erika Armstrong – EP.265

Inzo Technologies: https://inzotechnologies.com/

(00:04:00) – Erika’s career on the road

(00:05:42) – Tips for packing lean

(00:07:34) – Erika’s favorite places she has flown

(00:11:05) – What made the 727 fun to fly

(00:15:02) – Erika’s transition from flying to teaching

(00:20:29) – The process of training pilots

(00:26:39) – Why aircrafts shake during a stall

(00:28:00) – How training regimens have changed

(00:30:56) – Safety cultures

(00:39:15) – Advice for aviation leaders

(00:41:07) – Common phrases from safety-focused CEOs

(00:43:18) – The pilot shortage

(00:55:07) – Electric planes

Alex Bridgeman: Erika, it’s so great to have you on Think Like an Owner. This podcast is all about finding out how the most ambitious CEOs grow big companies. And you’ve been a part of a lot of companies in the aviation world and a pilot yourself. And one thing we were talking about is moving around a lot. And you mentioned being at six spaces in two years. I have a bunch of questions around that, but can you explain kind of that time and what that meant for like how leanly you had to pack and like how, keeping it just simply bare essentials for all those moves, like that just sounds like a whirlwind. 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, you’ll realize how unglamorous the airline world can be. So I’d been doing business, flying in business aviation for many years and then got hired at the airlines and started on the 727, which was one of the few airplane aircraft that had a flight engineer seat. So, everything is about seniority at the airline world. You learn that really quickly. So, I took the- I got the job. You start off at the very bottom of the group of flight engineers. So I was based out in Detroit, still living in Minneapolis, so commuting there. And of course, they didn’t really do a good job of scheduling you. So you’d work three days, you’d have two days off, but you don’t have time to commute home and back again. So you rent crash pads with other pilots. When I was based in St. Louis, I had upgraded to first officer and then captain. So I was sharing a two-bedroom with seven guys with one bathroom. And if you’re the last one in, you’re like sleeping on the floor. You take the couch cushions off and stick them in the corner and that’s how you’re getting your rest. So, we have this image of what the airline life looks like, but in the beginning, it’s tough. But you learn to deal with it, and you’re young and enthusiastic and you love your job, so it doesn’t feel like it’s any big thing. But you look back later and you’re like, wow, I can’t believe I did that. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, no kidding. I always, at airports, you see pilots with pretty small, compact bags. Like there’s not a whole lot they’re bringing around. What were some tips as a seasoned pilot yourself? And I fly frequently, so I’m always kind of looking for travel tips and ways to pack more leanly. What are some tips you’ve picked up over time? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, I can travel for a month on just a carry on bag. You do learn. And so the trick is just solid colored clothing that matches anything and everything. You bring a little bit of dish- not dish soap, but laundry soap with you and you just wash out your stuff. I mean, truly. I took my kids on an African safari, went to Zambia, and my kids laugh because they’ve got these big bags and I’ve got this little overnight. And they’re like, what are you going to wear, Mom? And every day, you just move around the solid colors and that’s definitely the trick. 

Alex Bridgeman: Well, yeah, no kidding. If I know we’re visiting family or going somewhere where there’s a washer dryer, I’ll pack for half as many days’ worth of clothes. And that does save a lot. Bringing an extra pair of shoes tends to add a little bulk, but the clothes savings, if you have washer dryer, you’re right, that’s a big deal. 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you’re hauling extra, you really just can’t get by without having extra shirts for the uniform, so you’re saving room for all of that. And yeah, I used to have like a dozen shirts because they didn’t give me time, I just didn’t have time to launder them. In the hotels, I learned really quickly that it’s actually pretty inexpensive to have them do laundry. I’m like, this is great. And then I learned, I was down in Texas one time, and I had been on the road for like 10 days. Finally, I’m like, okay, I’m just going to have them do the laundry, and I had jeans and stuff, but I didn’t realize in Texas, they starch and iron your jeans. So, they put a big crease down the front of them that never came out, and like, it would stand on its own. I set the jeans up and they would like stand there. So, I learned they do it different in different cities. 

Alex Bridgeman: Well, yeah, no kidding. What were some of the planes you got to fly? You mentioned the 727, but what were some others you were on? And is there a favorite or maybe a job or role that stands out to you most? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, I get this question often. It’s so hard because every airplane has got a different mission and different feel, different design. So it’s like comparing apples and oranges. But I tell you what, some of the most fun I had was like in just the straight up just the Citation 500 series aircraft, the 2, the S2. I had so much fun in those because we were doing all the Minneapolis to the mountain airports when I was flying corporate. I flew one gentleman, every Thursday, we would take him and his family out to Telluride from Minneapolis, and oh, it was just, especially coming from Minnesota, flatlands, first time coming into Telluride, I’m like, this is Shangri-La. There’s waterfalls in all the corners and you fly into this box canyon, and it’s just… and it was a pilot’s dream because it’s such a challenge. Every time you go in there, the windsocks are doing different things. And this is before they fixed the runway. So, there was a big dip in the runway. It was shorter, and if you’ve ever seen Telluride, at each end, there’s just a drop off, it’s a cliff, so if you are not ready to take off, it’s going to decide for you. You just go off the end and you’re in the air. So, I look back, and that was just the most kind of fun flying. But the 727, nothing beats that. We got to do all these weird charter flying with it because it had one unique thing and it had aft air stairs. And it sounds like such a minor thing, but we could get into all these tiny airports because we did not need a jet bridge. We didn’t need any airport services, so we had our own APU and everything, so we would fly all the baseball teams, football teams, like the Nebraska Cornhuskers. We’d go into these little tiny airports. I got to fly the WWF wrestlers back in the day when they were the Claw and all those guys. And we would- it wasn’t in going into the big cities, it was little tiny airports, little tiny towns outside the major cities. And we just had so much fun. Every day was completely different. No two days are the same. That’s kind of what I liked about the aspect of the aviation world I was in is I did all the charter flying, not just the main, I mean, I did all that too, but it got punctuated with these really crazy trips. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, no kidding. Those aft stairs are, I’m sure you’ve read about D.B. Cooper jumping out of the back of them. And then I didn’t realize that there were, the next year, there were 12 other identical hijackings, none that were successful. But 12 people tried to imitate that, his whole hijacking. And they built like a flap or a latch that would keep it closed during flight called the Cooper vein. And that’s fame is having an aircraft part named after you. 

Erika Armstrong: Isn’t it? I know. And I had the opportunity to meet the first officer who was on the D.B. Cooper flight and hear his side of it. But I’ll keep your secrets quiet. So he has his own version of what he thinks happened, but it’ll be the great mystery. We’ll never know. That and Amelia Earhart, I don’t think we’re ever going to know. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, a lot of big mysteries. What were some quirks about the 727? I don’t think I remember flying on many of them as a kid. I flew on more MD-80s as a kid and then some DC-10s. So, a couple kind of two and three engine aircraft. But what were some quirks of the 727 that stood out to you? What made it fun to fly? 

Erika Armstrong: Oh my gosh, how much time do we have? Well, I’ll tell you what, the first thing it did, because it was such an old airplane, and we were the last to actually fly passengers on the 727. This is 1950s and 60s design that we flew up into the 80s. So every time you come on board, we’d have a can for the mechanical tracking in the log book. And every time there’s something wrong with the aircraft, you can fly airplanes with things that are broken, as long as it’s on the MEL list. So we’d have these stickers that you put on. And so anytime you’d walk on board, there’s always a list of stickers of what’s broken. But what that does, it really makes you learn the aircraft systems. If something’s broken, you have to know how it affects all the other systems. So I think that is what really got me into aircraft systems and propulsion. I ended up teaching it later at a university and over at some of the training facilities. But the very first time landing the 727, I still remember how weird it was because you have all three engines on the back of the fuselage, not wing mounted engines, they’re all in the very back. So, if you think about your weight and balance and what that looks like, as soon as you pull the power out and you don’t have all that lift now on the wings, that heavy tail section pulls the nose up. So, during the landing sequence, when you’re slow, you have all these huge flaps out and you’re bringing the power in, but as soon as you pull that power off, the nose pitches up. So, you have to push down during your landing sequence sequence. So the first couple of landings, you’re in the sim, so then you can really mess it up. But just an awkward moment for a pilot to be that close to the ground and you’re having to push down on the yoke. But once you learn it and you learn to listen to the airplane, I mean, it’s just beautiful. You could just touch down on those mains and then I would pop the thrust reverse and just pull the nose, let the nose come down slowly. So once you get it, it just clicks in your brain. But those first awkward landings, you’re like, what am I doing? It just feels so weird. And that airplane was a Mach 90 airplane. I mean, now you’re flying around Mach 77 on a good day. But that- and we had to slow that thing down. It wanted to go. It wouldn’t go very high because it was so heavy, fuel is inefficient, we’d have to burn a lot of fuel before we could get up to the higher altitudes, but it was a fast airplane. When we got to fly that thing empty, we were all begging to fly it because it was just like flying a little rocket ship. So, yeah, it was built in the days where they didn’t care about fuel, they didn’t care about anything except building just a really good airplane with all these backup systems, and just the engineering design way back then before computers is just, it’s absolutely amazing what the human mind can do. 

Alex Bridgeman: Oh yeah, it’s a pretty wild machine. And there’s a friend, I talk about machines, there’s a friend who ran a company many years ago and he used to fly the Concorde back and forth as part of his commute, New York to London. He did that like twice a week for years and loved it. And that seems like the- that’s an experience I’ve missed. The Concorde, I think, what, went out of service in 2008, 2007, somewhere in there. Hopefully, Boom Supersonic gets going and we get to have supersonic travel again, but I’ve not flown 0.9 before. That sounds like a lot of fun. 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah. Boom is right here in my backyard in Colorado. I know they’re moving their production facilities out of here, but I had an opportunity to meet with the owner and listen to his journey and their passion for getting it done. And I can’t believe we’ve gone this long without a supersonic aircraft. So it’s getting really close. So, in the next few years, hopefully we’ll be breaking that sound barrier, at least over the ocean. And delaying that boom, sonic boom, and they’ve found a way to go past mach now without creating that huge window breaking noise. So, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. 

Alex Bridgeman: That will be, yeah. So, when did you transition from flying to teaching? What drove that?

Erika Armstrong: So, Delta bought out Northwest Airlines in 2008. Our whole division got laid off, and at the time I had two young kids, so it’s kind of serendipity that it worked out that way. I had already been teaching aircraft systems. I was teaching the 727 now at this point, so it was a kind of a seamless transition to kind of go into the teaching side. So I, a couple of years later, got a job teaching at a university here in Denver, Metropolitan State University. They have an aviation department. And it was so fun because the university worked with the military and you could use your GI Bill. So I had guys who had been in Afghanistan a couple of times coming into my classroom. They wanted to go back into the military as pilots. So I would have a 17 year old coming out of high school, sitting next to a guy who’s 50 years old, who’s seen it all, done it all. But now I have to teach both of these people this content. And for me, it triggered this really intense fascination and understanding how your brain learns, how our personality affects the way that we intake information, our experience also does too. And I just remember the clash between these two generations in the beginning, but they have such a unique set of skills, not one is better than the other, they’re just so different. And once you learn how to find a bridge for them to share that information, it was so fun to see them laughing with each other and like giving each other grief and smack talking and seeing who could do better on the quiz and who could do better, and sharing that commonality of aviation with such a different personality. It just drove me into digging deeper into understanding how personality affects our decision-making. So it affects safety right now. So when we look at safety in general right now, what else can we do to do better? And we’re trying to train pilots faster because we really still do have a pilot shortage. It’s not that we don’t have enough people who want to be pilots. It just takes time to get all that knowledge into somebody’s brain. So a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing now is that side of it now. So we could teach people the rules and regulations, but we have to take a step further and teach them how to be pilots. 

Alex Bridgeman: What are some teaching techniques over time you developed to make certain content as exciting as possible to different generations? Aviation is exciting on its own without needing to add too much, but I’m sure some subjects are more exciting than others. What were some things you did that helped get concepts across pretty effectively? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, so the first thing I knew was what not to do. I still remember sitting on my first corporate job and the chief pilot read the operating specifications out loud, read the FAR aims out loud, and I was just sitting there. And after a few minutes, your brain shuts down. It starts to resist because it’s so freaking bored. It just goes anywhere but listening to what’s at hand. So I think teaching in general has changed and is changing. I think people are understanding, so any type of scenario-based training is so important. For years, all we did was rote memorization for pilots. What’s the PSI on this? What is this? What is this? What is this? Which is great. People can take a multiple choice test, but put them in the airplane and have an emergency and that none of that knowledge applies. And that’s how we’ve been doing it since the dawn of aviation. So especially like when I was teaching aircraft systems, it is definitely starting off and taking a story, an accident or incident, and working the problem backwards and showing first of all what that component does, but more importantly, what happens when it fails. How does that one thing affect other things? So, it’s hard because we still do multiple choice testing. So, I mix that in with a lot of short answer questions, which is a burden on teachers, but now with AI, we can find ways to make that a little easier. But so just putting a student in a scenario, like I can teach you what an alternator is. But then I’m going to give you a question like, okay, we’re flying along on a cross country and your low voltage light comes on, tell me all the things that could be, what might happen. So you want that student to start thinking down the road and putting that synapse down because if or when it happens, your brain has some place to go. It doesn’t just say, okay, I know what this alternator does. And in reality, things don’t break cleanly. They don’t, we’d go in the sim and things like break. It doesn’t happen that way. Things start to fail. So how do you deal with this component that is kind of working or you run through a checklist and you’ve got a flap retraction that’s not coming back right. And it just doesn’t go the way the checklist says. How do you train somebody in that moment? Because you’re going to have to go off script and now you need to think at a different level. So how do you train that? Well, you got to do that from the very beginning and just get them to think like that first. So, yeah, that’s kind of what the intention is now with training in business aviation. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, and pick up some of kind of that gut feeling and instinct over time, too, from seeing enough different scenarios that you have sense for, a couple of those conclusions or second–order effects come faster to you. How do you get more reps into pilots before, like during that training? How did you- are there ways to speed that up or is it just it takes time, there’s probably no shortcut, but we’re just going to get through a whole bunch of them as much as we can? 

Erika Armstrong: Well, I kind of learned it by accident and out of pure hatred of a moment. I looked back on it now, it really was key. So, when I was at the airlines, I would train at NATCO, Northwest Airlines had their own facilities, and then they would contract out with Pan Am down in Miami when they were extra booked. And of course, I always had the 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. session, you’re exhausted. But I had this one examiner, instructor, he was an old dude, he was in his 60s, he wore cowboy boots, and he’d always have his feet up on the examiner’s table back there, just causing you grief. But we go in the simulator and we already know exactly what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to do V1 cuts, we’re going to do everything in our operating specifications. We already know what we’re going to do, but this guy- And so it’s hard because when you go in the sim, your job is on the line. It’s a matter of, if I bust this ride, I could be out of a job. And now with the pilot record database, all of your failures come with you your entire career. So, you go in and it’s you against them. So when you’re in the sim, you’re fighting for your job. And I think we’ve lost that opportunity to have fun moments in the simulator for learning. You’re in there to demonstrate that you’re a safe pilot, but we’ve- after you’ve gone into the recurrent over and over again, you almost stop learning. So what this guy would do at the end, I call it chaos training, and you’re not supposed to do this to the pilots. He would go in, of course, and just start failing things, one after the other, and always to the point where you’d have a three engine failure, and he’d always say, if you can’t get it to the airport, you’re buying the beer. So, I’m proud to say I never had to buy the beer. And so, when I see his name as my instructor, I would start sweating because I just dreaded it. I knew I would come out of there just like, ah, exhausted and we just hated it. But what he was doing is getting you to do this like chunking of information. Like in that moment, what is the most important thing to deal with? So he’d give you electrical failures, he’d give you a fire, give you another engine failure. So, in your brain, without a checklist, you had to automatically speak to your team and like quickly make a decision and make it right. You come back later to see if that was done properly, but it made you instantly understand the most important thing at that moment, deal with it to the point where you can move on to the next. You could never solve it. You had to get it to a point and then move on and move on and move on. So it taught your brain a different method of thinking. And we need to do a little bit more of that in the simulators, and we don’t do it. And I know the FAA guys hate it when I say this, but how do you practice the startle effect for a pilot? Put them in the sim, give them an emergency, then take away their checklist. So it gives you a safe opportunity to have panic because even after 20 years, you’re still going to panic because you’re trying to fly an airplane. Now you have an emergency. So you have all these stresses happening, and now you have to fly and think at a higher level for a long time. So, yeah, there are things that we can do, and I love the virtual reality technology coming out. Pilots right now, we don’t actually have pilot spin aircraft. We teach them stall recognition now. So our CFIs, we teach them. But after so many people have perished in training incidents during a spin, the FAA finally, they came back and said, look, we just don’t want pilots to even get in that position. We want to teach them stall recognition to understand what that airplane sounds like, feels like, so you don’t even get in that spin. But what’s the reality? Pilots are going to spin airplanes. So the first time you’re ever in a spin is going to be by yourself with no idea what to do. So having a moment of a scenario that you sit down with your instructor and say okay, close your eyes, and I’m going to walk you through a spin, and it lays a synapse in your brain so that if that moment ever happens again, your brain has somewhere to go. If you’ve never thought about it, your brain is going to go, I have no idea. So, the virtual reality stuff now can, you could sit safely in a classroom now, put that on, and just visualize what a spin looks like, and your brain still then will have some knowledge of how, neutral rudder, what do I do with the yoke, what do I do with the power, going through that process without actually being in the airplane, I see ways of making it safer without actually having to go out and do it. 

Alex Bridgeman: And a spin comes after a stall. Is that how those typically happen? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, and every airplane has its own personality and how it’s going to do it. Training aircraft are designed to be very stable, which is wonderful. So generally, like I trained in Beechcraft products, low wing aircraft, it’s a little different than how assessable stall, but I still remember the beachcraft sport, you had to like force it to stall. But what happens is one wing, they’re both still creating lift, but one wing is going to create more lift than the other. And what that does, it’ll start, it puts one wing over and starts to spin. And once you get that spin going, that outside wing is creating more lift than the inside, and so it just rolls you into spin, which can get worse and worse and worse. So they were trying to teach pilots there’s always a stall warning horn or something, an audible thing, but you can feel that aircraft talk to you. You can feel when just the stall just starts going and then starts to really buff it and shake, and then you’re hearing the tail. So, I like the idea of keeping the pilot safe, but we need to do that one step thinking beyond the mistake and what that looks like beyond that and how to get out of it. 

Alex Bridgeman: So how come the aircraft shakes during a stall? There’s a video that I’ll never forget watching, you’ve probably seen it too, a DC-10 in a stall, and you can see the back tail shaking and vibrating pretty, dramatically too, almost like it’s going to fall off or it’s loosely held onto the plane and then dips down. Why does it shake to that degree? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, so all those aerodynamics that are supposed to go smoothly over all the surfaces now are being all interrupted and you’re buffeting over that interrupted airflow. And you could actually do it, and don’t ask me how I know this, but you could actually do it like on the 727 going too fast. So, you get a mach buffet at a high speed. I just heard this, but so actually the airflow over the surfaces are going so fast, they aren’t even developing lift anymore. So your airflow is no longer smooth and it’s buffeting over those surfaces and it starts shaking the aircraft, which is even more terrifying because now you’re going really fast, and you gotta slow down, not just abruptly, but gently. So, yeah. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, yeah, no kidding. So, in what ways do you feel like flying and pilot training today has gotten safer or maybe more lax in some other areas? What do you feel like the training regiment looks like today versus 10, 20, 30 years ago? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, it truly is amazing. And I know right now, especially in springtime operations, the headlines are filled with incidents and accidents. Oh my gosh, it feels like all of a sudden, we’re completely unsafe. But if you look at the numbers, we are so exponentially safer. I mean, when I started flying in 1988, because we didn’t have social media, even our news was more local focused. And occasionally, you have the headline news from across the country. But we are so much safer now. It is just, given the billions of people and hours that we spend in the air, we are safer. And we always talk about safe, what is safe, and you don’t really know it until you see what it looks like to not be safe. So, when I was early in my career flying for a 135 charter company, after I got type rated in the citations, when I wasn’t flying for them, they would sell me to other flight departments. So, I’d get a phone call, and they don’t do this anymore as much, but they would call me up and say, hey, this company needs a right seat person for their citation, their guy is sick, you’re going to go fly a couple days with this company. So I would walk in the door of a new company and have to go fly like an hour later. And I didn’t really acknowledge the depth of what I was learning at the time, but when you walk in, there is a different culture of thought process that affects safety for all of these. And so I didn’t even realize what the culture was in my own company, because you’re in it and everybody feels like they’re safe. Nobody comes into work saying, I’m going to be unsafe today. But looking back now, I could see layers and layers of things that we were doing that was causing unsafe operations. And we actually had two fatal accidents, and with pilots that had a lot of experience. And I look back now and really the driver was the safety culture of the company. It wasn’t necessarily the skill of these pilots, it’s the operations they were doing and making decisions based on that pressure that they put on the pilot. So the industry as a whole has done such a better job, especially in the Part 91, Part 135. It’s still regulated. Part 135 is even more so. But on their own now, a lot of these companies had been creating their own safety management plans and process and procedures that they didn’t necessarily even have to do. The FAA is now mandating it, but a lot of them were doing this on their own. So, in the airline world now, it truly is amazing, the level D simulators now, you forget that you’re on the ground. You come out of there, you’re just dripping sweat and just stressed out because you forget. So, every year, it gets a little bit better and every year the industry gets a little bit safer. 

Alex Bridgeman: So, when you would spend time in companies that had a better safety culture or maybe even a great one, what did that look and feel like? Like if I went to, if I spent one day over the course of a week at each of those companies, what maybe little things or big things would I pick up on? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, it was so interesting what it was. And it was usually like the captain would, right off the bat, say, hey, we’re not in any hurry. We’re going to make sure everything we do is under standard operating procedures. They had a plan. It was just a joy to work for a company where you felt safe and you don’t really pay attention to that or what’s causing that stress in an environment. Just for an example, even at the airlines, don’t forget this was 1998, things were just getting rolling on safety, I would go from base to base, and they all had a different chief pilot, and each one of those bases had a different culture. And I was a brand new flight engineer and getting bounced around between bases. And I still remember going down to Dallas, and I’m in the flight engineer seat, and we’re getting ready for pushback and trying to coordinate all that. And there’s a checklist before you do all that. And all of a sudden, we started getting pushed back. I’m like, what? And I said to the captain, I’m like, oh, we haven’t run this checklist yet. And he looked back and he’s like, darling, this ain’t my first rodeo. But I told him, I’m like, well, this is my first rodeo. So, I would read the checklist out loud just for the cockpit voice recorder so that if something happened, I at least was on there as trying. And it actually is a dangerous environment because if we pressurize a hydraulic system during a pushback, we can actually snap a tow bar and hurt somebody down below. So even during a pushback moment, there really are these levels of safety. And it’s hard because the gentleman who did this, he’d been flying for 30 years. And this is the guy that knows everything. And man, I could tell you what, he could land that airplane on a dime. And so it was hard as a newbie, how to deal with those moments where you just don’t feel safe and you don’t really know why, why am I not enjoying this moment? Because you don’t know what the expectation is. And you just kind of, everything feels like out of control. But standard operating procedures has become such a reflex now. You don’t see that quite as often. I mean, it’s still there, but airlines have done a good job with that culture coming through now. 

Alex Bridgeman: Is that a factor of there’s more training today or we’ve had enough incidents over time related to safety and checklists that we can’t ignore how important they are anymore? What do you think drives that safety? Because I can’t imagine that progress is just inevitable or an accident. There’s intention behind these changes. What do you think over time has driven some of that intention in those changes? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, everything you just said there. And you know what it is? It’s peer pressure. You don’t realize it, but there was a tipping point over like a five-year period where you had that generation who did things without the checklist. There was no such thing as crew resource management. It’s like, come in the door, sit down, shut up, and I’m going to tell you what to do. For years and years, that’s how it was. And then we start training that young generation. So, there’s that conflict in the flight deck, and there always will be as the old are going out and the new are coming in. But after that, five, ten year period where everybody coming in had been trained on safety or standard operating procedures over and over again, it just becomes where, if you do a one-off, everybody’s like, what are you doing? And so, it keeps that person on track again. So yeah, there was- it takes time to get that whole process and mindset to change. And everybody complains about the next generation coming in, but I love it. That mindset knows now how to communicate with all the technology out there. It’s just a second language for them. In the same breath though, the people retiring right now had that opportunity to have that brain balance of manual operations and then learning the technology. So, they had that fallback of raw skill and then that little bit of resistance to learning new technology. But it was still a good balance, if they were willing to accept the old and the new. So of course, now that’s the new generation coming in, they’re learning, like when my students were coming in, they’re learning in a trainer airplane with a full glass cockpit with all the bells and whistles. I’m like, have you never been lost? And they’re like, well, of course not. And so, I’m like, ooh, well, what’s the day where that doesn’t work? Are you going to know how to do those old fashioned things? And even right now, like in business aviation, we’re having a problem with GPS jamming and spoofing. I don’t know if that conversation’s made it outside the aviation circles, but it is a concern because once GPS has been integrated in everything, we took out all of our raw basic, like our NDB, ADBF navigation, which is this like most rudimentary thing you could think of. But now we have aircraft that maybe are losing their GPS for nefarious reasons, and then we don’t have a lot of backup systems. So, in aviation, we should always have a nice little balance and one last go-to thing that’s still going to work because sometimes we embrace technology too much and then we forget about what happens if. 

Alex Bridgeman: Growing up with the stick shift and trying an iPhone, you had both sides of it. Do you think the- How often are steam gauges and more clunky no screens, how much of that training do you think still happens? 

Erika Armstrong: It’s hard. I would say probably maybe 70% of my students would have some sort of glass in their training aircraft. But it depends on the airport that you go to. There’s another airport that’s less popular and still has the old, all the analog gauges. And I don’t mind any of it, as long as you still make sure you have that conversation and fail those instruments. Just have the flight instructor pull that circuit breaker and say, now what are you going to do? So, I think that’s important to just kind of keep it in the repertoire. So about 70% of my students have some sort of glass in the cockpit, and most of it is like GPS and stuff, but it is a whole other skill. We always go back to the analog, but learning the glass cockpit is just as hard. Trying to take in all that abundance of information and put it in your brain and be able to process it quickly is a whole other skill too. So, no, I mean, I’m glad that my students are getting exposed right from the beginning, how to have that conversation with technology because when I first started, we did not have GPS. I still remember having to program a citation with a VLF Omega and it was basically this dysfunctional relationship that I’d have to tell the airplane where it was all the time, and then it would say, no, it’s not. And then I’d have to fly over VOR and say, yes, here you are. And it was… yeah, just early integration of, like Loran and having to do the manual of here’s a VOR, here’s the radial, how many miles off the VOR. So, having GPS has been, even from a sustainability point, to be able to go direct and save fuel and not having to fly across the country in zigzags has been exponentially more fuel efficient, along with the engines that they are designing now are so amazing. The ratio of power to what is burning is with the high bypass engines, it’s amazing, just even in the last 10 years what they’re coming out with. So, I know there’s a lot of protesting against aviation, but the industry itself is driving a lot of that technology. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, and the engines are powerful and quieter too. Like flying in any aircraft that uses a Leap or GTF or any of the like 350 or 787 engines, they’re incredibly quiet, even from the outside too. And they sound different and they don’t- the loudest planes now that fly over my house are next generation 737s. 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, yeah. I live on the ski arrival into Denver. And so right where my house is, where the community I live is, there’s a crossing restriction with a speed restriction. So I hear all the airplanes going overhead, doing their power changes and putting out their speed brakes. And I can tell you if it’s a Boeing or an Airbus or a Falcon based on the sound. But just over the last 10 years, it’s amazing how quiet, and it’s more of like a whistle sound instead of that deep roar. And so as far as people on the ground and listening to noise, it is getting much better. 

Alex Bridgeman: Did you have a sense for what future engines will start doing more of? High-bypass seems to be one of the biggest innovations in recent engines. What are some other ideas that you think they’re going to come up with here pretty soon? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, they’ve been trying things like, I’m going to get the terminology wrong, the chevrons, the scalloped edges on the exhaust stack and just having the airflow itself buffering some of that sound and trying to just reuse some of that air to do different things. Or even look at the 787 Dreamliner. Instead of pulling bleed air off of the engines, they’re using more of an electrical architecture for it. They figured those engines are spinning, let’s put a couple of generators on each one and make our engines more fuel efficient and pressurize a different way. And in trying different areas of that technology, I mean, I see all sorts of different wild things coming out. But I think as far as aircraft design, I think you’re going to see a blended wing design hopefully in our lifetime. They’ve found out different… the big concern was trying to like evacuate people during an emergency with that kind of design. And they’re finding ways to do it. And the design itself is so efficient. So, I see all these cool things that are, people are thinking of, and hopefully we’ll start seeing some of those prototypes coming out. 

Alex Bridgeman: Blended wing, like we’ll all fly in like B-2 bomber looking airliners in the future, you think? 

Erika Armstrong: Well, yes, almost like a triangle shape and the passengers are inside. So when that first design came out, everybody’s like, oh, everybody wants a window. I tell you what…

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, like me. I like window seats. I want a window seat. 

Erika Armstrong: Look around. All those people get window seats. What do they do? They put the shade down the entire time. 

Alex Bridgeman: I don’t do that. Other people around me do. 

Erika Armstrong: They are saying that people don’t care as much. They are going to put displays in the front so you can look with the cameras and get to see outside with a camera projection. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I guess they do have more and more like nose cam or tail cams that you as a passenger can watch. I haven’t been on a plane that has those just yet, but I know the A380 does and those are pretty cool. Maybe, yeah, maybe a fancy version of that. I think the Hyperloop was going to do something similar too, because they weren’t going to have windows, but they were going to have screens along the side that reflected the outside. So, it still had a sense for being out in the world, not in just this closed tube. So yeah, maybe they’ll come up with something like that. 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, and then they’ll have to come up with some more motion sickness remedies because the human body just isn’t designed to do that. So, whatever we can do to alleviate that kind of motion sickness too is going to have to be forefront in conversation. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, no kidding. So, my ambition is to lead an aviation company and obviously safety is a huge part of that. What advice would you give for someone who’s hopefully going to lead an aviation business sometime in the next couple of years or soon and wants to make that piece of their culture a huge component? What kind of advice would you offer kind of young, early on leaders? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, it really is a huge trickle down from the top. If it does not start up there, you will not ever see that safety culture you want it to be down at the lower rungs. And it has to be throughout the entire company. Because I also did dispatching. Man, I look back now, I was flying and dispatching, but I still remember the pressure I was putting on pilots and jabbing them like, oh, come on, you can do it. And all these little subtle psychological things you can do to get somebody to do something, which ultimately is completely unsafe. So making sure that leadership starts and sets the tone and letting the rules be the bad guys, and just saying, these are the rules, default to that. But making sure everybody has that empowerment to follow the rules and to say no, especially when you’re dealing in business aviation where somebody’s paying $70,000, we’re about to launch on a five, six day trip, and they’re going to spend a ton of money, and they want to get into that meeting in Aspen. And I’m looking at the weather, it’s down to minimums, the runway is slippery, and having the boss say, you got to get them there versus that boss saying, hey, you get them there, but it doesn’t have to be on time, it makes a huge difference, and it does spread. And it just takes one person to start cowboying the rules, and then it could spread the other way, too. And pilots are so mission-orientated, we sometimes forget we can also say no, and we have alternative choices, and that’s often forgotten. 

Alex Bridgeman: What are some common sayings or terms of phrase that you would hear from CEOs who are more safety focused that may be stuck with you? Like I liked your early example of the pilot saying we’re not in a hurry. That sets a different tone as you prepare for a flight. Are there any other kind of phrases that stick in your mind that you’ve heard from others? 

Erika Armstrong: Yes, and I’m going to try to paraphrase Dan Bodenheimer. He used to own the company I work for. He’s since sold it. Now he’s our safety manager still, but I still remember, and I hope I get this right, I remember him talking about one of the leaders of the JCPenney team that was coming on board a charter flight and having the conversation saying, look, we sell socks and underwear. How important is that, that we have to get someplace on time? And so I just remember, like, at the end of the day, really how important it is that that person gets there on time. We want them there eventually, and that’s the more important thing ultimately. And in that moment, you really do want to get there. I mean, getting there on time is such a thrill and adrenaline rush, to get them there perfectly, ahead of schedule, the rental cars are on the ramp, that’s your private pilot, privately your reward in business aviation. And the reward also has to be that, okay, we can’t go right now, but we will eventually get you there. And that’s ultimately the better reward. So, yeah, I can’t think of any other good ones right now, but that’s the one I can remember from Dan. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I like that. It’s not, yeah, it’s okay if you get there a little bit late as long as you still make it there. It’s definitely the more important piece. You mentioned also earlier the pilot shortage, and of course, there’s a mechanic shortage too. What do you think drives shortages? You mentioned that it’s not necessarily that there just aren’t enough people that want to be pilots. We had Top Gun and Maverick come out recently. I’m sure people are still excited to fly planes. Like that’s probably not going anywhere. But what do you think keeps more pilots from entering the industry? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, so I love looking at the statistics because you can see a mindset of a whole country during ebbs and flows. So, during COVID, all of a sudden, we had this huge, enormous amount of people get their student pilots license. So COVID drove people to their homes and then makes you re-evaluate what it is you want to do in life. But we still are probably, if I had to guess, about 80% washout. I’d say 80% of the people that start flying, they say, I want to be a commercial pilot, they wash out. And the first thing is understanding that it’s not just the airlines anymore. There are so many sectors in aviation now. We have to do a better job, especially in business aviation, of introducing that idea. Of the 500 students that came to my class, I would say 97%, when I asked them what they wanted to do, they wanted to be an airline pilot. But there’s all these other things that you can do, and your personality might be a better fit for all these other segments of it. But it’s still extraordinarily expensive. The airlines have had the luxury this entire time of having pilots come to their door already with their hours, their training experience, and then all they have to do is train them on their own aircraft and process and procedures. But now we have to look more at the European model, that they don’t have a good general aviation industry. So they’ve been having to do ab initio training. That’s taking somebody with zero time and putting them right into a 737 and training them on that aircraft. 

Alex Bridgeman: You mean instead of kind of working up from like a 172 and then a turboprop light jet, bigger jet, you just go right to the big thing? 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, they put you right in that aircraft. And the idea is we’re going to train you on all the good habits right from the very beginning. It’s going to obviously take a longer time. It’s going to be much more expensive. But you can just see the huge downside of that too. The Air Force Academy here in Colorado, they start their pilots in a glider. How about that? Cause they want that depth of knowledge of aerodynamics and understanding, if you lose all your engines, you still got an airplane, so a different mindset. So definitely it is the cost. It always has been a driver but now there are so many more opportunities for young people. I look at my, so both my girls are in college and I looked at their course catalog, and I’m thinking where were all these choices when I was looking at college. It’s amazing what’s out there now. So we’ve lost a lot of this talent and that skillset and that personality that might become pilots to other industries. And what happens, every day, you’re looking at the headline news and somebody is peeing on a seat, beating up flight attendants, all these horrible- we forget what it looks like for the younger generation looking at this. And I still remember the day I’m asking my students who was born after 9/11 and they were all after 9/11. But they grew up in that environment where you show up at the airport and it is just chaos and moving the cattle through the TSA and you’re stressed out by the time you get to the gate and people are just misbehaving and you feel the energy of negativity throughout your whole experience and it didn’t used to be that way. I still remember being little and getting dressed up to go on an airplane and how exciting it was, and it’s not like that anymore. So we have to put the shine back on our industry again. I think even our airlines need to do a better job. When I was growing up, we had all these glorious aviation commercials of advertising for the airlines and it looks so glamorous, and we don’t do that anymore. They don’t have to. You don’t have a choice anymore. Really, I mean, now they are so much alike. If I have to go to Cleveland, I look and I’m like, who flies to Cleveland? I grab the one and the pricing is almost the same. Even though we have the low cost carriers, if you bring in the services that you need, you’re almost paying the same as the other one. But it’s our fault; it’s capitalism at its best. We’ve driven the market to do what it’s doing right now. We have ultra low cost carriers that we complain about, but we did it. So we can’t complain. So, you deal the hand that we’ve chosen. 

Alex Bridgeman: Why do you think the shine came off flying? You’re right, it looks so glamorous. You’d have suits and the food looked great and it all kind of slowly kind of melted away. 

Erika Armstrong: This is going to sound stupid, but it really is respect for the pilot segment, it really was respect for the profession, when you have accountants that make decisions on safety and not understanding the effects of what that looks like. When I started at the airlines, I made, after spending years, 10 years in business aviation and I was making pretty good money, I went back to the airlines, and I think my first year, I made like $35,000. So even in the beginning, if we work for the regionals, it’s getting much better, but after all the sacrifice you’ve put into your profession, I still remember at, we got a memo at Northwest in the Champion Air division saying we no longer would be getting bottled water. They didn’t even want to provide the pilots with bottled water. They wanted us to use the potable water in the tanks from the 1960s. So I know this sounds minor, but it’s a degradation of the respect for that position. And we had a pilot glut. We had tons of people. People were paying at the charter company I worked at, people were paying $50 an hour to sit in the right seat of a King Air with passengers. So we had in the 1980s, we had 800,000 people that had at least their private pilot’s license. Now it’s down to about 520,000. So our pool of people to draw from, even though that’s a lot of pilots, most of those people don’t even want to become airline pilots. So we have a smaller pool. We’ve had years and decades of low pay, being on the road 20 days of the month. That shine kind of wore off, and it’s kind of plateaued. I see we’re on the edge of it, but all the industry needs to do a better job of making sure the public knows and especially when all that DEI conversation started coming out. For anybody to think that I got my job because of some sort of DEI thing, it’s just all the women out there, we just grown because if anything, we come in with higher hours, more experience, we’ve had to prove ourselves more on different levels and just to have that perception of women in aviation being degraded over the last couple months, it’s hard. It’s hard to encourage the next generation when you see that kind of thing going on out there. So we all as professionals need to do a better job of mentoring that next generation, showing them really how truly wonderful it is. We forget it is an incredible profession. The camaraderie within the organization is just amazing. So, yeah, I think we all could do a better job with it. 

Alex Bridgeman: What do you think, what would you recommend like an individual company do? Like one of your clients or one of your 135 or 91 clients, like what could they do that would bring some of that excitement and energy back? 

Erika Armstrong: Yes, good question. And it’s so easy, and this is what’s so frustrating. Before 9/11, before the airports got locked down, I’d go out to, I flew out of the Flying Cloud Airport in Minnesota. People would come out and they’d open up their hangar doors and they would come and hang out. There was an old warbird museum on the field. They would be flying the warbirds on the weekends. I took it for granted how cool it was to have them there. But sponsoring local events at the general aviation airports and having open houses, little air shows, we used to do that all the time. We don’t do it anymore. And that is that moment where that little kid has that tipping point going, how cool is this? I want to go fly that Falcon. I want to- Seeing an airplane like that sitting on the ramp and being able to walk up to it and touch and feel it is such a different thing than just seeing it on a computer screen. And then meeting the pilots and thinking, all right, these guys really aren’t that smart. They aren’t any different than me. You need that moment where you think you can do it, and we don’t do that. There’s such a disconnect from that dream and then actually thinking you could do it. So it doesn’t take much. In your local community, having an Aviation Day open house is super easy to do. Just get a few airplanes pulled out there and just let kids crawl through them. What a simple way to introduce people to the aviation world. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, no kidding. It seems like a good idea too for management groups to have clients who can come by and meet other clients in the company. You can all compare who’s got the coolest jet and other kids can come around. It’d be a nice, fun kind of mixture and probably just a fun way to get everyone talking to each other. 

Erika Armstrong: Absolutely, yeah, because I’m near the Centennial Airport here in Denver, and all the hangar doors are closed, and people have no idea. There’s like probably a billion dollars worth of hardware sitting on the ground over there. I mean, what a great way to just have an open house day and everybody goes over to one ramp and they- I understand there’s huge security issues and you don’t want the general public crawling through your 40 million dollar airplane, but there are other ways maybe of introducing the public in. And it’s hard. 

Alex Bridgeman: You get the red rope, red rope around the edge and you can make it look nice and fancy and still get kids kind of walking around and stand at the edge and look up the engine or something like that. There‘s all kinds of like cool things you could still do. 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah. And I know that perception these days is hard. There’s a lot of environmental groups that are anti-aviation. So there’s concerns about that as well. And I get it. So, a lot of companies keep a very low profile. But I tell you what, those airplanes are used for work. They are a tool within an organization that makes all the difference and they can’t be successful if they can’t move their executives around to meetings on a daily basis. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, a lot of the Europe net zero goals seemed pretty hard to achieve at all, but especially now when we have pretty low production of SAFs and electric aircraft doesn’t seem to be getting that much closer, at least at scale. People are trying out or there’s articles about hydrogen aircraft, but hydrogen has a lot of its own challenge with storage and whatnot. But it just seems like an incredibly hard problem where just grade A jet fuel is still a pretty phenomenal energy source and really not going to go anywhere. 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, and I think I need to look this up, but I heard rumblings that even in Europe right now, they’re really trying to ban 100 low-lead. That’s kind of the last hang on for the old technology. And so, there are alternatives, and I’m seeing like there’s a seaplane company that has been all electric for many, many years, and it’s operating successfully. So it’s just like you said, it’s that scale. We have to start somewhere and build on, but even by aerospace, they’re developing an electric airplanes for training aircraft. Once that happens, it will change the cost of becoming a pilot, which will encourage more people in. So it’s a back and forth. 

Alex Bridgeman: That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought about the cost of training going down as a result of electric, but what’s the electric seaplane company? What’s that one called? 

Erika Armstrong: And I’m going to get it wrong. Are they in Vancouver, I believe. And it’s perfect because there’s short hops. We still don’t have the range for long electric trips. And I’ll look it up here, but they’ve been operating for a few years. I can’t think of the name. 

Alex Bridgeman: Harbor Air?

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, that’s it. 

Alex Bridgeman: I just Googled it and found it. Kind of reminds me of Kenmore Air out of Seattle with the seaplanes that give you tours or fly over to Victoria or some Harbor. This is neat. I’ll look this up later. But, Erika, thank you for coming on the podcast. This has been super fun. It was great to meet you at SDC in New Orleans. I hope you got some good food while you and Alvin and everyone else were there. I’m excited to see you guys again… Oh, wonderful, wonderful, amazing. I had another white fish, I’m blanking on the name, but it was also really- it wasn’t a catfish, it was something else though. But it was phenomenal, it was really good. 

Erika Armstrong: Yeah, that’s New Orleans. Yeah, man, come back covered in grease and happy. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yes, very happy. Good to see you. Thank you for sharing your time. 

Erika Armstrong: Thanks for having me on, Alex. We could talk about a million things in aviation. That’s what I love about aviation.