4 Great Habits We’ve Learnt from Flying, and 4 We Wish We Hadn’t

There’s no doubt that flying teaches you a lot.

Some of it’s brilliant, stuff that makes you sharper, calmer, and way better at handling chaos 🌪️

But not all of it is helpful once you’re back on the ground, or just trying to live life!

Some habits sneak into everyday life and quietly mess with your head, your health, or your relationships, sometimes without you even realising.

So here’s a quick look at both sides, purely based on our own experience:

✅ 4 habits we’re genuinely grateful for…

🚨 And 4 we wish we didn’t learn at all!

We’d love to know if you have similar ones, or if they’re completely different!

✅ 1) Staying Calm Under Pressure

Aviation is controlled chaos in many ways. It depends a little on the type of flying you do of course, but it’s safe to say that for at least 10% of your time in the air, things can get a little hectic.

Sometime’s there’s no choice but to stay calm. You might be screaming inside, but it won’t do you any favours to act that out 😁

We’ve seen this come back in many other areas in my life. You become better at zooming out and thinking ‘is this worth getting worked up over’.

Definitely not something to take for granted!

We’ve talked about decision making under pressure before, check it out here:

6 Techniques to Master Decision-Making When the Pressure’s On

✅ 2) Prioritising and Thinking Ahead

Aviation forces you to never take a bit of spare time to just “chill”. There’s always the next event, the what if’s, and taking time to thoroughly brief your intentions.

What is important right now? And what is important 2 minutes from now?

It’s different in some ways for a long haul pilot compared to a HEMS pilot, but the principle still stands.

When we use to do a lot of instructing, we noticed how steep that transition can be for someone who is new to aviation (and understandably so, of course!).

It helps a lot with threat and error management too, which we’ve discussed here:

Keeping it Simple: Threat and Error Management as a Pilot

In normal daily life, we treasure having some time to ourselves and just enjoying the moment. There’s a place and a time for that in aviation as well, but they are much rarer!

✅ 3) Communicating Clearly and Efficiently

There is so much to learn on clear and concise communication, especially for non-native english speakers (like one of us!).

You’re working together with people from different cultures and weird accents (like Jop’s).

But we all share the same goal: come home safely at the end of the day.

That is easier said than done though. Assumptions are the killer here. Just because something is clear to you doesn’t mean everyone else is on the same page.

We’ve learnt to be concise, and to verify your message has been understood. That’s not something that comes natural to everyone (it wasn’t for us), but it only takes a few times of getting burnt before you become much more conscious of how you convey information to your team members!

✅ 4) Respecting Checklists and Procedures

I (Jop) remember one of the students at the flight training academy I started at, who basically treated a helicopter like a car.

“What’s the big deal Jop? Just hop in and get going, I know this thing like the back of my hand.”

And comments like:

“You don’t use a checklist in your car, what’s the difference?”

While at the time it was amusing, it’s exactly this mindset that aviation is trying to get rid of.

Sure, life’s bigger than a checklist or a standard operating procedure, and you can still fly into a mountain by following the book. But respecting the procedures that people much smarter than us have come up with is part of being a professional pilot, and a safe one!

🚨 1) Normalising Fatigue

Now, you might ask “in what world does aviation normalise fatigue?”

And you’d be right, no manual anywhere states fatigue is just something “to get on with”.

However, whether you fly for the airlines, or wake up at 0300 for a SAR or HEMS flight, you’re expected to deal with and manage fatigue.

Fatigue itself is simply something none of us can escape from 100% of the time, as we’ve discussed here:

How to Manage Fatigue and Survive Nightshifts

Yes, it’s our job to manage it effectively, but after years and years of having the alarm go between 0200-0500 and expected to fly an NVG landing in the middle of nowhere, it’s starting to become more normal to fly while fatigued.

This isn’t a good thing.

It teaches you to be ok with not feeling great and continuing anyway, and can bleed into other parts of life.

There were many HEMS doctors who would drive for over an hour after a full nightshift, it was just a matter of time before some of that didn’t end well, as you can imagine.

🚨 2) Measuring Yourself by Standards and Performance

One of the biggest mindset shifts flying gave us (not a good thing), is measuring ourselves based on how well (or badly) we perform.

In aviation, that kind of thinking kind of makes sense. You’re constantly being assessed, and rightly so.

Quite a few things depend on your judgment, your accuracy, and your decisions. You can’t just “wing it”. So over time, it becomes second nature to measure yourself by how well you did, whether that’s a flight, a sim check, or even silly pointless stuff that doesn’t really matter.

But outside of work… that same mindset gets a little problematic!

It’s a hard habit to break, and it’s something we’re still actively trying to unlearn!

🚨 3) Compartmentalising

This one’s tricky, because in aviation, compartmentalising is a genuine survival skill that helps you to stay focussed on what actually matters.

You have to be able to put distractions aside and stay focused. If your mind drifts mid-flight to that argument you had yesterday, or the bills you need to pay, you’re not just distracted — you’re a liability.

Or let’s say you make a mistake, maybe you missed a call, overshot something, or screwed up an approach, and your instinct (after feeling annoyed for instance) is:

“Park it. Not now. Focus.”

It gets a little complicated though from the moment you drive home.

You end up living like every part of your life has its own little drawer: work goes here, relationships go there, hobbies in another one.

It’s like switching roles instead of just being yourself across the board.

And the problem is, life isn’t that tidy.

Sometimes work stress does affect your mood at home. Sometimes things you learn in your personal life should change how you approach work.

But if you’re stuck in “this box doesn’t relate to that one” mode, you miss the chance to connect the dots when you really need to!

🚨 4) Vigilance as a Habit

Vigilance is a great tool to stay ahead of the game in flight, and to assess threats before it’s too late, like we discussed here:

Defensive Flying 101: Are you Vigilant or Complacent?

It’s great as an in-flight attitude, not as an actual ‘habit’.

Why?

Because sometimes life doesn’t require you to be on top of your game in that way (yea we agree that does sound pretty obvious…).

Sometimes it’s fine to just ‘be’. No thinking ahead, no assessing, just enjoy the moment and spend time in what’s NOW.

If you’re making it a habit to be vigilant, it can become a hindrance in daily life.

For us, the challenge is to be able to have that attitude in the cockpit, but then leave it behind when we don’t actually need it.

So What?

Yep, flying teaches you a lot.

But some of those lessons are not particularly helpful in normal daily life.

For us, it came to down to these 4 on each end of the spectrum. Are yours similar, or do you have very different ones we can learn from?

We’d love to hear it!