The last two sentences are a direct quote about the mechanics of a golf swing by a lady best known as an auto journalist from her book on skiing. This is not the first place most of us would look for flying advice! But Sam led me here, for the truths she found about motor skills apply directly to the ‘good stick’ aspect of flying.

It is often repeated that during the Vietnam war, when some US Navy aviator’s chests were wired up by doctors, that their heart rates were fastest not during actual deadly air-to-air combat, but at the end of the mission during landing back on the boat. Now, while few of us land a F-4 fighter jet low on fuel on a tiny rocking rolling aircraft carrier deck, most pilots can agree that landing is a time of complete concentration. We lose ourselves in the task. There are many other maneuvers — from the airline pilot’s V1 cut to soaring a glider in a tight desert thermal to low-level airshow aerobatics — that are excellent examples of mind-to-eye-to-hand coordination of the highest order. We need smooth. We need precision. But just trying harder often leads to worse results — actions become jerky and forced. We need relaxed concentration, we need fluidity on stick and rudder and throttle and judgment. Sam liked to say that we are surgeons operating on our own body, in a cramped bumpy operating theatre hurtling at 360 knots indicated.

F-4 landing on an aircraft carrier.

Like many sports or arts, the physical handling part of flying is far too fast, far too complex for one-thing-at-a-time reasoned thinking and careful consideration. It’s amazing what human fingers can do. A skilled pianist can produce finger movements at rates faster than visual reaction times. Over extended passages they can play 30 sequential notes per second. Humans can operate blindingly fast, the proof is seen in the first serve in professional tennis, a major league baseball fast-ball, or almost any play in ice hockey. Science has known for a while that there must be other modes of skilled human operation in addition to serial executive commands from the conscious mind. Famous psychologists David Rumelhart and Don Norman studied the problem back in the early 1980’s using the problem of typing. Yep, typing! World champion typists can type at rates up to 200 words per minute, so the average interval between keystrokes is only 60 milliseconds. That is close to the neural transmission time between the spinal cord and the fingers. Our 2 hands each have 10 fingers with 3 joints, and some of those joints have two degrees of freedom. And each hand is on a complex wrist and forearm assembly. Using computer simulation and several models of control schemata they replicated many of the characteristics of human typing — only by invoking multiple motor control programs that were distributed locally rather than running everything through a single central control program. They concluded that the skilled high-speed motor control system carries out its computations locally and in parallel (Rumelhart & Norman, 1982). Many people know this as ‘muscle memory’, but it’s fascinating to know that local control of skilled human movement is really carried out not by the central brain, but by many processes happening all over the body. How we control these unconscious processes is a major part of the inner art of skilled performance.

In the book Competing in Gliders, champions Leo and Ricky Brigliadori include this diagram; what they call the route to knowledge:

The first stage is thinking we can do something, but it is in fact too complex to just see someone do it, jump in the cockpit and do it yourself. The second stage is leaning how it’s done but still not being very good at it. The third stage is being good at the task, but still having to think about it. After much practice, it is possible to enter the last stage, unconscious competence. They write:

It will be as if we had acquired a second nature, we shall be similar to a real bird. After all, have you ever asked yourself what decision-making process a bird carries out? …. Its nature, its intuition does the thinking. (Brigliadori & Brigliadori, 2009)

In the flare you directly control pitch, yaw, roll and thrust to manage airspeed, angle of attack, descent rate, horizontal, vertical and lateral orientation against changing winds and aerodynamic states, all this movement referenced against a fixed point in space that is the very solid runway. Hands and feet are all dancing. In the time it takes to say it, to think it through, you have flared and landed. How much rudder? Whatever it takes. How much stick pressure? Whatever it takes. Right now. So how do we best manage these multiple instant demands? How do we control the body that is run by programs outside the conscious brain? We enter what sports psychologists call the zone.

You are completely focused, tuned in, switched on, super alive, in the tunnel, or as it is most universally known, in the zone. Tennis champion Billie Jean King says it is a perfect combination of “violent action taking place in an atmosphere of total tranquility.” World downhill-skiing record breaker Steve McKinney knows it as “the middle path of stillness within speed, calmness within fear.” Golf great Gary Player credits dedication and hard sweat, telling a pair of sport psychologists in an interview that:

I have been in ‘the zone' on a number of occasions. I remember one time in particular, I reached the 18th hole and I did not know what the score was. The only thinking going on at that time was thinking about what was at hand. (Barrell & Ryback, 2008)

While the degreed psychologists standing to the side of the sports star have a good appreciation of the zone, we should know that there is a much older, more complete, deeper knowledge of the zone. Samurai swordmasters studied this as a matter or life or death for centuries. The zone is another place where ancient wisdoms, modern psychology, martial arts and flying airplanes meet.

Two old wise Samurai facing each other with swords will be perfectly still. Waiting for the other to move, to signal an attack. An attack that can be countered by an instantaneous reaction. The observer sees nothing. Two men motionless. For a long long time. We notice not a thing. Then a flash of blade and there is a winner. The master saw a weakness, saw an opening, and moved faster than the other could hope to correct. As a pilot we must become as the Samurai. Sitting still in the cockpit. Waiting for the change. Waiting for the slight movement. Waiting for the gust of wind. And reacting faster than thought to pick up the wing and land straight.

Four hundred years ago, the legendary Rinzai Zen Buddhist priest and swordsman Takuan Soho said:

The mind must always be in the state of ‘flowing,’ for when it stops anywhere that means the flow is interrupted and it is this interruption that is injurious to the well-being of the mind. In the case of the swordsman, it means death. When the swordsman stands against his opponent, he is not to think of the opponent, nor of himself, nor of his enemy’s sword movements. He just stands there with his sword which, forgetful of all technique, is ready only to follow the dictates of the subconscious. The man has effaced himself as the wielder of the sword. When he strikes, it is not the man but the sword in the hand of the man’s subconscious that strikes. (Soho, 1986.)

Zen calls this mental-state mushin (無心), which can be translated as no-mind-ness. The zone is the unfettered mind of ‘samadhi’, a state where you are not thinking about next week’s union contract negotiations or a pretty girl’s nasty comment about your beer belly last night, but your mind and body are one with the moment. Power to idle, touch of rudder, flare the plane and land.

In the movie Top Gun — that cheesy classic where a maverick learns a lesson and becomes the teacher, told with fighter jets and hot chicks — Tom Cruise’s character is an instinctive flyer. He wins a training dogfight by trusting his inner game, and going against the book. In a tense debriefing room scene the civilian instructor Charlie asks, “The MIG has you in his gunsight. What were you thinking at this point?” Maverick famously says, “You don’t have time to think up there. If you think, you’re dead.”

There is more to this than movies. The zone is not just a perceptual idea, it is an actual real state of the brain. Neurological studies of people experiencing the zone show that the brain expends less energy when they are in harmony than when they are wrestling with a problem. One reason seems to be that the parts of the brain most relevant for the task at hand are most active, and those that are irrelevant are relatively quiet (Goleman, 1992). EEG brainwave scans have shown calm states in athletes that report being in the zone. Sean McCann, a sports psychologist at the United States Olympic Committee headquarters, has experimented with several biofeedback machines. He reports success using EEG feedback from the frontal lobes of the brain (Lawson, 2000).

Professor Dan Landers, when he was at Arizona State University, found that with EEG feedback he can teach athletes to improve their performance. Brain-imaging research at Syracuse University recently found that when athletes relived an in-the-zone performance there was greater activity in parts of the brain that control coordination, while other brain areas became less active. This is the physical process that allows mental focus and precision performance. James Austin, M.D., is a neurology researcher who has extensively studied Zen. His neurological explanation is that “long years of authentic Zen training cultivate brisk, fluid actions arising from liberated sensorimotot pathways [in the brain], not navel-gazing apathy or metaphysical speculation” (Austin, 2009). And yes, there has been some research on pilots, including United States Air Force bomber crews wired up while flying simulators and airplanes to allow study of the human factors associated with pilot error. (Sterman & Mann, 1994; Sterman et al., 1995) This work is still at an early stage. EEG readings are usually studied for people with problems, and using them to study virtuoso pilots is still in its infancy.

Being in the zone can be described in many words. Sometimes people use the term ‘ecstasy’. It really does feel that good. The word is also appropriate as in Greek ‘ecstasy’ meant literally ‘to stand to the side’. It can happen when full concentration on the task rather than thinking about the self flows you into the sunshine of the endless sky. Let yourself stand aside, then let your whole body and brain and soul fly in ecstasy. In a magic moment of letting go that is somewhere between a sneeze and an orgasm.

Ray Nitschke.

Ray Nitschke spent 15 years as the hard hitting middle linebacker for the Green Bay Packers, a career with coach Vince Lombardi that included winning the first two Super Bowls. In an interview he said that:

When I was in the zone, I got completely involved with whatever I was doing. It could have been in practice, the game, or whatever. At this time, I never heard the crowd. I felt relaxed, and in control, tranquil, and intense. I was ready for anything. (Barrell & Ryback, 2008.)

Jill Fredston has rowed twenty thousand miles of Arctic waters in a one-man boat. She described how it feels inside that little boat when a lifetime of practice comes together:

It is a sensation of being completely connected and disconnected in the same moment, a feeling of pure harmony an symmetry. It happens when my oars are just extensions of my arms and my legs seem to grow out of the boat. I am not consciously working or thinking in any disciplined way. The boat flows. I am a marionette, the boat is part of me, the water is air, the journey the ultimate magic carpet ride. Or maybe I am the boat — its heart, its motor, its spirit. My legs are pistons, I could row forever. (Fredston, 2001.)

Sarah Arnold won the world championship standard class sailplane contest at the 2020 FAI WWGC in Australia. She describes flying her sailplane at the elite level as praciticed actions deeper than cognitive thought:

I'd gotten to a place where I could trust my intuition when I'm racing. If I feel I want to go a little bit here, a little bit there, or try this side of the cloud versus that side, I don't have to understand why. I just have to trust it and go with it. (Barnes, 2021.)

Patty Wagstaff, who won the U.S. aerobatic championship three years in a row, tells on the zone in this way:

When people ask if I get frightened, I shake my head. “No” is the simple answer. The more complex, and unspoken, response is that in the air, I let myself go. It is cosmic, a Zen mode. I don’t think about anything but symmetry and dancing, lines and pirouettes. I indulge myself.

Patty Wagstaff.

Sam told students to stretch out your fingertips, your feelings, your awareness as far you can. Reach out and gently touch a glistening web of life that may be impossible to feel but is big and strong and real. It seemed crazy talk, but champion after champion talks about seemingly crazy stuff.Neil Williams won the British Aerobatic Championship eleven times, and he wrote, “there is no time to think of the handling of the aircraft; this must be automatic. One is not conscious of physical discomfort, such is the level of concentration.” George Moffat, who won the National Soaring Competition five times and the World Soaring Competition twice, says that when he is in the zone, “it almost seems unfair [to other competitors], as though another self, intuition, has taken over. — Wing Commander Bob Doe, one of the highest scoring ace’s in the Battle of Britain, said, “you’re not flying an aeroplane, you’ve got wings on your back. You are just flying. It’s a dream. It’s the most wonderful sensation I have ever known.”

Sam said in the zone you are feeling invisible lines of multi-dimensional energy, ripples and vibrations that intimately connect the multiverses and this universe. Strings that can be felt through astral and causal dimensions. None of this stuff has been seen by science. But elite pilots might just be this connected. Captain Rob Graeter, a USAF F-15 pilot and Aggressor instructor, describing one of his Gulf War air-to-air victories says, “you kind of drop into auto mode, where all the training you’ve done for so many years kicks in and you proceed almost subconsciously.” Captain Steve Robbins, another F-15 pilot and Fighter Weapons School instructor, recalls evading a surface-to-air missile: “your mind is on a different plane…. It’s so receptive to input that the normal time frame is slowed down.”

So what can we do to encourage this Inner Game? Totally intuitive action can not be forced, but it can be helped. We can set the stage for the zone. Sam put it this way, “you do not produce it, you discover it.” He believed that you passed through knowledge to simplicity, passed from book to brain to being. The steps we have already talked about bring you close, and then you have to let go. Allow the plane to fly. Visualize the path in the sky, note the configurations and airspeeds desired, see the wind. But you must reach a point where you let go and just fly. I noticed when flying as an airline pilot during the week, while meeting with Sam on weekends, my best landings were off a low ceiling IFR approach in gusty crosswinds with other weather or operational factors. By the time I flared I was so one with the plane that I just flared and landed. My concentration was complete.

To get good landings under normal conditions I would try to concentrate as hard on all the details as I could. Set up defined gates, places in the sky where I had to be at a certain airspeed plus five minus zero knots. Accept nothing other than right on the middle of the centerline. And with this I could sometimes enter the zone and just let my hands and feet fly the airplane as only they can. Mushin. I was watching, ready for a go-around should a runway incursion or somesuch happen, but I was trusting the Inner Game. I was not the first to discover that it takes a lot of initial effort and practice to be effortless.

The smoothness and control you can achieve with this technique is quite remarkable. You are not longer thumping the controls around, holding onto the yoke with a death-grip forceful enough to impress new finger marks on the back. You do not force things, you do not drive against the grain. Rather than a bull, you are a bird. You are using just enough effort to get the job done, what is called basal effort or optimal tonus. And with this gentle effort you can feel the airplane, you can feel the wind. A light touch on the controls works wonders. You are now graceful pilot, grooving with gravity.