I am no scientist; in fact, I effectively failed my way through the sciences in school and managed to escape unscathed by copying from my intelligent classmates on exam day. I’m not a cheater, but I know how to use the assets available to me. Through this act of ingenuity I realised that my problem solving and survival instincts were perfectly suited to life on the flight deck. Day-to-day I spend my time solving problems; dealing with idiots and generally making sure that I limit my workload by ensuring my fellow crewmember does the majority of the tasks allocated to me. It’s called CRM people!

 

These are my gifts. I am uniquely suited to my chosen career and I reckon that there is no other job that I could do as effectively. I believe that in the majority of cases pilots are in the aviation business because, a. they would be utterly shit at other jobs and b. they have spatial awareness skills that cannot be worked on. There is no such thing as good fundamentals in this game; it’s all about raw talent.

 

A few weeks ago I listened to a podcast, on Radiolab, about gene editing, that has me concerned about the future of both aviation and humanity. If you haven’t heard of CRISPR (pronounced crisper) then you’re in for a rude awakening. In most cases people are concerned that the Chinese may use this gene editing technology to make their people super athletes to facilitate world domination. If you want your children to have the attributes of LeBron James it might actually be possible. You could be the LaVar Ball to your very own mediocre pro basketball player offspring. Ireland may actually win a Rugby World Cup, if it could be harnessed to inhibit our innate ability to choke on the big stage. No matter what way you spin this CRISPR could change the world.

 

If you’re a pilot, this is something to be afraid of. As it stands, there is a chronic shortage of pilots in the world with our stock and respective bank balances rising to meet the demands of the market. If this gene editing is real we may be staring down the barrel of a world where anyone could be a pilot, without any real raw talent in evidence. All they would need to do is sample my DNA and drop it into some average loser and abracadabra you’ve got a “Top-Gun” ready to make flying look easy.

 

If this doesn’t scare you it should, because all those pilots out there that are flooding to the Asian markets will be jobless as a generation of uncharacteristically tall, aviation oriented children emerge from the laboratories of the Chinese government. And they’ll be happy to fly airplanes for a bag of rice rather than $25’000 a month.

 

As scary as all of this sounds it may deliver an era where the Instagram pilot is shot out of unimportance and into ignominy so fast they’ll drop their protein shake. In case you haven’t noticed there are an unhealthy number of pilots on Instagram taking selfies while flexing their guns on the flight deck.

 

I have two issues with these lads. Firstly, they are only in this industry because we are tight on pilots and they’re hiring everyone, even these talentless protein-monkeys. And secondly, if you’re going down the road of Instagram to supplement your pilot income don’t be so obvious. Flexing your muscles won’t inspire anyone to become a pilot and besides, you’ll never have as many followers as those Pilot Maria women. Someone told me they have over 300’000 followers, which is phenomenal; I think my Instagram has 250 followers.

 

For the moment, at least, I am still unique even if CRISPR may change that in the future. At which point my raw talent will most likely be consigned to a list of attributes you’ll be able to assign in an effort to eradicate mediocrity.

 

If everyone is special, then no one is special. Bummer.

 

Photo by Mitchel Boot on Unsplash