Stan Love ’87
Flight student
I had the fabulous good fortune to be a student of Iris Critchell in the Bates Aeronautics Program in the mid-1980s. As I’ve often told anyone who will listen, that experience set the course for my life and career. Iris taught me so many valuable life lessons that it’s hard to choose which ones to share in a limited space. But here are a few standouts.
1. If you get brought on board as an alternate, second, or deputy, appreciate the role and work hard at it. Frequently the backup person gets promoted to primary. That was the case for me and Bates, where I was accepted as a backup. It was a good thing that Iris encouraged me to pay full attention in ground school, because when other students had to drop out, I moved up to a flying slot! That experience repeated itself later. I went to Antarctica as a backup. I attended helicopter school as a backup. And I did my first spacewalk as a backup.
2. The best antidote for too much intellectual challenge is an activity, especially a physical one, that demands complete focus. As students, Harvey Mudd College’s rigorous academics dominated our time and attention. It was hard to tear ourselves away from it for extracurricular activities. Even when we weren’t in front of our books, our heads tended to remain there. Flying broke that obsession. For that hour in the air, Iris made us forget about differential equations and devote all of our attention to window pictures, engine and radio sounds, feedback from our kinetic senses, and the indications of panel instruments. Driving back to campus from Brackett Field I always felt elated and exhausted. But my mind was refreshed and ready to tackle more academics. I once read a study of human happiness that found that Buddhists generally report higher feelings of happiness. Maybe that’s because of the focus they cultivate in their daily meditation. In my experience, an hour of aviation can achieve the same result.
3. “Grab hold of those controls and command that aircraft!” Like many student pilots, I was timid with the controls at first. It can be intimidating to operate a complex machine in an environment that can harm you in many ways. Yet the airplane is designed to respond to our control inputs. We can bend it to our will. Many times in my life, when I was called to take action in a stressful environment, Iris’s exhortation to take command–to seize the day–returned to my consciousness. I expect that those words will stay with me, and motivate me, for the rest of my life.
Thanks for reading, and for helping us all to remember Iris Critchell.
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