Message from the Director

Good afternoon, fellow NOAA Corps officers,

There are a lot of parallels drawn between aviation and medicine; however, the best one I have heard can also aptly be applied to many facets of our lives. My father is a critical-care physician and has seen his share of folks in pretty bad shape, holding on to life as their major bodily systems reduce in functionality or fail altogether. He would tell me stories of how he would walk into an intensive care unit (ICU) room, faced with a patient hooked up to all sorts of machines and surrounded by other doctors and nurses, all trying their best to keep the patient breathing but none of them really working together to see the ‘big picture’ of the patient as a whole. It was in these moments, he would apply one of his favorite lessons he learned as a student pilot for the US Navy while serving as a Naval Flight Surgeon in the early 70’s. At the time, he was assigned the 1950s era T-34B aircraft (the T being the trainer designation). This old piston-driven propeller aircraft wasn’t the fastest or meanest looking trainer aircraft, by far, but it did have one characteristic that set it apart from all other trainers at the time - and that was its ability to recover from a stall. Young aviators would find themselves behind the power curve or well above the angle of attack necessary for powered lift and sure enough, the wing would stall and the plane would start to lose altitude…and fast. There are a few tricks that all aviators learn to recover from the dreaded stall but in the T-38B it was quite simple - just let go. Yes, with all altimeter dropping quickly and airspeed indicator doing something you didn’t want (and any number of other unsettling effects due to the absence of lift), there, in the backseat of the trainer, would be an instructor pilot screaming to the novice in the front seat (intercoms at that point in aviation history not being what they are today), LET GO!

And so my father did. He would let go of all the controls of the aircraft while in a stall - and sure enough, after a few harrowing moments, the nose and wings of the T-34B would self-level and before he knew it, all the dials began to stabilize and then he would continue flying the training event. Marvelous design!

Back to the ICU, and my father would be there, behind all the doctors and nurses, and would, well not exactly yell, but direct the room to ‘let go.’ Stop pushing more medications and constantly adjusting the machines without giving any one, least of all the patient, time to react. Let go of the controls for a moment and assess. Give the human body a moment to level set itself and then, once a few moments have passed, make the appropriate adjustments to the meds or control panels. And what do you know, the body reacts and, just as the WWII-era aircraft would start to stabilize, the patient would too.

Who would have thought that mindfulness found its way into the design of the T-34B; however, the life lessons it provides are just as applicable today as they were in the skies above Naval Air Station Pensacola. I encourage everyone to take this page from the aviation/medicine crossover; when the world around us feels as though it is spinning, take a step back, ‘let go,’ and breathe a moment. And then get back in with added clarity and purpose.

Stay healthy,

CAPT Douglas MacIntyre, NOAA
Director, Commissioned Personnel Center