On this episode of the Lessons from the Cockpit show... Many aviators have flown into bad situations or worse killed because they didn't listen to the voice in their heads. The military has a term for this voice: GUT CHECK. Malcomb Gladwell has written an entire book about this gut check phenomenon.

Recently I had a discussion with a close friend and both of our professions, he an EMT in Houston and myself a military pilot, realized we shared similar attributes in working problems. One attribute of gut checks causes our brains to slow down during a crisis yet have total situational awareness of what's happening around us, the problem, and its solution. This attribute often leads to simple solutions to very complex problems never tried before but they work!

As aviators, we really do use our five senses while flying. Our five senses feed problem-solving capacity and intuition. On a flight out of Hawaii, I literally "masked" one of my five senses which would have told me what was really wrong with the plane.

Strap in for another episode of Lessons from the Cockpit!