I got to go flying this week. A lot. It’s why I’ve not been around.

I’ve been mostly in a Piper PA-32R, but also managed to ride shotgun on a Beech King Air 200 - a very beautiful and powerful turboprop that moves businessmen and celebrities around ridiculously efficiently.

The thing about flying - and by flying I mean jumping in one of these things and actually flying it, as opposed to booking a flight with an airline - that grabbed me is how it is clearly broken up into two clear phases of work: preparation and reaction.

The preparation starts when a pilot learns to fly. There are books on the the theory of flying and radio telegraphy and navigation they need to digest. Methods for working out crosswind effects are memorised. Knowledge of how to read METARs and TAFs are absorbed. The student spends hours flying whilst sat next to an experienced instructor building experience in an aircraft that is (relatively) easy to fly. After a while, a license is issued and the student becomes a pilot. Of sorts.

Then, once qualified at one level, the pilot can aim to prepare for other situations and be “rated”. Instrument-only flying? You need more preparation and a rating. Want to fly at night? More preparation needed: go get a night rating. What’s this - a twin engined aircraft? Woah there, go get a twin engine rating on your license. Want to carry fare paying passengers? You’ve got a lot more work to do, pal.

Commercial pilots even have to build up experience on simulators for particular types of aircraft, and in some cases particular airfields. If there is a lot of “terrain” or “unusual weather” around an airfield you don’t get to go in until you’re a lot more prepared than you already with your considerable training and experience. Even then, it can sometimes get a bit scary.

Then, before each flight, a pilot does some more preparation. They leverage all the preparedness they have built up before, and plan the specific flight they’re about to undertake. They read weather reports they have been prepared to interpret. They check navigation charts, do calculations and check through checklists.

Prepare, prepare, prepare. Check, check, check.

And then they have to get in the plane and fly. At that point you realise the preparation was all there to minimise the amount of time and effort a pilot needs to spend reacting.

Reaction is important when flying. Weather can change, mechanical aspects of the plane can fail, and a pilot could have incorrectly prepared or made a mistake, so you know: pilots are paid to deal with it.

Some pilots have different approaches to the mixture of preparation to reaction. Some prepare the bare minimum they are legally required to (and dislike it), because they trust that whatever might be about to happen in the air, they can react and survive. Others will prepare intensely - they hate reacting and so want the knowledge that every detail has been prepared for.

Ideally in flying, perhaps as in life, you want a balance. Experience counts, learning counts, but the people we look up to and think of as being the best in their field are all great reactors too. You can’t dismiss the preparation: when they don’t bother preparing at all, they’re just reckless mavericks who will end up breaking something if they’re not careful.

I suspect now I’ve clocked this, I’m going to spend more time preparing.