Me, Edward, Howard and the virtue of an instructive error

One of the most instructive things to have ever happened to me was crashing my car aged 17, on the second day of ownership.

The virtue of an honest mistake has been on my mind this week after witnessing someone else’s rookie error, and a potentially formative one, at that. It immediately put Captain Edward Smith of the Titanic at the front of my mind, alongside Howard Hughes, two men of the first half of the twentieth century whose lives were by no means similar; yet, for one intersecting moment, their lives, our rookie friend, and mine all shared a potent moment of error. Only Smith’s resulted in the tragedy of mass death. The critical component is the absence of an instructive prior mistake.

My moment of formative vehicular education would not come until 1991, careening too fast round a simple left hand turn on the second night out in my first car, purchased days earlier for three hundred and fifty British pounds. Not a huge sum in macroeconomic standards, but bound into it were months of evening toil, hard work and the hope of a future of freedom; toil that paid not only for the vehicle and its insurance, but the dozen or so lessons that supposedly taught me how to drive it. No one was injured in the crash, and no one else’s property was damaged. But the pain of the failure was profound and instructive. I have never crashed since.

I was born in 1973, so my knowledge of Smith and Hughes was derived from the legends that had formed around them in the years after their epochal achievements. Smith, the stoic, noble Captain, Hughes, the eccentric malfunctioning genius. Smith, up until the creation of the suddenly and exponentially larger than ever before seen class of ocean liner that he perished on, had enjoyed a career described as ‘sterling’ by Dr Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered Titanic’s wreck in 1985.

The Captain, cresting a career that had avoided nautical catastrophe, famously went to bed shortly before the vessel he was in command of -whose sea trials had lasted less than a day, custodian of more than 2,200 lives - was driven under his command at full speed through an ice field that he knew lay before them, with no one aboard with any idea of how long it would take for a vehicle on that scale and with unknown inertial momentum to either see an obstacle at night, steer around it, or come to a complete stop. History has taught us all the answers to those questions. Smith’s incident-free career had conditioned him against applying the foresight to assess the scale and unpredictability of the massive new risks he was undertaking. Catastrophe was nowhere in his memory.

Contrast this with the protean figure of Howard Hughes, and the famed single flight of his Hercules prototype flying boat, the largest aerial vehicle in history at the time of its flight in 1947, and even today, one of the largest aircraft of all time, comparable in scale to the current A380.

Hughes was no stranger to aerial mistakes. Only the year before he had crashed at the controls of another test vehicle, causing himself horrific and permanent injury, the long term pain of which is understood to have contributed to some of his later manifest eccentricity. He was at the time given 50-50 chance of survival.

Consider for a moment what it must have taken for Hughes to step aboard his mammoth aircraft, perch himself atop the highest flight deck ever constructed, place his hands on the wheel and push the throttles forward on a vehicle whose ability to fly was only theoretical. The pain of his burns still smarting; the knowledge fresh in his mind of what would happen if anything were to fail.?

The modern, similarly sized A380 does not require the pilot to wrestle with a yoke and pedals, making complex decisions about yaw, roll and pitch to keep the aircraft in flight. Avionics are computer controlled into a variable flight envelope that prevents the pilot making a catastrophic mistake, channelling all their inputs via a simple joystick akin to what you fight find on a home video game. It is one of the safest airliners ever constructed. Not one has ever crashed.

Hughes had no such assistance. His hands and feet had to carefully judge the feel of his gargantuan aircraft through links, chains, flaps and cables that were directly connected to the flight surfaces with only rudimentary hydraulic assistance to ease the strain.?Imagine for a moment the courage it must have taken for him to pull back on that yoke and coax his experimental behemoth out of the water at high speed and to take it – maybe or maybe not – into the air. What we do know about his successful flight was that he had the prior knowledge of painful failure to inform his decision to proceed.

It may seem a bit of a stretch, but I lost control of my used 1980 Toyota Corolla in the same headspace as Smith ceded control of Titanic, buoyed by the absence of a corrective prior mistake. It was entirely my own fault because I had not yet learned what I now consider to be the most important single lesson of driving; to know my limits and to stay within them.?By no stretch of the imagination either am I Howard Hughes, but in that brief moment before he took to the air, Hughes was carrying the painful memory of his mistake in his burned skin and healing bones, balancing the lessons of his past with him aims for the future. To this day, every time – every time- I get behind the wheel, the lesson of my error that night in March 1991 comes to bear, and I endeavor to apply it.

Mistakes are inevitable. The key is learning from them and applying the lesson. It’s not an original thought to observe that one learns more from mistakes than success, but it is an eternal one. If you think if it at no other time except when you get behind the wheel of a car, it may be the thought that keeps you alive one more day. It has worked so far for me.

Image - The last photo taken of Titanic, leaving Queenstown, heading into the Atlantic.