A Fighter Pilot’s Take on Reality TV
April 7, 2014, NAB, Las Vegas—Rob “Scratch” Mitchell consulting producer for “Airshow” on the Discovery Channel talked about people and risk in high stakes productions. A former Royal Canadian Air Force officer, Mitchell compared the job of fighter pilot to that of a production manager.
After leaving the RCAF, Mitchell wanted to do something that combined his passions and expertise, and considered both as entry leverage into the film business. The air show series tries to go to the core of what makes people tick. It also allows for the application of military functions to a business environment.
The military concentrates on leadership, focus, and, surprisingly, creativity. It turns out that the best fighter pilots have an interest in music or art, both of which call for redefining spaces. In fact, there are many similarities between the two worlds; they need detailed planning-debriefing cycles, and to be successful, need a safety culture. The jet shows mirrors TV in needing complex methodologies with a focus on creativity to create tacit movements. The reality style of TV is just another way to tell a story and get good retention.
The planning cycle starts with a general plan that is passed on through a briefing. After executing the plan, the participants and other leaders need to have a complete debriefing to determine what worked, what didn’t, and what to do next time. Unfortunately, in many cases, the TV side didn’t follow through on the debrief portion, because of time and energy limits.
The plan is a set of objectives, both strategic and tactical, combined with intelligence information, and for TV the visual and character teams. After making the plan, the briefing is critical. The briefing addresses critical issues, mission variables and threats, and a backup plan for unanticipated events. For many missions, additional information updates from central command, and unscheduled termination aspects are added.
For the TV shows, one additional aspect was the availability and scheduling for the Cineflex helicopter. This piece of equipment allowed for alternative shots and sequence recovery that the other air-borne cameras and ground crews could not get.
The pilots execute the plan and then come in for their debrief. For the air show, the debriefing was on a daily and weekly basis and covered pilot safety items as the first topic. Then they discussed the good and bad points of the operation and ways to improve both areas. While critical to the show and to on-going pilot and ground crew safety, the debriefing is easy to drop if the leader(s) don’t put lots of effort into ensuring the debrief takes place.
While in the air, the pilots need to have good situational awareness. Situational awareness includes what has happened, what is happening, and what might happen next. For pilots, this is especially important, because people are poor in their perception of reality. In one example, Mitchell noted that flying low to the ground is an interesting challenge in Northern Canada because the trees get shorter as you go farther north. Flying at tree line drags you slowly closer to the ground, and if you just watch the trees you slowly drop, until you see a (perceived) 100 foot moose in front of you.
As a result, pilots try to be in a OODA loop—observe, orientate to the goals and to the situation, decide on one option, and act on that decision. This loop is a multi-input function that is changing constantly. In a combat situation, you need to be in a tighter loop than your opponent to be successful.
The goals of leadership in both flying and in production are to increase the team effectiveness. The main process is through motivation, which can take various styles and types that may be situation dependent. The leader also needs to have social situation awareness to make sure that an approach is appropriate. The leader also needs to consider the “smart wingman” concept. The wingman has to be smart enough to strictly follow orders until the situation calls for other actions, and then act independently. These concepts also apply to managing the characters in the show, by managing expectations.
Success in both the military and in TV require a safety culture that allows people to be able to speak up and share information. As an example, Mitchell presented a story of the RCAF air show team going to New Mexico, in an area that has many tarantulas. The air team landed and went to bed. The next day at the air show, Mitchell was the lead in the formation doing a group roll—a maneuver that has all of the planes in a rotating plane surface. At the go-no go point in the maneuver, Mitchell noticed a spider in the cockpit and tried to knock it way. The spider dropped to the floor until the plane was inverted, then fell to the canopy. At that point, Mitchell said to himself “fly the plane, fly the plane”, because he had seen a report of another pilot who had a spider in the cockpit and flew the plane into the ground. The investigative results called out pilot error due to a distraction. Safety information helps to keep others ok, and is complementary to the training, gear, and protocols for flying, and for a TV reality show production.
