You are on a career path that will lead you, with any luck at all, to a well-heeled bourgeois lifestyle. In Buddenbrooks, the novelist Thomas Mann brilliantly used gluttony and its attendant ills as a metaphor of what was wrong with the bourgeoisie of his day. In an age of painless dentistry, you do not have to worry about some of the ills that beset the Buddenbrooks clan, but the human constitution remains the same, and it will not tolerate excessive abuse. It behooves the well-heeled pilot, then, to recognize the value of a spartan lifestyle even in the midst of plenty.
Smoking is bad for you. Booze is bad for you. Narcotics are bad for you. Too much food, especially fatty food, is bad for you. Sloth is bad for you.
Conversely, a steady exercise regimen is good for you. Sobriety is good for you. A lean, moderate diet is good for you. A bloodstream uncontaminated by nicotine, lungs not burdened by tobacco tars - these are good for you.
The first group of habits would be bad and the second good even if you were not a pilot. But you are one, so smoking, boozing and overeating are triply bad for you. These habits can make you ill; they can make you a less skilled pilot; and they can cause you to fail a physical and lose your license.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
The full-page ad in the New York Times showed Roscoe Turner, celebrated aviator, emerging from an open-cockpit aircraft with a cigarette in his mouth and doing his spiel for Camels.
"Like most pilots I smoke a lot," Turner was saying. "But I watch my nerves as carefully as I do my plane. I smoke Camels for the sake of healthy nerves."
This ad appeared in 1933, in an era when a whole generation of Americans regarded the pilot as the epitome of physical perfection. Testimonial by Turner was telling since he belonged to a group possessing "no flaw of body, nerve or character" (to cite a description of the professional pilot taken from the Literary Digest^- 22, Nov. 14,1936).
How wrong was Turner?
Recent research indicates that the "calming" effect of smoking is at best simply an easing of the jitters caused by NOT having a cigarette; at worst, it is in part a drug-induced dulling of the mind.
A psychogenic addiction, smoking is a "closed system" that creates and satisfies its own craving. It not only calms the jitters that it causes, but it produces the illusion of helping a smoker think and of keeping him or her alert.
The illusion is created by an injection of adrenalin into the bloodstream. The adrenalin, however, raises the blood sugar level, thus increasing fatigue until the next dose of nicotine. Even the scientific community once concluded reluctantly that smoking can help job performance. Not so, according to recent research.
George Spilich, of Washington College in Chestertown, Md., has reported to the American Psychological Association that the earlier belief of the scientific community in the performance-improving power of cigarette smoking depended on studies "based on tasks which demand little or nothing from high-order mental processes."
Spilich set smokers and non-smokers to such complex tasks as reading and recalling a short story, driving (using a computerized simulator), and remembering a series of letters on a short-term basis. He divided people into three groups: non-smokers; smokers allowed, in testing, to smoke freely; and smokers who were not allowed to smoke for an hour before the experiment.
All groups abstained from coffee and soft drinks for two hours before the experiment. To equalize the effects on performance involved in the physical routine of smoking (generally negative and time-killing), those who did not smoke during the tests were asked to "sham smoke."
Spilich found that while both smoking and abstaining smokers performed slightly better than non-smokers on simple repetitive tasks, the results reversed as tasks increased in complexity.
Notably, in the simulated driving test, smoking smokers got involved in almost three times as many rear-end collisions as non-smokers did, and in nearly twice as many as did abstaining smokers.
Especially significant is the fact that merely spurning cigarettes for one hour (and then not smoking during the test) resulted in an emergency-conditions driving record nearly twice as good as that of the "smoking smokers." Thus, the smoker puffing away on a cigarette would seem to be a sort of "ticking bomb" for complex activities in which safety is involved.
Spilich concluded that to smoke is to err. Smoking may help with simple repetitive tasks, but "it exerts a negative effect upon more complex tasks which require access to working memory, [to] long-term memory, and [to] one's extensive knowledge base." He also suggests that the smoker's handicap is by far more pronounced when the situation demands the most complex thinking - as when "a pilot is taking off or landing, or a machine operator is faced with a serious malfunction."
If Spilich's research is correct, smoking makes you just a little bit dumb before it makes you dead. It could cause you to make a piloting mistake.
As for the "dead" part: About 1,000 people a day die from tobacco-related disease in the United States of America. Practiced by only a third of the adult U.S. populace, smoking causes 85 percent of this country's lung cancers, 80 to 90 percent of long-term severe lung diseases (emphysema, chronic bronchitis), and 30 percent of the deaths from coronary heart disease.
