A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption. -Robert Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

Like in any industry, airline pilots are taught best practices to ensure the safety and quality of the flight and to promote the correct use of the airplane and its systems. In many cases these best practices have been distilled and codified into “checklists.” During training, checklists are used as a step-by-step guide for action. As the pilot gains familiarity and experience, checklists are used to verify flows of actions that become more or less automatic over time.

Gumption is typically high in the early stages of flight training and remains relatively high during the subsequent observational period called Initial Operating Experience, where a Check Airman rides along and observes during a new hire’s initial revenue flights. Invariably, however, gumption starts to fade over the next month or two, when the pilot is unleashed from a trainer. Almost invariably, attentiveness gives way to complacency and a Quality crisis of one sort or another eventually occurs.

If the pilot is lucky, little things are missed, like turning off a landing light or making a call on the wrong radio frequency, but bigger mistakes, like leaving a tail stand in or a pod door open, or worse, like forgetting to extend landing gear before landing can just as easily occur by forgetting or refusing to use a checklist to verify the newly grokked flows.

Gumption clearly waxes and wanes in any endeavor. We’ve all experienced it, but why?

According to Pirsig, “…gumption isn’t a fixed commodity. It’s variable, a reservoir of good spirits that can be added to or detracted from…[A] gumption trap, consequently, can be defined as anything that causes one to lose sight of Quality, and thus lose one’s enthusiasm for what one is doing.” Pirsig adds, “…there are two main types of gumption traps. The first type is those is those in which you’re thrown off the Quality track by conditions that arise from external circumstances, and I call these ‘setbacks.’ The second type is traps in which you’re thrown off the Quality track by conditions that are primarily within yourself. These I don’t have any generic name for–’hang-ups,’ I suppose.”

Pirsig goes on to describe a particularly destructive gumption trap that can ruin an otherwise talented mechanic: ego. He continues, “The next one is important. It’s the internal gumption trap of ego…If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality. When the facts show that you’ve just goofed, you’re not as likely to admit it. When false information makes you look good, you’re likely to believe it. On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. You’re always being fooled, you’re always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a big ego to defend is at a terrific disadvantage. If you know enough mechanics to think of them as a group, and your observations coincide with mine, I think you’ll tend to agree that mechanics tend to be rather modest and quiet. There are exceptions, but generally if they’re not quiet and modest at first, the work seems to make them that way. And skeptical. Attentive, but skeptical. But not egoistic. There’s no way to bullshit your way into looking good on a mechanical repair job, except with someone who doesn’t know what you’re doing.”

To my mind, the failure to use checklists boils down to an ego thing. Experience naturally builds self-confidence, but in the presence of ego, self-confidence is twisted into hubris. A self-confident person trusts but verifies, while a cocky person says “I don’t need to be checked.” This is obviously not the cause of every airplane accident or incident, but it lies at the root of many.