Omar Hafez explains how flying an aircraft without an engine made him change how he thinks about strategy.
One of my passions outside work is gliding: flying aircraft without an engine
It shares more with strategy consulting than one might expect. You set a destination, assess the conditions, develop a flight strategy and adjust your route as the forecasts change.
But the biggest lesson for me is how differently pilots and strategists tend to think about worst-case scenarios.
In strategy, the worst case is often treated as an unlikely contingency: something we invest heavily in trying to avoid.
That works when we control most of the relevant variables – which is rarely the case.
In a glider, you do not control the weather or how conditions will develop. Under stress and fatigue, you may not even have complete control over your own performance.
So the worst case is not an appendix to the flight plan. It is built into it from the start – and treated as an outcome that may genuinely occur.
A pilot’s planning framework looks like this:
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A) Main destination: where you aim to land under favourable conditions.
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B) Backup destination: an alternative airport from which you can later continue towards the original destination.
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C) Safe outlanding: the plan for getting back on the ground safely when neither A nor B remains achievable, even if it means landing on water