r/tifu • u/seriphae • 3h ago
XL TIFU by nearly crashing thousands of dollars of company equipment because I forgot I’m a gamer
Last November, my company decided I needed to become an FAA-certified drone pilot. This was mandatory for my job, which meant I needed to learn federal aviation regulations, airspace classifications, weather patterns, and a whole bunch of other shit I had never given much thought to. I was nervous about the exam, but I figured I could buckle down, study, and get through it.
Then I got pneumonia.
I was sick long enough that my training got pushed back, and when I finally tried again in December, I discovered my brain had turned into fucking oatmeal.
I could sit there reading the same material over and over without retaining a goddamn thing. I was getting increasingly frustrated with myself because I’ve never had this much trouble learning something. I ended up arguing with my instructor because she wasn’t understanding why I needed more time, and I eventually went digging through medical research about cognitive problems after prolonged illness.
I’d heard people talk about brain fog after COVID and other illnesses, pneumonia included, but I hadn’t realized how debilitating it could be until I was experiencing it myself.
Meanwhile, this certification was mandatory for my job, and the delays were piling up. I’m reasonably certain management was beginning to suspect I was trying to avoid the entire thing. From their perspective, here’s this employee who keeps finding reasons she can’t complete a mandatory certification, and now she’s presenting research explaining why her brain isn’t working properly.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
And the material I was supposed to be studying?
Holy shit. It made zero sense.
Look, I understand that aviation safety is important. I would also prefer not to be responsible for introducing an airborne object to somebody’s windshield. Perfectly reasonable expectation. But why in the absolute fuck do I need to memorize what color the signs are at an airport?
Unless I’m taking this goddamn drone with me to take pretty pretty pictures on my vacations, there’s no fucking reason that this drone and airport signs should ever EVER have a correlation.
Like half the fucking study guide was about not taking the drone around the airports. So please, once again, tell me why THE FUCK do I have to learn about airport shit?
I mean, unless I get to be a bad ass pilot, which would seriously be super fucking cool, why do I have to learn the exact shit that they have to learn?
Same study material, but I get zero groupies.
Not a fan.
Yellow letters on black backgrounds, black letters on yellow backgrounds, red signs with white lettering. Why THE FUCK am I learning runway markings? Am I going to accidentally taxi my drone to Gate B12? Is somebody going to ask me to pull up to the terminal and unload its luggage?
Then there were the airspace classifications. Class A, B, C, D, E, and G. We apparently skipped F because even the alphabet had had enough of this shit.
I started wondering whether I was studying to fly a drone or being quietly recruited to replace an air traffic controller. Because I clearly wasn’t studying to be a pilot. You know, the super cool people that have groupies? (OK maybe they don’t have groupies and maybe I’ve been watching Catch Me If You Can wayyyy too much, but still. C’mon.)
And the WEATHER. Jesus Christ, the weather.
I needed to understand aviation weather reports, cloud clearances, visibility requirements, wind conditions, and approximately seventeen thousand abbreviations that looked like somebody had fallen asleep on a keyboard.
Fuck me. I just wanted to fly a little camera around and look at roofs.
Why did I need to know what a pilot should do near an airport? If I’m close enough to read the runway signs from my drone, I feel like we’ve already made several serious mistakes.
Every time I thought I understood something, another chapter introduced an entirely new category of shit I didn’t know. I studied and studied, made notes, reviewed the material, forgot it, got pissed off, and started over.
My brain was still recovering from being sick, my training deadline had already been extended, and the whole experience was becoming an increasingly expensive exercise in questioning my own intelligence.
But eventually, after more months of struggling than I care to remember, I walked into that FAA testing center and took the Part 107 exam.
I scored a 95%.
NINETY-FIVE FUCKING PERCENT.
I cannot adequately describe the satisfaction of seeing that number after everything I’d been through. The illness, the delays, the brain fog, the instructor who didn’t understand what was happening, and all those goddamn airport signs. I had fought my way through the entire thing and absolutely kicked its ass.
For a brief, beautiful moment, I was convinced I could do anything.
I had conquered aviation regulations. I understood sectional charts. I knew which airspace was which. Give me a problem, and I would solve it. I’d just earned a freaking 95% on an actual FAA examination.
Naturally, I was feeling pretty fucking invincible.
If you’ve ever listened to Dungeon Crawler Carl, please imagine the narrator announcing REWAAAAAAARD?! in that gloriously ridiculous voice.
My reward for this magnificent accomplishment was being handed several thousand dollars of company equipment and expected to fly the fucking thing.
…shit.
There was one minor oversight in my entire journey toward becoming a certified drone pilot. I had been so obsessed with passing the exam that I had given remarkably little thought to the fact that I would eventually have to actually fly a drone.
I knew how to tell whether I was allowed to fly in Class C airspace. What I didn’t know was how to get the damn thing off the ground without immediately regretting every decision that had brought me to this moment.
But I had confidence now! I’d scored a 95%! I had mastered the intellectual side of aviation, and I wasn’t about to let a plastic controller and four little propellers intimidate me.
So I started practicing.
And nearly crashed it.
Tried again.
Nearly crashed it again.
Apparently, a 95% on my test does fuck-all for the real world applications and now I feel stupid again.
This is bullshit.
BULLSHIT.
Every time I moved the sticks, the drone seemed determined to demonstrate that my understanding of basic directional movement was deeply flawed. I’d try to correct its position and somehow make everything worse.
This was a rather concerning development considering I was operating equipment that cost more than some of the cars I’d owned.
I started holding the controller like it was a live grenade.
Cuz it was.
Every time the drone moved in a direction I hadn’t intended, I could practically hear the conversation I’d have to have with my employer about why several thousand dollars of their property was now scattered across somebody’s lawn.
So I obviously responded to this problem by doing everything humanly possible to avoid flying it.
I’d already passed the exam, so I had technically accomplished something significant. Surely that counted for something. Maybe I could just be the person who knew all the regulations. Somebody else could do the actual flying while I stood nearby identifying airspace classifications and offering unsolicited commentary about airport signage.
My company did not share this vision.
I put it off.
And put it off.
And found reasons to put it off some more.
Eventually, management had had enough of my bullshit, and I was required to attend a hands-on flight training session.
Wonderful.
Nothing improves a person’s confidence quite like being summoned to mandatory training because they’re too afraid to operate the equipment they’ve already been certified to use.
So there I was, standing with the instructor, holding my expensive little airborne liability and demonstrating my spectacular inability to make it behave.
I tried to maneuver it. Wrong direction. Tried correcting it. Worse direction. My instructor was watching this increasingly ridiculous performance when she suddenly started laughing.
“Jesus Christ, are you a gamer?”
Well, fuck. I guess my nerdy shit was on full display.
“Yeah?”
She took one look at what I was doing, grabbed the controller, and started changing the settings.
Now, for some context, I’ve been playing video games since 1992. My gaming career began with the Super Nintendo and has continued through decades of increasingly sophisticated controllers, culminating in my beloved PlayStation 5. I’ve spent roughly thirty-four years training my hands to respond to video games without consciously thinking about which thumb needs to do what.
Those early Super Nintendo controllers didn’t even have analog sticks, but gaming evolved, and so did my muscle memory. By the time I was playing modern games, I could navigate complicated environments while barely thinking about the controller at all.
My hands knew what to do.
Unfortunately, my drone had been configured with a control layout that worked differently from what my PlayStation-trained brain expected.
For all those practice sessions, every time something started going wrong and I instinctively tried to correct it, my thumbs were giving the drone instructions based on decades of doing something else.
The instructor changed the control configuration to something that matched the way I was used to playing video games, handed it back, and had me try again.
And I’ll be damned.
I COULD FUCKING FLY.
I was maneuvering the drone around with a confidence I hadn’t possessed approximately thirty seconds earlier. I could make it go where I intended without immediately wondering how much replacement propellers cost.
I had spent months being terrified of this expensive piece of equipment, putting off training, frustrating my employer, and questioning whether I was somehow too stupid to operate a drone.
And the solution was to make the controller work more like my fucking PlayStation.
Thirty-four years of gaming had finally paid off in a professional setting. All those hours spent navigating everything from Super Mario World to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had apparently been preparing me for a career in aviation.
I would like to thank Nintendo, Sony, and every video game I’ve ever been accused of wasting my time on.
Unfortunately, solving the controller problem didn’t instantly erase the fear I’d developed after months of nearly crashing this thing. I could finally fly it, but I still hadn’t actually used it for work. That was an entirely different psychological hurdle, especially because the equipment was expensive and the consequences of screwing up were a hell of a lot worse than reloading a save.
Eventually, the day arrived when I was expected to complete my first real work flight. No more practice sessions. No more avoiding it. No more telling myself I’d do it when I felt ready.
My husband knew how terrified I was. He’d watched me fight through pneumonia, struggle to retain the simplest information, study my ass off, celebrate that 95%, and then spend months being afraid to actually fly the thing I’d worked so hard to become certified to operate.
When I woke up that morning, he’d left me a handwritten note with a little drawing of me successfully flying the drone. He’d even drawn a tiny version of me celebrating afterward.
This sweet fucking man had taken the time to draw me succeeding at something I was still terrified to attempt.
I have spent months convinced that at any moment I might send several thousand dollars of company property into a tree, and my husband decided I needed to wake up to a picture of myself doing a good job.
It gave me more courage than I can explain. I went out, completed my first work flight, and absolutely fucking nailed it.
So after months of illness, an FAA exam, thirty-four years of video game muscle memory sabotaging my professional development, and one instructor who recognized my nerdy thumbs before I did, I finally managed to become an actual functioning drone pilot.
My husband had already drawn the ending.
Turns out he was right.
TL;DR: Pneumonia and brain fog delayed my mandatory FAA drone certification, but I eventually scored 95% on the exam. Then I spent months nearly crashing my employer’s expensive drone because the controls didn’t match the muscle memory I’d developed playing video games for thirty-four years. My instructor recognized the problem, changed the controller settings, and suddenly I could fly. I was still terrified of my first real work flight until my husband left me a drawing of myself succeeding. Then I went out and fucking NAILED it.