A look at Flying Myndz

Hello, Flying Myndz aviators, cabin crew, industry professionals, and the traveling public. I'm your host on Flying Myndz, Stephan Grisbrook.

First off, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to pop into the website, listen to the podcast, or watch us on YouTube to see what this is all about. This project has been a year in the making and a 180-degree turn from my mindset of being a full-time aviator.

The continual training to stay at a high level of awareness, the constant pressure of performing at your peak every time you step into the flight deck, the crazy schedules we have to keep—working shift work, flying short patterns or long haul all over the world—the medicals we have every 12 months, the recurrent training every six months. We all have days when things don't go as smoothly as we'd like, but the pressure to perform well is always there, and safety is always our number one priority.

There are a lot of people depending on us to be at our very best every time we show up. If we're not feeling our best, we tend to keep it to ourselves—often out of fear of consequences like jeopardizing our careers or livelihoods. Sometimes, we carry that stress quietly, wishing we could talk about it. We suffer in silence.

The more I talk about it with colleagues, friends, doctors, and family members, the more I wish I'd started this years ago. Everything we talk about here, I've been through. I've been lonely, sitting in isolation in a different country, in a different hotel room, thousands of miles away from home—gone for weeks, sometimes months. I wasn’t sure this was the life I wanted. But then you get back home to your loved ones, and it grounds us. It brings you back to Earth.

For a short time. Only  to head out and do it again.

Four decades of flying now seem like the right time to start this conversation, in hopes that it helps other flight crews too. If nothing else, I hope it encourages them to talk about it.

To those not in aviation who listen to Flying Myndz, thank you. I hope the conversations we have here don’t change your view of flying, but instead, open up the realization that flight crew are human, too. We put a lot of time into our careers, and we love what we do. We’re good at what we do. The thousands upon thousands of crew members who work hard to be safe and bring people where they need to go.

Sit back, relax, and stay tuned for more Flying Myndz.