[00:00:00] Welcome to episode 147 of the Bandhive Podcast. It is time for another episode of the Bandhive Podcast. My name is James Cross and I help independent artists tour smart this week on the podcast. I'm gonna tell you the story about my first and so far only in flight emergency. And of course, this will tie back into knowledge for DIY bands, but I wanted to use this story as an example.

Because if you've been following the podcast for a while, you're probably aware that I'm an aviation nerd. And as of July, not just an aviation nerd, but also a licensed private pilot. And during my training, there was one moment that stood out from all the uneventful flights during training. I mean, they were fun.

They were exciting, but nothing really went horribly wrong. Except one single flight, which had a few moments. Just like, what do I do now? And then I figured it out and I went with it and that moment was caused by a single insect[00:01:00] one insect caused this all. So here's the story. It was a beautiful may day for flying.

The sun was a few hours from setting. The winds were a calm. The sky was clear, everything was perfect. So I pulled up at the airport and I saw my instructor. So I chatted with him for a few minutes. And then I said, okay, I'm gonna go flying. And I pulled the plane out of the hanger, did my pre-flight inspection, all of that, nothing at all seemed wrong.

So I climbed in and fired up the engine. Did my pre take off checks, made my radio call and headed out onto the runway for takeoff all super standard stuff that I'd been trained to do. You know, I was like just about two months into my training at this point. so I set full power, the engine roar to life, and I started moving down the runway. Everything seemed as expected. I checked the air speed indicator to make sure it was working. And I saw that it was so perfect. It was reacting to that incoming air pressure.

But as my speed was getting near takeoff speed. All of a sudden, the indicator dropped by about five to 10 miles [00:02:00] an hour, and then it came back up slowly. So I figured, oh, there must have been like a little bit of a headwind and that's not there anymore. Okay. No worries. So I waited until the speed was back up to where it needed to be.

And then I lifted the plane off the ground and that is the moment I realized I was in trouble what I quickly realized is that the plane is supposed to climb at 78 miles an hour, but I was barely climbing and the indicator was showing 65 to 70 miles an hour.

So something was wrong, but the training I'd gotten as well as watching way too many aircraft investigation videos on YouTube led me to make the educated guests that the air speed indicator was not showing the actual air speed.

And I was probably flying faster than it was showing me. Now here's the problem with this. It's not like in a car where you can just slow down and stop when you're flying a plane. If you fly too slowly, You can stall the plane, which is not really a big deal. It's not like stalling a car where the engine goes out.

It just means that you're not generating lift anymore. So the plane actually kinda stops flying [00:03:00] and you can recover from that really easily if you have enough altitude, but when you're close to the ground, That can be a really big problem, because if you don't have enough altitude to recover, you hit the ground. And that's not a good thing. On the flip side, if you fly too fast, you can actually overstress the airframe and cause damage, or even have the plane break up in midair, which is also not ideal. Now that's really difficult to do, depending on the plane you're in the plane.

I was in that probably wasn't going to happen unless I was diving down, which I didn't intend to do, but. Flying too slowly and exceeding the angle of attack. That's safe in that plane could have happened if I wasn't careful. So keeping that in mind, I flew the pattern back around and landed, and I just used my best guess to keep the speed going.

Thankfully, it wasn't very windy. So. With it being calm. It's a little easier to fly judging based on the ground. Whereas if it's really windy, you might be doing, you know, a hundred miles an hour in the [00:04:00] air, but you're only moving forward. 50 miles an hour or 70 miles an hour or whatever it is. So I was really glad that it was a calm day, that it wasn't a lot of wind to contend with.

So I landed the plane, it was fast and I took a little more distance to stop. But aside from that overall, it was uneventful. And then after maintenance checked out the plane, they figured out that something had partially blocked the pitot tube, which is the sensor that's used to show your air speed on the air speed indicator. And that just goes to show as something as simple as a bug can block that. Now, in this case, it was only partially blocked. So I looked at flight radar 24 after the flight, and I saw that I'd been doing about a hundred.

When I was in the pattern, whereas my air speed was showing about 80. So there was about a 20 mile an hour mismatch on that air speed indicator, which is not a good thing, but it tells me that I did fly that pattern as safely as I could. And I just used my best judgment to make it happen.

now you're thinking, what on earth does this have to do with the music industry? Well, here's the thing. [00:05:00] I was able to land that plane and walk away safely because I stayed calm. If I hadn't stayed calm. If I had freaked out or locked up or anything like that, it could have entered quite differently.

And there are tons of situations in the music business where things go wrong and staying calm is a massive benefit. Anything from like a minor inconvenience to emergencies. Like one year I was on tour and the bus caught fire and I was able to stay calm and it all worked out. No one was hurt, no one was injured.

We got the bus back the next day. Thankfully it was a small fire, but still, we didn't know that when it was happening. So in general, freaking out or having a meltdown, doesn't help the situation you're in at all. So to avoid that. The best thing you can do is have a plan of action for anything that could be reasonably expected to go wrong.

So for example, if you're on tour, plan ahead, have a AAA membership and a full size spare tie rather than a donut, because you can only go so far on a donut. [00:06:00] And you're not gonna be able to find a full size tire at 3:00 AM on Sunday, everything's gonna be closed. And the same thing goes for something that's not as detrimental as that, like selling out of merch.

If you plan ahead to have a little extra merch that goes a long way to not cut into your merch sales, because if you sell out that's merch, you're not selling because you don't have. So by planning ahead, you make it a lot easier to stay calm when things go wrong because they will go wrong.

That is the nature of the music industry. It's Murphy's law. you want to be prepared. So at the very least being prepared could save you some annoyance or in the best case scenario, it could actually save lives. So don't ever underestimate planning ahead. It's that important. so after listening to this episode, please sit down, take 30 minutes to list out anything that can conceivably happen to your band and write out a plan on how you would respond to those events quickly and reasonably. Then discuss it with your band mates so they can suggest other [00:07:00] scenarios. And you're all on the same page with what the plan for each of those scenarios is and Where you're gonna keep that. So probably a Google doc or a shared spreadsheet of some sort that you can all access and that way, if something goes wrong, any one of you can pull up this list and say, oh, look, we have a plan for that.

Does this work? Okay, let's do this. Does this not work? Maybe it needs a little tweaking because the situation's a little different than what we had written down, but it's still close enough that we can use this as the skeleton of our. So the key takeaway here is one be prepared and two learn from the problems that other artists have faced.

So you can have a better understanding of the situation when it's your turn to face that situation. So, like I said, make a list of those things that you think could go wrong and maybe look at other artists, see what has gone wrong for them.

So obviously things that are super common are like gear, getting stolen vans, getting broken into flights, getting canceled, delayed, all that kind of stuff can go wrong on tour, but it could be something as [00:08:00] wild as you know, green day's album from like 2003 getting stolen. The master tape's gone. That album is lost forever.

so guess what? Maybe have a backup of your music, what if your laptop gets stolen? They're not necessarily looking for your music, but they steal your laptop and you don't have a backup of your music. All your music's gone. You gotta start from scratch. So always have backups. That's a really simple solution.

And I think it's ridiculous that green day didn't have a backup. Like they had one copy of the master tapes that is studio 1 0 1 is you keep a backup. Now again, they were on tape, but you can put stuff onto a second set of tapes. Makes a good story, but it's ridiculous.

look at what happens to other artists And figure out how you can handle that situation or better yet prevent it from happening to you in the first place. So take all of this information, sit down for 30 minutes maybe it doesn't take you that long, but whatever amount of time it takes, go make that list. So you're prepared for when things do go. and you'll be so much less stressed [00:09:00] when something happens.

That does it for this episode of the Bandhive Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in listening. I really appreciate it. And I hope this episode has given you some insight onto what you can do when things go wrong, because in the music industry, it's not, if it is when I've seen a bunch of different things happen over my years in the industry and anything from, like I mentioned, the bus catching on fire to, you know, just getting lost or hearing horror stories from bands.

I absolutely never wanna relive. I don't wanna face what they've faced. So when I plan a tour, I plan it around. What's happened to these other artists and make sure that I'm doing the best I can to mitigate those problems before they even happen. So by being prepared and learning from other artists, you can really help yourself big time. And that's one of the things that really saved me on this flight is I had watched accident videos like investigations from other aircraft incidents and accidents. So I was able to make that educated guess and say, it's probably the pitot tube that's blocked because my [00:10:00] air speed indicators are not working correctly. They're still working, but it's not the right speed. Something is off here. Now another student might not have been able to figure that out.

They might not have been thinking through that. Whereas in my case, because I'd seen all these videos and knew what happened to other planes on occasion, I was able to immediately say, this is what I think it is. This is how I'm gonna handle it. And I landed the plane safely. And then when maintenance checked it out, that's exactly what it was.

So, if you can do that with your band, you will be so much calmer and less stressed when those things go wrong, because you know exactly what is going on. So I really hope you take this to heart for your next tour, your next release, whatever it is, apply this anywhere in your band, where things can reasonably be expected to go wrong.

If you wanna see what other artists are putting on their lists, I would love to see bands sharing their list in the Bandhive community. When you do have a Facebook post for every single episode in our Facebook group, [00:11:00] you can find it by going to Bandhive.rocks/group or searching for Bandhive. That's B A N D H I V E on Facebook and joining our group that way.

Again, that's Bandhive.rocks/group, or you can search for us on. we'll be back with another brand new episode next Tuesday at 6:00 AM Eastern Until then I hope you have a great week stay safe. And of course, as always keep rockin'.