1153 – Lessons For Business: Tom talks What I Learned From Flying

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Overview
Tom Antion shares lessons from his years as a commercial pilot and explains how they directly apply to running a business. Rather than discussing aviation itself, he focuses on decision-making, planning, leadership, and resilience.
Key Lessons
• Make small corrections early.
o Fix problems as soon as they appear instead of waiting until they require major changes.
o Small, continuous adjustments are more efficient than dramatic course corrections.
• Always have a backup plan.
o Pilots prepare alternate airports before every flight.
o Business owners should think through "what if" scenarios before launching products or making major decisions.
• Use checklists.
o Tom describes nearly crashing after skipping a preflight checklist on a short flight.
o He now relies on checklists for webinars, speaking engagements, and other recurring business tasks.
• Accept that you're responsible.
o As the "pilot in command," the business owner is ultimately accountable.
o Delegation is important, but final responsibility cannot be delegated.
• Pay attention to changing conditions.
o Just as pilots monitor wind, entrepreneurs must watch industry trends and adapt before markets shift.
• Some events are beyond your control.
o Tom recounts losing his nightclub business when the legal drinking age changed.
o His advice: maintain your integrity, honor commitments, and recover rather than complain.
• Not everyone is qualified.
o He recalls inexperienced pilots creating dangerous situations.
o In business, expect to encounter decision-makers who lack experience and learn to work effectively with them.
• Experience builds capability.
o Difficult airports became manageable only after years of practice.
o The same is true in business—real competence comes from experience, not shortcuts or "get rich quick" promises.
• Stay calm under pressure.
o A commercial pilot must project confidence even during emergencies.
o Remaining calm allows clearer thinking and better problem-solving during business crises.
• Newer isn't always better.
o Tom argues that many older aircraft—and other equipment—were built more robustly than newer versions.
o The lesson: don't assume newer automatically means superior.
Personal Stories
• Engine failure during takeoff caused by skipping a fuel check.
• Flying unusual cargo, including glass beads and feeder goldfish.
• Delivering new Cessna aircraft before they were equipped with navigation radios, requiring navigation by highway signs.
• Considering returning to flying by pursuing a gyrocopter rating.
Key Takeaway
Success in both flying and business comes from preparation, discipline, continuous small adjustments, personal accountability, and staying composed when things go wrong. Tom's central message is that good systems and good judgment matter far more than reacting to crises after they occur.

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Episode 1153 – What I Learned From Flying
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1153 of Screw the Commute podcast. If you hear any little yipping in the background, Little mini is wanting to go out, but I got to finish this podcast. So today is 1153 and it's going to be something totally different than I usually do. And it's called what I learned from flying. Now, some of you know, I was a freelance charter pilot many, many moons ago, you know, when you had to go out in front of the plane and push a propeller down, get it to go. Well, no, not quite that far away, but. But I learned a lot of lessons and I'm going to, uh, they, they kind of relate to business. And so I'm going to, uh, relate things I learned in flying to business in this episode. Hope you didn't miss episode 1152. That was publicity. And I want you to listen to a screwthecommute.com/publicity. It was an hour long with myself and the celebrity image coach Starlee Murray. And, uh, she has a big event coming up, but we gave you a lot of tips on publicity and how it can be valuable to you and, and the mistakes that even experienced people like myself were making when approaching the media. And I, you know, I built my whole career on media marketing when I first started. So, I was humbled when I met Starlee learned from her. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go screwthecommute.com/episode number. 1152 was publicity.
[00:02:01] And then also screwthecommute.com/publicity would be the whole hour of Starlee and I. Okay. Let's see. Pick up a copy of my book. I'm just so close to getting it out. It's in the proofreading stage, the new version 4.0. But don't hold back from grabbing 3.0, because 4.0 just adds to 3.0. So you can go to screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And also I've got a podcasting masterclass for you. The first half of it is all about being the greatest guest the host has ever seen. What you have to do to do that. And then the second half is all the cool things you can do if you have your own podcast. And it got me invited to the white House, that's just one of the things. So, so check that out at screwthecommute.com/pod. And that'll lead you to YouTube where the, you can watch that masterclass. Take a lot of notes. You really want to take some notes on that one?
[00:03:01] Okay, let's talk about what I learned from flying. So I hold Commercial Multi-Engine instrument part 135, which is a higher level commercial. And that's all old, but you still maintain those ratings. I don't I haven't flown that stuff for a while, but I do have a also recently a commercial drone rating. So, so I hold a lot of ratings up in the sky.
[00:03:31] And I've had a lot of time up in that airplane and flying around, flying people around and doing all kinds of stuff. So I learned some things along the way. And I'm there in no particular order here, but it's just from my past and how I've used some of these things in business now that I think about it. So like I said, no particular order here, but first one is small immediate Corrections. See, when you first start flying. Let's say you get off course to the right and you should be over to the left. So when you're beginning, you say, oh my God, I'm off course to the right. And you turn the wheel and you, you know, hit the rudders and you go real sharp to the left to get back on the course. Well, remember, you're in the air. You're not, you don't have wheels on the ground here. So. So what happens is, is you shoot clear across your course and then you say, oh, oh my God, the course is now I'm on the left and it's to the right. I got to go back. And then you turn real hard and you go back the other way. And so you zigzag and it takes you like three times as long to get to your destination because you're that's your experience. You don't have the experience. So it was drummed into my head when I was first learning, uh, to make small, immediate corrections, and that's much more efficient.
[00:05:03] And it'll get you to your destination way faster than a giant corrections after things have already gone down the tubes. Okay. So when you see something is wrong in your business, small correction can usually fix it up. But if you let it go and fester, then then you've got to make giant corrections and things are going south on, you see? So small immediate corrections. Okay. Next thing is flight planning. And when we would, uh, plan to do what they call a cross country, you're going from one airport to some other airport. You're not just practicing at your own airport. Well, you have to plan the flight, and you plan for, hey, if something goes wrong, uh, where's the alternate airports along the way so that I can land if something goes wrong. And I got to tell you, things can go really, really bad, really fast in the flight. Flying and in business. Okay. So so you've got to be ready for that. So I would have to do flight plans and see along the route what airports could I land at if, if I had engine trouble or let's or if I couldn't get to an airport, what was the terrain I was flying over? How far could the plane glide if the engine went out so that I could safely land it in a field or something like that.
[00:06:40] So that was planning. So you got to do that in your business too. What you got to do a lot of what ifs. So I'm going to roll out this new product. Well what if this happens. Or what if that happens. And what if something comes out on ChatGPT, that makes my product obsolete. I put all this work into it. See? So you got to plan for things because they can go bad really fast. And and it's not. Well, in an airplane, it could kill you. Usually it's not going to kill you in your business, but, uh, it might feel like it sometimes when things go really bad. So you got to plan for contingencies. That's flight planning. Okay. Checklists. Oh my God, this is. I would not be talking to you if I hadn't had some great, great training on twin engine aircrafts when one engine goes out, however, and I had an engine out on takeoff up in Pittsburgh, almost crashed and burned on the Steelers. Uh, the Pittsburgh Steelers practice field that was near the the the airport I flew out of. And I'll tell you what happened. Um, I was coming out of Corning, New York, with 1,000 pounds of glass beads on my plane. All right. And I don't know what people do with them, but I had £1,000 of glass beads. You know another thing? I used to fly to New York. This will this will crack you up.
[00:08:12] Goldfish. You know how heavy goldfish are with, you know, all in water in the back of your plane. They were called feeder goldfish, and I flew them out of New York. So I had a lot of stuff on the plane. But anyway, I'm flying back to Pittsburgh and I stopped in, uh, at a place, um, I forget the name of the city, but it stopped right before my home base. And they had a restaurant called the Blue Angel. So I stopped for lunch. The goldfish didn't mind, and neither did the glass beads. All right. So I go in and have lunch and I come back out and it's only a ten minute short hop to my home base airport. Rostraver was the name of it. And so I jump in, the plane fired up and and I go, uh, go down and take off and. Right. Well, that's, I shouldn't say take off because as I'm rolling down the runway and getting to my, what they call the accelerate stop distance, this is like the point of no return on the runway. And so I lose an engine and the, the, the old saying in the pilot world is when you have a twin engine aircraft, I mean, we're not talking about airliners here, that if one engine goes out, the other engine just flies you to the point of the crash. Okay. So, so you gotta, when you lose an engine in a twin engine aircraft on one on each wing, the one that quit turns out like a giant piece of plywood up there, and it violently turns the plane and can make you crash, you know, really quick.
[00:10:02] So you have a procedures that you have to do. And I was very good at it and I saved the day and I declared an emergency. I got, uh, Barrett and the things will barely fly on one engine. They will, but barely, especially if you got goldfish on there. And, uh, and so I get it around and I get down and I land and there's fire trucks waiting for me. And, I mean, this is a big deal. All right, well, what happened? I ran out of gas on the right, on the right foot. I'm laughing now, but this is serious stuff, man. I ran out of gas because I didn't go through my checklist for that short ten minute hop to to Rostraver airport. And if had I gone through my checklist, I would have checked the fuel. Actually, you look in the tank to see the fuel and I would have seen. Holy crap. You know something's wrong. You know, it was, you know, a lot of these older planes, you know, have some quirks with them. I'm going to talk about older stuff in a minute, but, uh, I would have seen there was not enough fuel in that tank to get home and I would have gotten fuel and went my ten minutes to get home.
[00:11:23] So checklists and, and how you relate this? Well, I, I do webinars, right? Or I haven't done a lot lately, but I used to do tons of them. And invariably I, or inevitably, I don't know which word is right there. I would get a live webinar going and then say, man, I forgot to get this graphic I wanted or I forgot how you you do this certain function in the webinar software. And so I quit, you know, when that happened enough times. Luckily, the people didn't know, but I knew that I had messed up. And so I started having a checklist. So if I do a webinar now, I go through this checklist of all the things I got to do to get that thing right, even even there, I have a checklist when I live speaking engagements, what am I going to do? Uh, you know, do I need to check that my materials have been sent to the hotel and all these little things that, you know, when you're, when you get really busy, you forget. So checklists. Very important. Okay. Next thing you got to realize that you are the pilot in command of your business. Now, if you're in a gigantic business and you're just some cog, you're probably not listening to this thing, to this thing, but, um, you're the pilot in command.
[00:12:49] You have to come to terms with that. That nobody's going to save you. Nobody is going to come. You know, like with me working all weekend, I don't expect the employees to work all weekend. They got families and they're doing their thing. I'm the pilot in command. I have to do whatever needs done, right? Yeah. You can pay people to work extra shifts and stuff, but then that's a lot of extra payroll and this and that. But no matter who you hire, how many people you have, you are the bottom line. You are the pilot in command. See, the pilot in command is that's the term we use for the person who's responsible. So there could be two pilots flying somewhere, but each one of us knows, okay, who is the pilot in command of this aircraft? And we talk about it and say, okay, your pilot, your pilot in command, PIC, or you take it, you know, I'm going to take a nap. You're the pilot in command. Okay. And I've done that before. I've done it was 40 hours in the air one time with me and two other guys taking shifts. You know, because we had a really critical thing we had to do. So you have to come to terms. You're the bottom line on things. And if you you know, you're in the wrong business. If you can't come to terms with that, if you always want to blame somebody else and put everything else on everybody else.
[00:14:17] It just doesn't work that way. You're the pilot in command. Okay. This is this sounds kind of goofy. You got to know which way the wind is blowing. All right, if I'm flying from east to west, if I'm flying to Los Angeles or I flew three, uh, frequently back from Wichita, Kansas. I'll tell you about a minute. It can take way longer if you're flying into the wind, as opposed to with the wind on your tail. Or if the wind is crossways, then it blows you off course and you got to do stuff. Okay, So I'm thinking that applies to business. And that's like trends. What are the trends of your business? Which way is the wind blowing in your business? Can you imagine a big factory that that duplicated CDs and DVDs where they're at now or right. So the faster you can, uh, watch for which way the wind is blowing in your business, the, the earlier you can make corrections. Remember those small immediate corrections? Well, if you, if you wait too long, you're going to make those giant corrections and it might be too late. Okay. So you got to see which way the wind is blowing. Now some things can be out of your control. And in that case, I'm talking about whether, you know, I'm not talking about big airliners that can really stand lots of thunderstorms and big stuff like that I'm talking about mid-size aircraft, which and small, small aircraft, you know, compared to big airliners.
[00:15:58] And the quote is in the flying world is it's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air rather than being in the air, wishing you were on the ground. Okay. Because I've been through some bad weather in these things and it's not fun. And Mark Twain has a quote. Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Right. I think they are now trying to seed the clouds and stuff. But anyway, some things are out of your control and you have to come to terms with that. I know it happened to me when I had the nightclub, the drinking, you know, I had a nightclub in a college town, second biggest nightclub in the whole state. And the drinking age went from 18 to 21. It was out of my control. You know, I just. What are we going to do? Say. But what I did do is I went to all the creditors and I refused to go bankrupt. And I said, if you give me time, I'll pay you off. And I could go back there 50 years later and any of those people were still alive, they'd say, you're the guy that didn't screw us, you know, because you that's your reputation.
[00:17:10] Say you don't want to screw people over, but there's things out of your control sometimes. And what you do about it is shows what you are and who you are. And people will understand, especially if it's, you know, like, it's not like I was a big drunk. I mean, I'm allergic to alcohol. I didn't drink up all the profits and go out of business. No, I just got knocked out of business because of one legislative pen. All right. But that was out of my control. I had nothing, nothing I could do about it, but recover. Okay, so you got to come to terms with that. Now, another thing that's interesting that I learned from flying is that and in business for sure is some people are in positions they aren't qualified for. Okay, now let me give you some sidebars here. Me and the other professional pilots prayed for bad weather. We wanted bad weather. And you say, why on earth Tom would you ever want to to fly in bad weather? Well, let me give you a little known fact here. This is a little sidebar. Most airports don't have a control tower. Did you know that most airports don't have a control tower? According to the FAA, the United States has 19,482 airports total. You know how many have control towers? 527. That's 2.7% of all airports have a control tower. Many of them. You don't even have to have a radio.
[00:18:56] But here's the thing. You have to know the rules of every airport you fly. They're written down. Now there are little grass strips and things like that that are around. But you got to know the rules for whatever airport that you're flying into. Well, back to my. Some people are in positions they aren't qualified for. Right. The reason we we prayed for bad weather is because all the people at that airport. And there was a lot of them that had little homebuilt aircraft that was no bigger than your kitchen island. Literally were flying around like little bees buzzing around. Okay. And, and, and what I remember this vividly. So I'm flying a heavy twin engine aircraft and I'm on short final. In other words, I'm all configured to land. I'm not supposed to be flying fast and all this and going all over the place, although you're always ready to do what's called a go around. If something happens on the runway, you do what's called a go around. So I'm ready to land. Short, short, final means you're just almost ready right there. And so I. So I'm there and I look down the runway and one of these little puddle jumpers comes on the other end of the runway, the wrong end, and is flying and takes off towards me. So I had to do a go around and then the people on the ground bitched him out pretty bad because he wasn't qualified, really.
[00:20:45] I mean, he got his license, but that's like a license to learn, you know? So so he he took off the wrong direction and had no idea that a big ass plane was coming right at him. Right. So so you have to, to realize in business, you're going to run into people that are not qualified. That might be nepotism. Their uncle put them in the job. They're arrogant sometimes and they think they know it all, but they don't. So you have to be able to deal with those kinds of things. And like I said, a lot of times it's not life or death, but it could be life or death to your business. If you have to deal with one of those people that's holding purse strings, say, so you gotta, you gotta suck it up and, and learn how to deal with people that aren't really qualified. Okay. Um. There was another thing I wanted to tell you about. Oh, because I'm in Virginia. I used to fly executives from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh steel down to Grundy, Virginia. That's here in Virginia, where I'm at. But the the runway. And like I said, sometimes you have to deal with adverse conditions. And it wasn't weather related this time, but Grundy Virginia airport, my wheels would barely fit on this gravel runway. And it's on the top of a mountain. And it also would have made a better golf hole.
[00:22:16] It had a dogleg in the middle, a curve, you know, it went straight and then it went off about 30 degrees a different direction. This you had to really be sharp to land at this airport. And so I did got good enough to do that, but I had to deal with those adverse conditions. And then when you took off, the runway was so short, you'd have to take off on the top of this mountain, turn on the dogleg to keep your speed up. You know, the wheels are on the ground and you'd go off the edge of the mountain, and then you'd have to fly down below the mountain to get your airspeed up enough to pick up to, then climb right. So you're down, you're flying off the edge of a mountain. And so. So, you have to get good enough in your business. And this is the way I relate to business. You have to get good enough. And when you're brand new, you might not be good enough. When I was brand new, I wasn't good enough to handle Grundy, Virginia. But as I got more experience in practice, I could handle more adverse situations in my business and in flying. Okay. So when you're brand new with something, don't get all arrogant about it or mad at yourself. You have to get the experience. And that's what cracks me up about all these people now.
[00:23:41] You can't go through Instagram and there's like three ads for every piece of real, every piece of content. And it's all I'm. I'll make you rich. You'll. You'll make a million downloads tomorrow. You don't pay. I mean, you know, just I'm leaning up against my jet that I don't own. And I mean just all this crap out there. Don't fall, fall for that. You have to learn and, and get some experience. And then that's where success comes from. Uh, unless you're a hot babe or something, you can just, you know, be out there and, and get a million views and make a lot of money. But most of us aren't. Okay. Let's see. Um, oh, now when I got my commercial rating. All right, so I could fly passengers for money so I could fly passengers as a private pilot and a multi-engine pilot and an instrument rated pilot. Instrument rating means you can fly in bad weather, but you can't get paid with any of those ratings unless you go for a commercial rating. So when I got my. But the thing is, is even if some of you go on some of these tours, helicopter tours, or, you know, little airplane tours of the Grand Canyon or something like that, I asked the guy one time, hey, how many hours did you have to have to get this job? He said, oh, only 500. Well, 500 is a relatively new pilot.
[00:25:12] I think you can get your commercial at 250. And that particular company could have hired a guy at two 250 to fly 18 passengers. All right. So so one of my teachers said, Tom, the most important thing about your commercial rating is don't let the passengers know how scared you are. And that was true. Sometimes as you're coming up as a pilot. So. So be careful when you're going on some of these little puddle jumpers. Make sure that the pilot is, uh, qualified and experienced. But that's the thing. What he was telling me is you got to stay cool because. And this same thing in business, when things go bad, if you don't stay cool, you can't figure your way out or think your way out when if your mind is all worked out and and fearful, you've got to stay calm and that'll help you figure a way out of it. The only one of the things I can relate to this is when I went out of the nightclub business because of the drinking age, and then I got hurt and I was living on credit cards in a vacant building on a mattress. This is around 1988, and, uh, I was keeping humor books around me because this was the worst time of my life. I was Mr. Big Shot in the whole state. And then now I'm a nobody living on a credit cards, on a on a mattress in a vacant house.
[00:26:44] Okay. And so I was watching Candid Camera, and I kept all these humor books around me to keep up, you know, keep my my spirits up when I was, you know, in this mess. And I'm watching Candid Camera. And that's when I got the idea for Prank Masters, which I got worldwide publicity for, got me on radio and TV all over the world and kicked off my speaking career. And, you know, but had I just been crying the blues that whole time, then none of that would have happened. I wouldn't be here talking to you today. So that's my commercial rating. Stay cool. Even when you don't know how you're going to get out of stuff. And then the last thing is old stuff can be better than new stuff. And some of these airplanes see, another little known fact is airplanes can last 30, 40, 50 years, something that they put, I think it's a zinc coating and they don't rust out and they have to be maintained every year, no matter whether they fly or not. And all of these, you know, uh, mechanics have to do all this stuff all the time. And so you can have old planes that fly a long time. And, and they were a lot of the older planes that I flew were better than the newer ones. And that's another little sidebar story for you.
[00:28:10] I used to fly commercially to Wichita, Kansas, and Wichita, Kansas is where they make Cessna airplanes. And in those days they didn't put the navigation radios in or like the GPS. There was no GPS in the airplanes in those days or communication radios in the airplanes. You did that at your local airport after the plane was delivered. Well, I'm the guy the delivery boy for. I'm like the the Amazon driver for Cessnas. Okay, so so it was a pain in the neck for me to have, you know, I had maps in the plane, but it was just a pain in the neck to, to be checking the map every two seconds to where you know, where you are because you didn't have any navigation stuff in the plane like they do now, and no communication to talk to anybody. So I would ride down route 70 at about 500ft above the ground, which is very low, and read the road signs all the way back to Pittsburgh. So, so, so even those those brand new planes were kind of rickety compared to an older plane. The and like the trailers I buy today for my business, you know, the I buy ten year old trailer, it's really solid. The, the metal you go down to Tractor Supply or Lowe's or whoever sells trailers. There's such dinky little metal on them and crap like that. So old can be, uh, can be better.
[00:29:51] And like I said, some of those old planes that I fly, they were just just beautiful. So anyway, this is a little bit different. Uh, gives me a little rambling of, uh, the days up in the air, but, uh, it was so much fun flying and, uh, and, uh, pretending I'm not scared. So, so, uh, so anyway, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Uh, I'm thinking about going back for my gyrocopter rating, so I've been studying that a little bit now because I'm trying to, I'm getting the bug a little bit. That's why I'm doing this episode. I've been watching gyrocopter videos. They're, uh, they're like a, um, a Timu helicopter. So, so anyway, there we go. So check out screwthecommute.com/publicity for the interview I did with Starley on publicity. I mean, publicity is how I started my career. I got speaking engagements from it, all kinds of sales of products and services from being, um, well known on, on the airwaves and then the podcasting masterclass screwthecommute.com/pod. Take really deep notes on that because that can make you one of the greatest guests the host has ever seen. If you do what I tell you on that one. All right. And then of course, check my mentor program out. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. And my school, IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I think I'm gonna go watch a gyrocopter video. Catch you later.