A LIFE-SAVING CONFLICT
By Jim Davis

John and Walter, both private pilots, were taking a weekend trip in a small, rented plane. According to the weather report, it looked like a great day for flying. Unfortunately, about half-way into their journey they ran into a violent storm that they couldn't go over or around. They couldn't turn back because the storm had them surrounded. Visibility was zero. And the turbulence was giving the small plane a beating. They didn't have any choice but to try to fly through it, and although both of them were pilots, neither was instrument-rated. It was rough going, but luckily they lived to tell the story. Or was it just luck?

Fortunately, John and Walter each shared a conflict that most of us can relate to. It wasn’t a conflict with each other, and it wasn’t a conflict with another person. It was a money conflict – they didn’t have enough. Renting a plane was too expensive for either of them individually, so John and Walter flew together most of the time in order to share the cost. As is often the case, though, solving one problem just created another one – another conflict. The way they handled that one saved their lives.

If they had just been “car-pooling” by plane, it wouldn’t have been a problem. One would pilot the plane and the other would ride. They could even take turns. But they wanted more. They each wanted to log flying time the whole time. They found a way to do just that, and saved a lot more than money in the process. Here’s how they did it.

Normally, only one of them could log time as the pilot, but there was an exception. They could take turns flying “under the hood,” which means one of them wore a device on his head that kept him from seeing where he was going. This forced him to use the plane's instrument panel in order to fly. The other pilot served as the “safety pilot” and was always alert and ready to take over if necessary. Neither one of them ever dreamed that this would save their lives, but during the storm nature provided the “hood.” And the fact that they refused to compromise is the real reason they survived.

Think about that. Most people would probably have figured that the best they could do would be to split time at the controls the same way they were splitting the cost. But if John and Walter had been content with that, the storm would almost certainly have won. Compromise is often thought of as the best way to settle a conflict, but in their case it wouldn’t have come close.

Granted, John and Walter didn’t have a dispute, even though they had a conflict situation. They were friends who realized that the conflict was simply a problem for them to work on together. By taking that approach from the very beginning they came up with a way that gave each of them everything they wanted, and a lot more. But that doesn’t mean the same approach won’t work even if you are totally at odds with one another. All it takes is to recognize that your conflict is a problem to be solved and then to work on it together. That doesn’t mean it will be easy. It’s a lot of work. But it’s definitely worth the effort when everybody wins.