Ask Noah Show · Noah J. Chelliah

Ask Noah Show 458 | Lessons From a Pilot

September 9, 2025·54 min·4 clips

The first line in the airline's quick reference handbook reads 'this cannot possibly cover every scenario — be a pilot.'

1. Ask Noah Show episode 458, titled 'Lessons from a Pilot,' focuses on applying aviation's process-driven culture to everyday IT and technology decisions. 2. Host Noah Chalaya is joined by co-host Steve Ovens and guest Alex, a professional commercial pilot from Pasco, Washington, who has been Noah's friend since high school. 3. The episode's central thesis is that aviation has systematically solved human-error problems — through checklists, fatigue limits, and pre-made decisions — that the IT and medical industries still struggle with. 4. Listener Fred emails in to recommend Kagi, a user-funded, ad-free search engine offering a 100-query free trial, as an alternative to Google's declining search quality. 5. Steve reports that colleagues at his workplace use Kagi professionally because they believe it produces better results, and he personally splits searches 50-50 between DuckDuckGo and Perplexity. 6. Noah explains that SearchXNG (also called SearXNG) is essentially an obfuscation layer over Google and other engines — using a service while circumventing its intended model — whereas Kagi is purpose-built for privacy from the start, similar to how Proton Mail was built for privacy rather than retrofitted. 7. On domain registrars, Noah ranks GoDaddy at the bottom for its difficult account-recovery process and a brokerage service he says succeeded zero times at acquiring domains he paid them to obtain. 8. Noah places Namecheap higher for its native dynamic DNS support, useful for home servers on dynamic IP addresses, compatible with routers running PFSense, OpenSense, and OpenWRT. 9. Gandhi ranks above Namecheap in Noah's list for its exceptionally clean web interface and access to every top-level domain, though it shares GoDaddy's complexity in dispute resolution. 10. Register for Less, a Canadian company, sits at the top of Noah's list at $14 per .com renewal and $20 per year for email hosting, with multi-profile delegation that lets Noah manage all client domains from a single login. 11. Noah credits Register for Less customer support rep Doug Friend for personally locking his account after a hijack attempt and restoring access after Noah provided a driver's license scan. 12. Alex explains that aviation checklists come in four types: normal pre-flight and in-flight checklists, emergency checklists, immediate-action checklists (3-4 memorized items for imminent catastrophe), and deeper Quick Reference Handbook procedures. 13. Steve describes his documentation habit — writing down every procedure he executes whether or not a client asks for it — as laziness: 'I don't want to have to figure it out again,' a direct parallel to aviation's motivation for codified checklists. 14. Alex notes that at his airline, pilots may deviate from accepted procedures — such as landing without autobrakes or flying visually without an ILS — as long as both crew members explicitly agree beforehand and the deviation is safety-justified. 15. The first line of Alex's airline's Quick Reference Handbook reads 'This cannot possibly cover every possible scenario. Be a pilot' — acknowledging that cascading failures or undocumented scenarios require crews to improvise beyond any checklist. 16. Noah recounts that his wife's failure to use her seven-item morning checklist caused her to miss one item, and argues that unexpected variables (field trip money, extra gym class) create the same information overload that makes memory unreliable for pilots. 17. The episode uses a conversational, question-and-answer format with Noah probing aviation concepts and Alex and Steve translating them into IT analogies; the tone is relaxed and collegial. 18. Noah repeatedly drives the conversation toward explicit comparisons, asking Steve to grade the IT industry on communication, documentation, and checklist adoption, creating a structured critique of the industry. 19. IT professionals curious about applying aviation process culture to their own workflows, sysadmins, and Linux practitioners will find this episode most useful. 20. Listeners seeking deep Linux technical content or those uninterested in management and process topics may find the episode's aviation analogies tangential.

As heard by us

An aviation analogy opens into a practical discussion of communication, silos, and how people actually work.

Ask Noah uses an aviation analogy to open a broader point about communication, and the episode settles into IT talk without losing that frame.

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Why you'd press play

Hear aviation logic turn into a candid look at how IT teams actually communicate.

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