Why “flying blind” is safer than trusting your eyes

Sometimes you hear people say something that immediately brings your own thoughts to mind. Do you recognize that? I have that with this sentence:

 

If you don't <fill in the blank, preferably something from IT>, then you're flying blind.

I understand what is being said, BUT IT'S NOT TRUE.

I always think: well, thank goodness, because flying blind is much safer than flying visually.

What you need to know is that, besides being an IT professional, I'm also a pilot.

For those who are interested: I fly a Cessna 150 and a Cessna 172.

And I like to fly “blind.”

Because when you fly by your instruments, it's called flying ‘blind’. Not relying on what your eyes see outside, but on what your cockpit tells you. To many people, that sounds like the height of risk. In their minds, ‘flying blind’ is something you only do when everything goes wrong.

In practice, it's exactly the opposite. The vast majority of all flights – more than 95% – are flown under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). That means flying by instruments. Precisely because it's safer. European and North American airspace would never be as busy, complex, and predictable as it is if we didn't fly “blind.” Large parts of the airspace are even off-limits if you don't fly by instruments.

“Flying blind” is actually an outdated term. Nowadays, we talk about IFR: flying based on instruments, procedures, and agreements. The old-fashioned way—Visual Flight Rules (VFR)—is mainly still the domain of hobby pilots like me. And of professional pilots in training who do not yet have their Instrument Rating. VFR is fantastic on a clear day with good visibility: you navigate using church towers, highways, rivers, and landmarks on the ground.

“Nice story, Hugo, but what does this have to do with IT?”

More than most organizations would like.

You can see it coming, can't you? Let me take you to the more exciting situations in the air. Because as soon as the weather deteriorates, the clouds hang lower, or the airspace becomes busier, your eyes are no longer enough. The horizon disappears, distances are difficult to estimate, and what you see is not always what is really happening. That's when the instruments come into play: your altimeter, artificial horizon, speed, course, navigation systems. They tell you what is actually happening, not what your brain makes of it.

With IFR, this goes one step further. You don't just fly by your instruments, you also fly within a tightly organized system. Your route, your altitudes, your points in the air: everything is defined and checked in advance. And perhaps most importantly, you never fly alone. From the moment you want to release the brakes, Air Traffic Control is watching you.

You don't start the engines without a clearance from Ground Control. Ground Control gives you taxiing instructions: which runway to use, where to go, where to stop, who has right of way. Then the tower takes over and decides whether you can take off. “Cleared for take-off” means: the runway is clear, the airspace is clear, you fit into the picture.

After departure, Departure takes over and guides you past various air traffic control centers, each responsible for its own section of airspace. They monitor the distance to other aircraft, give you new altitudes and courses, and ensure that everyone misses each other neatly. If something goes wrong—a sick passenger, thunderstorms around your destination, a technical problem—they will work with you to find a solution: an alternative route, another airport, priority landing.

At the end of the flight, you return to the tower via Arrival for your landing clearance, and then back to Ground for the last few meters to the gate. From the first radio message to signing off at the jet bridge, there is never a moment when no one is watching over you. That is not a limitation. That is the reason why “blind” flying is so incredibly safe.

Why your IT is still flying VFR in IFR airspace

“Hugo, can we get back to talking about IT now?”

Sure. And you could already see the parallels everywhere, right?

It starts with this: most IT departments still fly “by sight.” Not by looking out the window, but by staring at dashboards and separate screens to see what's happening. You might think that sounds like the instruments in the cockpit. But it's slightly different. Especially when problems arise. They only really start looking when there's a malfunction, a complaint comes in, or a member of management grumbles that “it's slow again.” That's not IFR, that's cruising around in busy airspace with a tourist map on your lap.

The analysis of application behavior is more often than we would like incomplete. At best, log analysis provides a glimpse of what went wrong after the fact – and then only of what the application itself was ‘willing’ to report. An application that does not realize that errors are occurring or that enormous delays are creeping in will not log them either. You are then looking at a report that does not know it is incomplete.

There is another factor to consider: logs are text. Like LLM's (Large Language Models – commonly referred to as “AI”), they are excellent for finding patterns in words, but not everything that matters in your IT environment can be neatly captured in text. I/O peaks, lock contention, queues, network glitches: these exist in timelines, graphs, and events, not in stories.

And because logs consist of text, you quickly end up talking about mountains of data. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. The storage, computing power, and time required to sift through all those logs are enormous. It's expensive, it's slow, and it often yields disappointingly little useful management information.

Other aspects of application behavior usually only come to light when things have already gone wrong. And then you have to use tools that were never designed for that purpose. The standard tools provided by Windows or Linux give you a superficial impression at best, but not the in-depth information you need to understand what is really happening.

As long as you continue to fly ‘visually’, proactive prevention of disruptions and delays is mainly wishful thinking. You lack your own ATC – and you are flying in busy airspace with your eyes half closed.

Sciante as your Air Traffic Control

I recommend flying “blind.” In other words, relying completely on your instruments.

If you want to fly “blind” safely, you need good air traffic control.

It's no different in IT.

At Sciante, we have been the air traffic control for our customers' application landscapes for more than 15 years, ensuring that they run without delays. We don't hang fancy dashboards on the wall; we install specialized “radars”: in-depth measurements of applications, servers, and underlying infrastructure. This allows us to see bottlenecks, queues, and impending incidents well before users or customers are affected.

Would you also like to switch from flying by feel to controlled instrument flight with your IT?

Then schedule a no-obligation appointment with me. In a half-hour conversation, I will show you:

• where your biggest risks lie (i.e., where you can save money)

• where you are already experiencing unnecessary delays

• which 2–3 actions will make your IT more predictable immediately

So that your IT becomes as safe and predictable as busy but well-managed airspace.

👉 Book your appointment now