What makes training good? What makes it stick so that when you really need it, you can make the right decision and execute accordingly? Anyone who has earned a flight instructor certificate will remember the Six Laws of Learning as elucidated in the FAA's dreary Aviation Instructor's Handbook. My friend John Deakin once told me after he got through that volume and took the written, he felt in strong need of a hot shower.

When I went through primary training, there was only one law of learning: the Law of the Rolled Up Sectional to the back of the head. Musta worked. I've made it this far. What caused me to ruminate on this is two things: a conversation I had over the weekend with a friend who's about to start flying aeromedical flights and a movie I saw last week. I mentioned the movie, Deepwater Horizon, in a blog last week.

What the movie has to do with training is that in the film, there's a scene in which the protagonist and supporting characters are about to be flown 40 miles offshore in a helicopter. The director very carefully included tracking shots of the vast aviation infrastructure that supports the offshore oil industry to give some sense of the scale of the enterprise. Helicopters in the hundreds organized almost like airlines. But the instant I saw that, I didn't think of airlines, but some training I had 15 years ago at a company called Survival Systems USA in Groton, Connecticut.

This company is devoted mainly to one thing: to teach passengers and crews how to egress a helicopter that's crashed or ditched into the ocean. They aren't the only company doing it, but every worker in the offshore oil business will go through some version of that training before boarding a helo to a rig or a production platform. And that's instantly what I thought of and I'll be damned if I didn't find myself running the bullet points from that training: Be ready for cold water gasp, wait until the aircraft is completely at rest, find and open or remove the exit door and then and only then, release the seatbelt and egress.

The daylong course I took covered a lot more than that but for eight hours, we endured repeated dunkings in a simulated helicopter cabin which, as helicopters do, always inverted after impact. The day culminated in one of these exercises in pitch black conditions. It was wet, cold and kind of scary. But to this day, those key points in the training bubble up from time to time. I even have a little wallet card they gave me certifying my training in emergency egress. I would have zero difficulty in doing it any conditions right now.

I think it stuck because the instructors structured most of the training as in support of those four bullet items. I seem to recall they said if you remember nothing else and do nothing else, you will increase your probability of survival. They reinforced this with repeated ditchings (Law of Exercise) with some variation thrown in, but with debriefings focused mainly on the four critical points. There wasn't a lot of nuance. When you hear the phrase "relying on your lowest level of training," it means that when panic has reduced your operating bubble to the diameter of a human hair, you'll still be able to perform. Confidence in that ability can mean the difference between surviving and not surviving. However they managed to do it, it worked. We can only hope we pass the same kind of confidence on to our students.

My life of quiet desperation hasn't often intersected with royalty. But it did once. You probably read that King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand died this week. What that has to do with aviation is that Thailand is a very aviation- and, especially, skydiving-oriented country. The latter is almost an obsession and I wouldn't be surprised if it had spiritual overtones.

In 2006, I went to Thailand as part of The World Team and a successful attempt to set the record for the world's largest skydive. Read about it here. The Royal Thai Air Force, the citizenry and the King himself were enthusiastic supporters of this project, which became part of the Royal Sky Festival. The Thai people treated us like the royalty we definitely were not.

With nearly 500 skydivers participating, the logistics were staggering. We met in Bangkok for a couple of days, then transferred to Udon Thani, a big airbase up near the Laotian border. Famed fighter pilot Robin Olds flew out that base during the Vietnam war. Some of the skydivers flew up to Udon in Air Force C-130s, but the King generously made his Airbus available for the rest of us. And that's how I got a ride on the King's airplane.

So for me, his passing is not just another news story for halfway round the world, but a touchstone for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.