There is a lot of pressure on people to get it right: we want to not mess up; we want to contribute positively to the mission; we want to not be a hot mess that someone else has to clean up after. Also realise that nighttime and/or bad weather makes everything exponentially harder.
You have to remember that most of the time, all of that pressure is in your head. It is the expectations that we feel others have that can make us choose to not take part in mission like this because we feel that we are not up to some artificial standard that we assume others have for us. It is the stress of multiplayer cooperative missions with other players who have their poop all in it’s correct pile :-).
Remember: Some people do this for a living; some people are naturally better at balancing these kinds of work loads; some people get to practice more than others. W
Fighter pilots have a term (I have read, not that I am that familiar with the culture): “getting behind the jet”. It means that we are temporally in the wrong place - we are seconds, or minutes behind where we need to be - where the jet is. We are sitting in the jet but our minds are lagging behind and we are responding to what the jet needed of us in the past.
We have all have a limited amount of attention that we can use at any given time, some people have more than others, some have less. Each task that you add to yourself takes some portion of that attention away. At some point you will get task saturated and start to ‘fall behind the jet’.
Expand: Being 'Behind the Jet'
When we are nuggets to flight sims, we fall behind the jet very fast - sometimes as soon as we push the throttle forward on our first takeoff we start to fall behind as the jet rockets forward. At it’s basic all we need to do is keep it down the centre-line and rotate at the correct speed. That is, like, 3 tasks. Quickly, with practice, we get up to speed with the jet and 3 tasks is within our capabilities.
When we do our first landing, we start to fall behind again. Think back to the first time you tried to land a virtual fighter at an airfield. Likely the weather was fine, no wind, no traffic, yet keeping track of airspeed, sink rate, orientation of the jet with regard to the airfield and the touchdown point on the runway - it would overwhelm us and we would screw up our first attempts. We became task saturated quickly and fell behind the jet. After some practice, however, we understood the jet better, we understood what was happening better and we understood what we wanted to happen better. We are back with the jet.
Add weather; a crosswind. And we start to fall behind the jet again. 
With any aircraft (actually I would argue with any task at all, work, driving a car, eating pizza) we can fall behind where we need to be at the moment. It’s normally described as being distracted. Your eating pizza and a rather attractive @klarsnow walks past and we forget to put food in our mouths, for example. Ahem.
I am digressing and pontificating. So let me bring it back.
We are all going through this in some form or another - getting behind the jet and feeling like a burden to others. @near_blind, @klarsnow, @AeroMechanical are old hats at a lot of this which is why they start to add weather and night time flying to their roster - to push themselves. They get a lot of practice in, read a lot of books and talk about it all the the time. You and I are the nuggets that either do not get the time to practice or we are just lazy, so there will be times where we quickly get behind the jet faster than the others.
And that is okay. Really. Get behind the jet … in this group it is encouraged - and we will all work to help each other get better.
Two points:
-
Set your expectation realistically - if you are in a situation where the mission is beyond your abilities, change your ‘win state’. If we are doing a weapon drop that I am not familiar with, or some other complicated action, I am going to redefine success. Example: Nighttime cooperative flying. I expect that I can take off and get to a waypoint. What I have trouble with is flying the get with reduced visibility and trying to acquire (and stay in formation with) my wingman, let alone getting the jet set up to flight/fight/drop bombs. So I change my success goals. Did I at least acquire my wingman enough to get close to them? Check. Did I get oriented in the same direction as them as we ingressed? Check. I win - that’s it. Did I stay with them? That’s a stretch goal. Did I get my jet properly configured? Stretch goal. Did I get weapons off the jet? Meh - that’s for next time. Did I hit anything. Meh - next time. Each time I go out I want to add one item to the win list, or at minimum if I am having a bad day, not have one item fall off the win checklist
. -
It’s the reason that the Wednesday Night Fibre was started. We were trawling around in a multiplayer server each doing our own thing and we thought we needed to add a little structure to our diet; add a little fibre, so to speak. We realised that we were all at different skill sets and the only requirement we had was to just try. We never wanted to get to a spot where we even hinting at ‘turning people away’ because they ‘couldn’t keep up’. So, remember, you are in the perfect spot on Wednesday Night Fibre sessions if you want to: A. Cooperate; and B. Learn. Everyone in the Wednesday Night Fibre is there for those two items and we are all willing to help each other out to achieve those two goals.
Aside: Since December, @near_blind, @klarsnow and @AeroMechanical have started a Discord group to coordinate and expand these Wednesday Night Fibre sessions. If @whareagle’s fearlessness seems like something that you would like to mimic, or if my AARs from back in October or November seem like something you would be interested in, I encourage you to contact them via PM if you wish.