The making of Max Darkosadze

Early years

Max Darkosadze was born in Tbilisi on 26 August 1995, into a family that prized study and service in equal measure. The household rule, as he has described it since, was simple: you may choose your work freely, but once you have chosen it you owe it everything. That rule has followed him into every field he has entered.

His interests ran in two directions from the start — people and the machines that carry them — and he has never given either up. Where most people are asked to choose, he has built a working life in which the disciplines teach each other.

Somewhere in those years he acquired the name that has followed him ever since. To students, patients, pilots and readers alike he is not “professor” or “doctor” but Batoni Maksi — Mr Maksi — an address that in Georgian carries respect and affection in the same breath. He has never encouraged it and has never managed to stop it.

Medicine and surgery

He studied medicine and went on to train in surgery. Those training years were, by his own account, the hardest and most formative of his life: long rotations, difficult cases, and the slow accumulation of the one thing a young surgeon cannot be given — judgement.

Colleagues describe a surgeon who is unhurried in the most literal sense: he moves at exactly the speed the tissue in front of him allows, and not one step faster. He is early in a career rather than at the end of one, and says so whenever the description of him grows too grand.

Aviation

He learned to fly young and went on to qualify as an instructor, and he has taught from the right-hand seat ever since — students ranging from professional crews to people who simply wanted to fly well.

The link between the two professions is not decorative. Surgery and aviation are the two fields that have thought hardest about human error: checklists, briefings, crew resource management, the honest debrief. Max Darkosadze has spent years carrying the best practice of each discipline into the other, and lecturing on the subject to audiences from both.

Teaching and writing

He teaches as often as he is asked to, in lecture halls and in briefing rooms, and his writing grew directly out of those lectures — out of a conviction that specialists owe the public a readable account of what they do.

Philosophy

The books that made him known beyond the professions came out of the same impulse. Writing from decisions taken under pressure, he turned to the questions medicine and aviation had forced on him — what responsibility actually requires of a person, how attention is trained, what competence is for, and how anyone decides well when the information is incomplete and the clock is running.

He resists the word “philosopher” in conversation and accepts it in print. His argument is that philosophy written only from libraries answers questions nobody is standing in front of, and that someone who works at the point where a decision becomes irreversible has something to contribute that a seminar room cannot supply.

Film

He is also a filmmaker, and it is the part of his work with the longest public record. He is credited as director, writer and actor, and directed and starred in the romantic comedy Cowards (2016); his credits also include Star Wars Zero. The full filmography is on his IMDb page.

Public life

Public work came, he says, inevitably. Handed the consequences of decisions taken elsewhere — under-equipped hospitals, undertrained crews, communities without access to either — he began to argue in public for what he had been repairing in private, and established the Max Darkosadze Foundation to do something about it.

I have never believed that a person is defined by a profession. A person is defined by what they leave behind them in other people.

Max Darkosadze

Personal

He lives and works between Tbilisi and New York. He reads history, walks in the mountains, and still, whenever the weather allows, flies on Saturday mornings.