Training Monarchs

F ew instructors in general aviation can claim to have influenced as many pilots as the dynamic duo of John and Martha King. Founders of King Accelerated Schools and pilots for more than 30 years, the two share not only a business, but also a life's passion in teaching others to fly. Their videotapes, and now CD-ROMs and DVDs, have taught generations of pilots the basics needed to pass written exams and the details of how to fly professionally and safely.

John soloed in 1960. He later met Martha when both were attending Indiana University. The couple eventually married and then earned their pilot certificates two days apart in 1969. They earned instrument ratings a year later on the same day after "we scared ourselves silly multiple times flying VFR," quips John.

Besides running a successful training and catalog company, the couple has taken the time to earn every available category and class rating for pilots and ground and flight instructors. Over the years, they've perfected the give-and-take necessary for a couple (married or not) to fly together. They've also developed a passion for sharing their experiences and expertise in flying and especially in decision making that leads to safer flight. In addition to working with the FAA to improve safety through better education, they are in the process of developing a curriculum that will assist flight instructors in teaching risk management. I met with them recently to learn more about their views on risk management in aviation. — Thomas B. Haines

Martha: I think one of the difficult things is actually sharing the authority. It's very easy to share the cockpit if you don't ever give up the authority of the left seat. It's easy for the person who retains the authority. It's not very easy or enjoyable for the other person flying with them. The difficult thing to do, but the important thing to do, is to allow each of you to have a significant contribution to the flight and have your opinions respected.

John: The other thing I think is important, whether it's a significant other or not, is to have standard operating procedures. If you fly with another pilot frequently, you should sit down and develop your own standard operating procedures. One of the things we do is a call-out when we are coming up on an altitude. A thousand feet from the altitude, we acknowledge we're coming up on the altitude verbally. Three hundred feet from the altitude, we acknowledge it verbally. If it appears that a pilot is wandering off the altitude, it is legitimate for the other pilot to call out the word altitude. If the person is wandering off heading, it is a legitimate call-out for the other pilot to say heading. We both acknowledge verbally when we cross a fix, so that the pilot doesn't sit there and fail to recognize we've crossed a fix. On final approach, if the sink rate is more than 1,000 feet per minute, we would expect the other pilot to call it out. But it's not an insult to the pilot flying to call it out. It's expected....

Martha: It's required!

John: So therefore no argument ensues because we have agreed that these are standard operating procedures in advance.

Martha: But the other thing that is very important: You don't give opinions. In other words, if you're coming in on approach and the person is slow, you say, "V _ref minus 10." Or whatever the speed is. Or if the sink is too high, you say, "Sink 1,500." What is not legitimate is to say, "You're too slow," with this urgent kind of panic tone in your voice. In other words, the phraseology — and this sounds contrived, but it really works well — the phraseology needs to be one of providing facts and information, not opinions and attempts at control.

John: Now there is a time, and we've used this ourselves, when you're getting into a situation where the weather is bad, and things are just getting cumulatively worse, where the other pilot will say, "Captain, I'm uncomfortable with this situation." Now that's an opinion. But it's when the overall situation gets to be one where we're not managing the risk properly. And sometimes one can just get so goal-oriented in one's behavior that you just keep plugging on and you avoid the question, "Should we really be doing this?" And so the role of the second pilot in this particular case is to say, "Hey, let's take a look at this, because, Captain, I'm uncomfortable with what's going on." And that's a case where expressing your opinion is a very legitimate thing to do.

Martha: But again, the way in which it is expressed is, "I'm uncomfortable with this." Not, "You're doing something stupid!" Another rule that John and I have is the most chicken pilot wins.

John: This all has to do with people who ask us, "Why are women pilots 6 percent of the pilot population, and 50 percent of the overall population, and why don't women get involved more?" In many cases when they do, the male pilot wants to share the time in the air, but doesn't want to share any of the authority, and that's what Martha was alluding to. And so, if you're going to fly with your significant other and that's a female, and you expect her to get satisfaction out of flying, you're going to have to share some of the authority. It's no fun to be just a voice-activated autopilot.

Pilot: What advice do you give to pilots who are fearful of flying because they don't really know how to manage the risk?

Martha: I think the biggest risk that needs the most focus is the external pressure. We spend a lot of time thinking about if there is any significant weather for the flight, but what are the external pressures in terms of people expecting us at a particular time? What can we do to alleviate external pressures to continue on? It is external pressures that tend to make pilots ignore the other risk factors. They may be aware that they are not as current as they should be. They may be aware that the physical environment is challenging — maybe mountains, maybe night, maybe weather. Or they may be aware that they're not as familiar with the aircraft as they ought to be. And normally they would pay attention to those, but when external pressures reach a certain level, then they tend to blow off those other risk factors.

John: You risk flying to an event, flying there for business purposes, having someone waiting for you. The way to deal with that is to build in time so you don't feel pressured by reasons that make you late. I think one of the biggest things is building strategies so that those external pressures don't make you ignore the other risk factors. We do things like always carrying an overnight bag, just in case we feel the need to stop short of our final destination. We carry contact lens solutions, medicine, whatever we need for a stop en route, no matter how short the planned flight. Even if we're going up on a hundred-mile trip and coming back, we throw in the overnight bag. It may get foggy. Whatever it is, you don't have to feel pressured to get back. If we take passengers with us, we always advise them, "You know, we may not get to our destination." We also tell them, "Don't have someone arrive at the airport who would be waiting for you. Let's call when we get in, and we'll have a cup of coffee together while we wait. And that way we won't have someone there waiting at the airport for us."

Martha: Or we'll plan on getting a car and driving out to where we're going rather than having someone come in to pick us up.

John: But regarding risk management, we start talking about a flight and thinking about it a day or so ahead. We're watching the overall picture on the weather. We brief each other on the weather and discuss the risk. And then when we're getting ready to depart we do a cockpit briefing. "Is the runway dry...is it wet? Can we do a VFR return? What altitude are we going to fly to, what heading, what are we going to do after that?" And if I were flying solo, I would do the equivalent.

Martha: When John says we start looking at the weather a couple of days ahead, one of the things that we start talking about if we think there's going to be a weather issue is, "What about alternatives?" And it might be bad weather at the destination or it could be it's going to be really hot. How's the performance going to be? What're we going to do about fuel loads? Just thinking about alternative ways to accomplish the flight and minimize the risk.

John: If you take your airplane into a shop for maintenance, they will be actively conducting surveillance in an annual inspection — trying to find things wrong with the airplane, and that is what airplane maintenance is all about — try to find things so that the airplane, if you are doing an annual inspection, is good for another year. Well, pilot activity should be virtually the same. Our job is to be thinking very, very carefully about what are the risks. And we should do surveillance before every flight, thinking about all of the risk factors and how to manage them just as you would when you are maintaining your aircraft. And so, before every flight we go through this one-page checklist, called the "PAVE" checklist, and think about the risk associated with the Pilot, the Aircraft, the enVironment we're flying in, and the External pressures. If general aviation pilots make risk management part of their everyday habits in flying, the outcome will be much better for all of us. And that means actively seeking out and identifying the risks.

Martha: And the more you do it the easier and quicker it comes. You get skilled at identifying risks. The other thing is that some of the risks involved in general aviation flying are not obvious. They are insidious, and very often very, very confident people get caught by surprise by the risk. Some risks are more obvious. Crosswinds are pretty obvious. You know what the runway direction is, what the wind direction is. You look out one side of the window and see the windsock, but you might overestimate your ability to handle it. But you don't have any question that there is some risk there.

John: But the risks of continuing to fly in poor visibility or low ceilings work out to be not so obvious to pilots. It sneaks up on you. And, after all, if you look at the number-one cause for accidents in cross-country flying, it continues to be VFR flying in worsening weather conditions. Now, pilots don't deliberately take off and fly in weather that they know will kill them. What happens is that they don't properly assess the risks. It may appear obvious to some of us, but when you get out at night, let's say, in an area that's not well lit, and the visibility is poor, pilots lose control of the aircraft and it catches them by surprise. They didn't have a clue they were going to have a problem. And so, one of the things...one of the reasons that we should be conducting this surveillance on risks is that some of the risk is insidious.

Martha: And weather conditions that may be acceptably safe in daylight conditions or in flat country may not be so at night or in hilly terrain or mountainous terrain. When we were working with the FAA on this one-page PAVE checklist for personal minimums, one of the things that they kept talking about was this study that surveyed VFR pilots and IFR-rated pilots. One of the things that came out of that was very interesting. VFR pilots are more comfortable with scud running and flying in low visibility than instrument-rated pilots are. Which tells you that the VFR pilots don't really understand the risks that they're taking.

John: Well, they're insidious. I don't mean to blame the pilots for this. I think the risks are sneaky. If there were one thing that general aviation pilots could do to dramatically improve our accident rate, it would be to get instrument-rated, because it will eliminate the biggest single risk — the biggest single cause of fatalities in flying airplanes for transportation — and that is this risk of losing physical control of the aircraft.

Pilot: But there are plenty of pilots who fly a long lifetime without ever getting or needing an instrument rating. They tend to believe that instrument-rated pilots look down their noses at VFR pilots. Many VFR pilots ask, "Why should I go to the trouble and the hassle of the instrument rating?"

John: Well, learning is rewarding. It's fun.

Martha: If you're going to use an airplane for serious transportation, meaning you're going to try and work on some kind of schedule, flying only VFR would be like only driving your car when the sun is shining and it's daylight. Certainly you can do it, but it puts a cramp in the utility that you're going to get. Someone who has their private license has put an enormous amount of effort and energy and commitment into getting that license. But they are not getting all the utility and all the enjoyment they could be getting from flying if they went on a little further and got the instrument rating. It's another tool in the toolbox, if you will.

John: But a lot of us get tired of boring holes in the sky as VFR pilots. We've done the $100 hamburgers. One of the things that makes flying deeply rewarding is that it requires a lot of effort. And it requires emotional control, physical control, an intellectual capacity — it has science, it has beauty — so it appeals to a lot of aspects of people. But after awhile, all of us who fly eventually begin to say, "Well, wait a minute. All I'm doing is boring holes in the sky." And that makes many people quit flying. Working on a new rating lets us use our aptitudes again. And all of a sudden, it becomes again more deeply rewarding. To me, flying is tremendously fun because it is challenging.

Martha: One of the problems that I have with the statement, "I only fly VFR," is that I don't trust the weather forecast that much. You know, usually they're right or closely right, but when they're not they can sometimes be very spectacularly wrong. And so lots of times people start out on a trip and the weather is VFR, it's forecast to stay VFR, and the forecasts are just flat-out wrong.

John: The instrument rating gives them one more arrow in the quiver. An instrument pilot who intends on flying VFR is still going to get more utility out of the aircraft, and flies with more confidence and less stress.

Martha: And I think generally his or her passengers are going to be more comfortable.

John: The other thing is that IFR flying enhances even the VFR pilot. One of the significant things you learn when you learn to fly IFR is communication skills. Communication skills are important as airspace becomes more complex, as restrictions become more complex.

Martha: Good communication skills will get you a lot better service out of ATC, whether you're IFR or VFR, and an instrument rating really sharpens that.

Pilot: You've said one of your goals is to help instructors do a better job of teaching risk management. How do you do that?

John: I think risk management is a habit, and it's the instructor's job to help develop that habit in everything. Every lesson should be in the context of developing the habit of risk management. That means surveillance of the risks, identifying and assessing your level of risks, and management.

Martha: I think one of the things that flight instructors could do to help develop this habit in the students — when they are sitting down and reviewing, for instance, the student's planning for a cross-country flight or a dual flight when they are starting out — is to specifically say, "OK, now tell me what could go wrong on this flight, and tell me what are your alternatives in case it does?" And work through issues like mechanical issues with the airplane, fuel issues, weather issues, things like that. And what are the student's backup plans? What alternatives have they thought about? In the beginning the students won't necessarily have thought about alternatives or have very comprehensive alternatives, but the more you do this, the more automatic it will become.

John: It's interesting that the pilots with the most capable equipment, with the most experience use risk management more actively when they're flying than other pilots. Even though these pilots have everything going in their favor — because they use standard operating procedures, they use pretakeoff briefings, crew briefings, they use preapproach briefings — and they do this as a standard operating practice. So everything about their line of flying has the risk management procedures built right into it. The dispatching, the briefing before they go, the cockpit briefing before they take off, the cockpit approach briefing before they make an approach, the standard operating call-outs. All of these things are risk management tools. And the people with the most capable equipment and the people with the most experience spend more effort on risk management than all the rest of us. And we're the ones in general aviation who have the higher risk. As a culture we have not embraced the concepts of risk management. Much of our culture historically has been spent denying that the risks exist at all.

Martha: Which makes it very, very hard to manage it.

John: With fallacious things like, "The most dangerous part of your trip was the drive to the airport," which is not true. We are seven times more likely to have a fatality in an airplane per mile than we are in a car. So if we deny that, how are we going to improve on it? And so, one area of aviation that seems most appropriate for risk management is us. I'm sorry to get on my high horse.

Martha: One of the things that seems to happen is a prospective student will go into flight school. He or she is interested in taking lessons and they ask, "Well, is it safe?" And what is a flight school typically going to say? "Oh yes, it's perfectly safe." Well, intuitively, the student knows that that can't be true. I mean, you're going to get into a machine built by human beings and go up into the air. And intuitively you know that it isn't perfectly safe, but what it leaves the student with is no place to go in terms of an accurate assessment of what the risks are and how to manage them because the culture is denying that there are any.

John: So the correct answer is, "Of course there are risks associated with flying, but we're going to teach you how we're going to manage it." That's what learning to fly is all about. Plus the pilot's number-one job is risk management.

Martha: Because if they manage the risk right, they don't have to worry about having superior physical skills.

Transcription by Dorothy Drummond.

For a copy of the PAVE (Pilot, Aircraft, enVironment, External pressures) Personal Minimums checklist, go to www.kingschools.com/pave/.