As the hiring windows reopen, thoughts turn to interview strategies once again. It’s time to brush the dust off your ATP knowledge test question books and start looking through the list of typical personnel-type questions like: “Tell me about yourself” or “what are your strengths/weaknesses?”
Among the more difficult questions to answer is the one where you must explain away an accident or incident on your FAA record. You have requested a copy of your FAA records just to make sure it’s accurate, right? Of course, everyone prefers to have a clean record with the FAA, but all pilots realize mistakes can and do happen. Humans forget things and get complacent—like neglecting to put the wheels down before landing or landing at the wrong airport. Often it’s a chain of events that systemically ends up in an error such as an airspace bust or an accident with bent metal, injuries, or even fatalities.
In no way is an accident or incident a death knell for landing a professional pilot job—unless, of course, drugs or alcohol were involved. That’s one area that’s largely inexcusable. I can guarantee that the folks on the other side of the interview table have made their share of mistakes in their career, so they can certainly empathize with your situation—some may also have gone through a similar confession themselves. So put your ego aside, get your story together, and practice it. The story should be truthful, have a clear setup of the scenario, an explanation of what happened and why—and the important part, what you learned from it.
One thing the interviewer is looking for is how you react to the incident in question. Let’s say you entered Class B airspace without a clearance on a training flight and you were the instructor. When asked about the incident, you don’t want to get defensive and blame your student for letting his course wander, for example. You as the instructor were the pilot in command (PIC). All you’re doing is implicating yourself for not adequately monitoring your student’s flying. Likewise, if you are the student in the same situation, you don’t want to blame the instructor just because he was the PIC and “should know better.”
If I were the student, I would tell the interviewer that I became fixated on holding altitude (for example) and my course wandered. My instructor failed to notice the course deviation as well, since he was providing me instruction on how to best hold altitude on this bumpy day. This explanation shows that you’re taking responsibility for the incident and not placing direct blame on your instructor. And then relate how you learned not to blindly trust that your instructor would keep you out of trouble. After all, he’s human too. You also learned to be skeptical—even somebody with vast experience can screw up just as badly as you.
As the hypothetical instructor in this scenario, you could explain that you were distracted by the student’s altitude deviations and while providing instruction in how best to correct it, the aircraft deviated laterally into the Class B airspace. Again, you’re not blaming the other guy and admitting that you got distracted to the point that your situational awareness became diminished. You learned to multitask and not lose awareness of navigation while providing instruction. You should also relate other methods you now use to keep tabs on your position, such as using a moving-map GPS or noting ground landmarks that coincide with invisible airspace boundaries.
In professional flying, we like to say after the other catches an error: “That’s why there are two dummies up here.” It’s rare that two pros are going to fail to catch an error, but it does happen. Pilots need to be skeptical of one another. You certainly won’t hurt my ego if you point out that I’m climbing 3,000 feet a minute to our assigned altitude that’s only 800 feet away. If you save me from a violation or a chew-out from the chief pilot, you’re my hero.
Pilots on either side of the interview table can relate to a gear-up landing. The age-old saying goes, “There are those who have and those who will.” The gear-up landing is especially common in the training regime, since there are distractions galore. At my home airport, two respected and experienced pilots landed a light twin gear up following some engine-out training. The incessant chirping of the throttle/gear warning switch led one of the pilots to silence it by pulling the breaker—thereby taking away the airplane’s sole means of warning that the gear was still up when power was reduced to land. The lesson terminated with a simulated single-engine landing in which both pilots failed to notice the gear was still up. But despite the self-induced sabotage of the gear-warning system, at least one of the pilots is now a professional pilot.
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