It’s a breezy morning with broken clouds in multiple layers. The surface wind is 15 knots with occasional higher gusts, and there’s a healthy crosswind component. There was a time during your student pilot days when a solo in a two-seat trainer would have been prohibited under these conditions—and you would have been content to wait for a better day.
Not anymore. The call is yours now, and the four-seat cruiser that you have stepped up to flying is preflighted and ready. You are pleased, and a little surprised, at the calm confidence with which you find yourself preparing to take on the day’s mission.
Confidence, but not cockiness. There is still a lot to learn, as there always will be. But the nice thing about having learned how to think in three axes is that your piloting has become a smooth affair, free of the constant, fatiguing error-and-correction sequences. With new skills and self-assuredness, getting in just a little over your head no longer produces anxiety—even a sense of guilt—as it did when your flight instructor was responsible for setting your flying limitations.
The perennial hazards—instrument meteorological conditions, thunderstorms, freezing rain—will still demand just as much respect and avoidance as ever. But if the winds come up on a nice day, or the weather begins to trend downhill, you will be on top of the situation and respond as necessary. If forecast light turbulence at your planned cruise altitude progresses to moderate, you won’t just sit there and suffer (or turn back in discouragement). Using a combination of winds-aloft information, pilot reports, and your grasp of the big picture, you will try to find an altitude that’s more comfortable, especially for any passengers. If there’s no help there, rerouting over smoother terrain might help. Sometimes you just have to tighten up that seatbelt and shoulder harness, slow to turbulence penetration speed (maneuvering speed), and tough it out. So here’s the question: If your skills have taken you beyond the limitations governing ceilings, visibility, and wind that were inscribed in your logbook before you earned your pilot certificate, what limits should replace them?
You can compose a new set of finite limits, or you can ask the advice of more experienced pilots whose experience you value. But it all boils down to this: Provided that you comply with regulations and any limitations on the use of your aircraft (such as a rental agreement or FBO policy), the decision is up to you.
Consider today’s conditions. Those broken clouds at 2,500 feet are forecast to dissipate as a frontal system departs the area, taking the gusty surface winds with them. Your planned flight is toward improving weather, so it should not be jeopardized. However, you will keep an eye on the weather trends to avoid being taken by surprise. If you had planned a flight toward the departing low pressure—with its lingering showery precip, turbulence, and occasional mountain obscuration—your plan would have seemed dicey. So there’s one new element of a personal minimum definition: Stronger winds and lower ceilings are acceptable when flying toward an area of improving weather.
The destination also presents a new set of piloting considerations. It’s an airport with a single 1,800-foot grass runway that has trees on one end, power lines on the other, and no on-field weather reports. Challenging. But you landed there several times during training. The experience left you feeling comfortable with short-field landings, and your checkride performance vindicated the work.
It might be a good idea to call ahead for a report on early spring field conditions. They could range from hard-packed plowed snow, to frozen ground, to mud (which might be good to avoid). So you will assess the report you receive, and make a decision. On arrival, overfly the traffic pattern and give the windsock some careful scrutiny for wind speed, direction, and variability.
Stepping up, carefully. The privilege of having responsibility for setting your own boundaries is the reward for earning your pilot certificate. You are becoming a prudent manager of risk and pitfalls.
Here is one: When you step up to a more capable aircraft, don’t conclude that your mere presence in its cockpit makes you a more capable pilot. Just as when you were a student pilot, wait until you are completely comfortable with the basic characteristics and operation of the new aircraft before you put it to the test under challenging conditions.
It may be hard to resist the temptation to load up people and baggage for a week of skiing after that heady checkout in a bigger, faster aircraft. But the extra power and speed of a high-performance aircraft, and the systems management of a complex aircraft, are best approached gradually, in easy weather and on familiar runways.
So here’s a standard for flying this type of aircraft after acquiring the required endorsements: Be confident that you won’t “get behind the aircraft” in busy airspace or tricky weather. Many pilots bring a CFI along on the first few longer trips. That’s also a chance to log some experience toward an instrument rating, if you ponder that kind of upgrade.
It’s common for the crowd in the FBO to describe the capabilities of aircraft—speed, payload, ice protection, short takeoff and landing operations, and so forth—as if they existed independently of the pilots flying them, but this is dangerously misleading. It is only when you observe that a new-to-you aircraft is reducing your workload during both routine and unusual flight circumstances that you should consider yourself as much in command of it as you now feel about the aircraft you have been flying.
Also, pilots flying an unfamiliar aircraft model tend to spend more time with their eyes inside the cockpit checking instruments, managing fuel, or locating and tuning radios. That means your situational awareness and collision avoidance scanning will be compromised until you become more at home in the new cockpit. Resolve to stay vigilant.
Weather detection capability is a triumph of technology, but it only works as intended if the pilot uses it to reduce—not increase—a flight’s risk. Don’t make the mistake of taking an aircraft with advanced weather-detection equipment into or near weather that you would have otherwise avoided. There are plenty of accident reports that illustrate how pilots got in trouble trying to sneak through bad weather. Far better to let that wonderful weather technology on your panel lead you away from the bad stuff instead of into it.
Better weather detection capability is not a license to snip away at the margins of safety with which you feel comfortable.
Another complacency conundrum arises when a pilot who has only flown aircraft with basic navigation radios first experiences the thrills and information deluge provided by satellite-based navigation. Don’t retire your plotter and flight computer just yet, or stop keeping track of your fuel burn in flight. Tracking the magenta line on the screen of your GPS, and reading groundspeed and estimated time of arrival from a display, reduce workload and provide certainty of position. But the box won’t take you where you want to go if you enter GRE (Greenville, Illinois) as your destination when you want to go to GMU (Greenville, South Carolina). If the database is slightly out of date, you could follow it blindly into an airspace incursion.
Flying new aircraft, and gaining new confidence in your growing skills, inevitably expands the range of altitudes at which you may fly. That’s true at both the high end and the low end of the altitude range—a fact that raises the most important personal piloting standard of all: Pledge now to set a safe floor for your flying at all times. Then, for your own sake and for the sake of anyone you welcome into your aircraft, never violate it.
There will be times when someone asks you if you can get just a little lower, to take a photograph or for other reasons. But then throw in a distraction that leads to loss of control, or failing to see an unmarked obstruction, and the risks soar; so decline the invitation.
When you passed your checkride, the FAA granted you the privilege to use what you learned about safety and judgment to set your own limits. That responsibility awaits you on every flight from now on.
Set standards within your limits, not at their fringes. Then add in some safety margins to help you deal with the unexpected.
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