Appalachian Trail hikers, marathon runners, and athletes in solo sports find the biggest enemy or obstacle is the self—one’s own person. These people are constantly negotiating with and reevaluating themselves, their goals, performance risk, attitudes, and lessons learned. In aviation, we call controlling and harnessing the power of one’s self single-pilot resource management (SRM).
You may think that you demonstrate single pilot resource management (SRM) skills each time you are pilot in command and no one is riding in the right seat. Perhaps you do, but SRM has a specific meaning: the art and science of managing all the resources—those in the aircraft as well as outside sources—available to a single pilot to ensure that the successful outcome of the flight is never in doubt.
Over the past few years, the FAA has begun to include SRM in the practical test standards (PTS), FAA Industry Training Standards (FITS), and advisory circulars (AC). The PTS states, “SRM is a set of skill competencies that must be evident in all tasks in this practical test standard as applied to single-pilot operation.” If you want to pass your next checkride, you must competently apply these skills. SRM has grown out of the success of crew resource management (CRM) used by airlines to increase crew effectiveness and ultimately the use of all available resources for a safe flight completion.
How do we go from CRM to SRM? How does a general aviation pilot increase his effectiveness as the sole pilot on board? Two or more crewmembers working in close coordination to solve a problem seems like an obvious tactic, but using some of those same core skills while flying solo seems a bit more obscure.
Pilots who effectively use SRM are skilled at self-awareness, situational awareness (SA), attitude management, aeronautical decision making (ADM), conflict avoidance, and self-critiques. Consider that SRM skills are about dealing with one’s own mind.
Self-awareness is the ability to know what kind of pilot you are, including your limitations. What is your culture or style when flying? Many successful organizations use mission statements to indicate how they function. Airline pilots use the company operations manual, aircraft flight manual, and a code of ethics as their mission statement.
You can create a personal pilot statement that addresses how you’ll deal with external pressures, risk, and your attitude toward flying. If you do not predefine how you’ll address these facets of flying, you easily could be pressured or influenced to “go with the flow” and end up in a place you don’t want to be. Your personal pilot statement should be short, and as you gain experience you should update it.
A sample pilot statement could be: Although I fly for personal reasons I strive to fly as professionally as I can. I operate within the FARs, local and state laws, the aircraft POH, and my own personal minimums. I won’t allow outside pressures to negatively influence my commitment to safe flying. I also fly for the enjoyment of it. When a flight no longer becomes enjoyable I will cease operations.
Flying professionally is an attitude not related to compensation. GA pilots who fly recreationally can and should be professionals. It is the attitude you choose to bring to the aircraft. Seek out professionals and others you respect to model their attitudes and behaviors.
You can protect your situational awareness—knowing what has happened and what could happen—by recognizing red flags. Red flags are, for example, ambiguity or get-home-itis. When a pilot encounters a red flag, it should be addressed immediately. Failure to address a red flag can result in more red flags, which can ultimately lead to an incident or accident. Red flags include but are not limited to:
- Ambiguity
- Not flying the aircraft
- Lost communications with ATC
- Confusion
- Violating rules/regulations
- Failure to meet or set targets
- Not recognizing deficiencies
- Complacency/overconfidence
Attitude management is integral to successful SRM. An attitude is a predisposition, or shortcut to decision making. This can yield good results for positive attitudes, yet a hazardous attitude may result in an undesired aircraft state. Attitudes can skip reasoning to justify certain actions. Most accidents involve one or more hazardous attitudes. Your ability to recognize and change your own hazardous attitude as needed for safe flight isn’t easy, but it is critical for flight safety.
Scenario-based training can improve ADM skills. If you are a regular reader of Flight Training’s “Flight Lesson” or AOPA Pilot’s “Never Again” column, you know two excellent tools to evaluate how a pilot got into an undesirable situation and learned from it. Now that you have some SRM skills, you can look at these articles and find the breakdowns: poor planning, red flags, loss of SA, poor ADM, hazardous attitudes, and lack of a personal pilot statement.
In pilot parlance, conflict isn’t a disagreement with another person, rather it is expectations within your own mind. Good pilots have excellent conflict resolution skills. Even airline pilots experience conflict when they expect operations to go smoothly and they don’t. The skill lies in how you respond to your conflict. As a single pilot, when events don’t occur as planned, what will you do? Curse and play the blame game? Or realize alternate plans are in order? Dealing with conflict is effective attitude management.
Finally, conducting a self-critique is necessary to learning. We all make mistakes and have had a less than desirable performance. But if you don’t debrief these weak areas, you never learn. After an event in which you feel you should beat yourself up, ask yourself three questions. What happened? What is my opinion of it? What changes would I make next time? Try these three questions when reading a “Flight Lesson” or “Never Again.” Consider documenting your debriefs so you can create a history of your progression. In addition, you can review your self-critiques as part of your recurrent training.
The SRM skills mentioned in this article can be found in FAA publications such as the Pilot’s Handbook of Aviation Knowledge and Risk Management Handbook. No matter your certification level, don’t hesitate to reference the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook and Safety System Handbook. All are available as free downloads from the FAA website (www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/).
An excellent SRM training path is to create your own SRM tool kit. A tool kit could be a small book that lists SRM definitions, red flags, a human factors checklist for your flights, a personal pilot statement, and other items customized to your flying style. Combine it with rules of thumb to make it complete. It’s no secret that most problems that occur in airplanes are a direct result of a lack of SRM skills. You can easily remove yourself from the accident statistics by making SRM a standard in your flying. Climb inside your head; safe flying begins there.
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