License to learn: Risky business

The fact is that even in sixth grade I knew the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. Nevertheless, I still (occasionally) ran in a crowded hallway. Why did I do it? For the most part, the risk of being caught seemed minimal. Clearly my risk evaluation ability was about as well developed as my preadolescent sense of self-control.

The not-so-surprising thing here is that this isn’t solely a description of adolescent behavior. It’s also what pilots do. We often make choices that require us to evaluate whether the risk associated with a particular behavior is acceptable or unacceptable. Unfortunately, we’re often left with little advice on how to make this decision.

For instance, should you fly over the mountains at night in an attempt to get home or spend an evening in a motel named The Nine One One and depart the next morning? Most pilots are quite familiar with the risk of flying at night compared to flying during daylight hours. What they’re not good at is evaluating whether that risk is either acceptable or unacceptable.

Unfortunately, there are no FAA publications—none whatsoever!—that meaningfully inform a pilot about whether or not a specific risk is worth taking. For instance, you’ll never hear the FAA say that it’s OK to fly at night when there is less than a 5-percent chance of having a fatal accident. I certainly don’t blame the FAA for this omission because that type of advice is nearly impossible to calculate for any individual, and impolitic to offer. Ironically, the FAA’s new airman certification standards now require private pilot applicants to apply very specific risk management principles (i.e., identify, assess, and mitigate risks) on their checkrides. In other words, the FAA expects new pilots to assess a risk without providing any meaningful guidance on how to do so.

In its Risk Management Handbook, the FAA offers four broad and general categories of risk likelihood as part of a risk assessment matrix: probable, occasional, remote, and improbable. If the risk of a certain danger is probable, you don’t fly. If the risk is improbable, away you go. During risk evaluation, however, you’re unlikely to find many situations where the risk under consideration is either probable or improbable. Most of the time, it’s somewhere in between.

This is why the FAA says the risk assessment program it promotes in its Risk Management Handbook is “not a formal methodology of risk assessment.” Translation? It doesn’t actually allow a pilot to assess the quantitative value of a risk, much less decide whether taking that risk is acceptable or unacceptable (the latter being the single most important aspect of any “practical” risk management strategy). That’s why the FAA says that its risk-management strategy merely “prompts a pilot to look at the simple realities of what he or she is about to do.” Nothing more.

Given the FAA’s lack of practical guidance in assessing risk, how is a pilot supposed to determine whether that risk is acceptable? Pilots need flight experience to make this decision. This is the main reason why airline captains need an ATP certificate that traditionally required a minimum of 1,500 hours of flight time.

Fine, but how are newly rated private pilots with limited flight time supposed to make this decision? The FAA never actually addresses this issue, so let me give you my answer.

When pilots don’t have the experience to assess whether to take a risk associated with a flight, they should use the knowledge of other, more experienced pilots to help them make this decision. There are two effective ways to acquire this knowledge: Read a lot of aviation books and ask experienced pilots a lot of questions.

Expanding your aviation library and adding AOPA safety seminars or fly-in events to your calendar will help you expand your AEQ (aviation experience quotient). And this says nothing about the many great web-based sources of aviation knowledge available for consumption. Additionally, smart pilots always have three or four good questions (written down or memorized) that they’ll ask should they meet one of their highly experienced aviation comrades. This is how inexperienced pilots can accelerate their path to becoming better risk managers.

Of course, when and where possible, fly! Gain practical experience when the opportunity permits. Then again, I probably didn’t need to tell you that, did I?

Web: www.rodmachado.com