Safety Spotlight: Think like a pro

The confluence of events was reported on by Aviation Week saying: “Unstable Approaches Rampant in Sunday AirVenture Arrivals.” I would agree with this assessment, but it’s understandable—when lots of airplanes are converging on a small piece of sky, any hiccup in the normal procedures will have an unavoidable cascade effect. My comments are in no way meant to be a criticism of the controllers, the AirVenture arrival procedures, or the pilots flying. I also was airborne during this time and believe there were lessons we all can learn from this. So, if we exclude the weather and a closed runway for a moment, why did Sunday Oshkosh arrivals devolve into some very “colorful” flying?

The answer is simple. The pressure to perform and the inertia of the situation pushed a few pilots into a situation that exceeded their comfort zones. Even though anyone listening to the arrival frequency could tell things were not going smoothly, many pressed ahead into the fracas and reduced their normal safety margins. Many pilots I spoke with later said that after landing and thinking about it, they wished they’d diverted and waited for the situation to improve. Suffice to say there where many sighs of relief muttered in cockpits after touchdown.

Accident case studies teach us what not to do. Learning how to think like a pro can keep us out of a bad situation in the first place. We’ve all heard about the perils of flying into a box canyon—an area of mountains that surround an airplane on three sides where there’s no room to turn around and the walls are too steep to climb over.

Sunday’s Oshkosh arrivals were a perfect example of a “mental” box canyon. Anyone familiar with NTSB accident reports can see the results of mental box canyons all too often. This mental phenomenon is sometimes also referred to as “get-there-itis”: an insidious desire to press ahead despite the warning signs. And it isn’t isolated to just pilots. Remember O.J. Simpson driving in his white Ford Bronco with the entire Los Angeles Police Department in slow pursuit, or Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme? Both of these individuals were in hopeless situations, and neither could see a way out, so they just kept going. For them, the results were jail time. When it happens to a pilot, the results can be much worse. In order for GA pilots to think like professionals, it’s important to understand the psychology of why mental box canyons happen at all.

Decision-making abilities degrade when our minds are busy with complex tasks such as piloting an aircraft or dealing with high levels of stress. These cloud our judgment and make rational decision making difficult. Add to it a controller prompting, “Keep it tight” or “Give me best forward speed,” and the pressure to perform can paint us into a corner.

The best way to combat this is to teach ourselves how to recognize the warning signs, and condition our minds to evaluate a situation. That starts with having the right mindset. There are three simple ways to do this. First, remember this rule of thumb: “General aviation is a 90-percent solution, and 10 percent of the time the plan will change.” If we accept the fact that one out of 10 flights will not go completely to plan, then we are better predisposed to altering the plan in order to maintain adequate margins of safety. The second way is my favorite phrase to use when I feel pressure from a controller: I simply say “Unable.” Never let someone outside of the airplane push you to fly in a way that makes you uncomfortable. The third way is to use the AOPA Air Safety Institute’s personal minimums contract. The contract helps to inform decisions during times when our judgment is clouded by stress and other factors. All three are simple ways to train yourself to think like a pro.

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