Proficient Pilot: Too much of a good thing

I learned two more mnemonic devices during my early flight lessons—CIGAR (Controls, Instruments, Gasoline, Alignment, and Run-up) and GUMP (Gasoline, Undercarriage, Mixture, and Propeller)—mental checklists used before takeoff and landing in the simple airplanes of the early 1950s. Ground school then taught that “true virgins make dull company,” a mnemonic used to sort out the arithmetic manipulation of true heading, variation, magnetic heading, deviation, and compass heading. “Can ducks make vertical turns?” applies to making the same calculations in reverse. It seems that we needed only a few more memory aids such as “east is least and west is best” for dealing with magnetic variation, and that was about it. Each phrase made sense, was useful, and came easily to mind.

In recent years, however, the FAA began using mnemonics in a big way, and introduced more such devices than might be needed or make sense. The first of these “modern” mnemonics may be I’M SAFE, which is not bad. It represents a pilot’s personal preflight checklist: “Illness, Medication, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue, and Emotion,” although many argue that a pilot should know intuitively and without this checklist whether he is fit to fly.

A hot topic, risk management, was introduced more recently. Although a worthy area of study, the way it is sometimes taught seems to obfuscate the subject. If you have not yet been introduced to the “3-P Risk Management Process,” you are going to really love this [he says facetiously]:

You first need to know the three Ps of risk management: “Perceive hazards, Process this to evaluate the level of risk, and Perform risk management.”

With respect to perceiving a hazard (the first P), you are supposed to use the PAVE checklist: “Pilot, Aircraft, enVironment, and External pressures,” categories to which most risks can be assigned. You then should Process (the second P) any potential hazard using the CARE checklist: “What are the Consequences? What are the available Alternatives? What is the Reality of the situation? What kind of External pressures are affecting my thinking?” After a hazard or risk has been identified, the pilot must then Perform (the third P) by using the ME checklist: “Mitigate or Eliminate the risk.” ME can be expanded to TEAM: “Transfer the risk; Eliminate the risk; Accept the risk; Mitigate the risk.” The choice of ME or TEAM presumably is up to you.

It seems to me that if a potential threat develops in flight, the time it takes to extricate these checklists from our memory and then apply them in the proper manner might take more time than would be needed to simply resolve the problem in the first place. I would like to suggest a much better method of coping with a developing risk. Use the WUADSAI (pronounced woo-AD-sigh) checklist: “Wake Up And Do Something About It.”

Student pilots are really being taught this psychobabble. Presumably, we’re supposed to know it as well. But hang on. There is more. Aeronautical decision making (ADM) instructs us to use DECIDE, an appropriate-sounding word intended to help us remember the steps needed to make a decision: “Detect that something has happened; Estimate the need to react; Choose a desirable outcome; Identify the actions to be taken; Do take those actions; Evaluate the effects of the action.”

If DECIDE doesn’t suit your needs, you might prefer OODA, an abbreviated method of decision-making: “Observe available information; Orient (analyze) this information and use it to update your reality; Decide on a course of action; Act on your decision.”

I cannot decide whether DECIDE or OODA results in the best decisions, which might be a fault in my own decision-making ability. I do apologize for what might seem to be a disparaging attitude toward this subject, but I do not believe that this is an effective way to teach common sense and good judgment—especially without boring the student to death in the process.

Mnemonics are wonderful memory aids, but reliance on those that are not particularly memorable or useful in the first place is probably self-defeating.

Web: www.barryschiff.com