Step by step: Expanding your personal minimums
Once you earn your pilot certificate, you become responsible for judging the conditions in which you can and can’t fly safely based on your skill and experience level. Your flight instructor has been preparing you for this moment, establishing personal minimums for you for your first solo and possibly adjusting them as you tackle solo cross-country flights. But how do you safely expand or reduce your minimums over the course of your flying life?
Personal minimums are a set of parameters that pilots establish and use to evaluate whether they can safely conduct a flight. Minimums are set for the pilot, weather, airport, and aircraft. The AOPA Air Safety Institute offers free downloadable personal minimums contracts, tailored to operating under visual flight rules or instrument flight rules. The FAA includes a personal minimums checklist in its Aviation Instructor’s Handbook, Appendix D.
Your minimums might change based on the aircraft being flown or on your level of proficiency, for example, so you should revisit them before every flight.
You can expand your personal minimums by increasing your skill level through training for more advanced certificates and ratings and by becoming proficient in different types of aircraft. Both of these approaches would involve the watchful eye of a flight instructor through training and aircraft checkouts.
Gaining real-world experience is another common way to expand your personal minimums. An instructor or mentor pilot can help, but you can also do it safely yourself. You just need to approach it in a step-by-step manner, similar to the building block approach used in flight training. Tackle one aspect at a time, increasing it incrementally until you become comfortable and proficient. While you are working on expanding your minimums, you should do so with an instructor, another pilot, or solo, not with nonpilot passengers, the Air Safety Institute cautions.
Pilot
Review your logbook entries to gather your number of landings and total hours in the past month and total time in the make and model of aircraft you will be flying. By keeping this up to date, you can quickly see if you are current to carry passengers. More than that, you need to determine whether you are proficient and healthy enough to fly. Consider the “I’M SAFE” checklist and determine how many hours you should fly a specific aircraft in a given window to be proficient.
You might want to create a couple of personal minimums contracts to establish limitations based on whether you are proficient or rusty. You will need to create stricter minimums that limit you to lighter winds, better weather, and longer runways when your recent experience is limited.
Weather
To increase your personal minimums for the winds in which you can take off or land, start by going up in stable conditions just a couple of knots higher than your minimums. Then try it in conditions in which the wind is gusting or shifting direction slightly but still just a few knots above your minimums. Continue these incremental increases until you are comfortable with five knots or 10 knots more wind than you were previously and update your minimums. Initially, you might develop one set of minimums for winds blowing directly down the runway and another set for crosswinds.
If you only flew in 10-plus miles visibility during your primary flight training, you’ll be surprised that six miles visibility is still considered VFR and that people fly in marginal VFR conditions with three miles visibility. Before starting on a cross-country flight in lower VFR or marginal visibilities, fly to the practice area and back or in the traffic pattern to become acclimated.
Airport
The step-by-step approach works for landing on progressively shorter or narrower runways; operating at larger, busier airports; and flying longer cross-countries. Instead of tackling a different airport environment all at once, try one element at a time and master that before expanding. For runways, jumping from a 5,000-foot-long by 100-foot-wide runway to a 1,800-foot-long by 25-foot-wide runway might be too much. Try a 2,500-foot-long by 50-foot-wide runway, first, for example.
If you flew mostly at small nontowered airports and want to expand to larger towered airports, research off-peak times to go, listen to LiveATC.net in advance, and mentally picture what clearances you might receive for approaching different runways. Similarly, if you flew at a busy towered airport and want to head to the backcountry, practice making radio calls and watching for traffic at nearby nontowered airports. You’ll need to become comfortable in both of those operations before heading to a strip that has blind spots in the pattern where you can’t see the runway or might miss other aircraft on base or final approach. Also practice at grass strips with open approaches.
Aircraft
As you get checked out in other aircraft and work to become proficient, you might need to adjust your personal minimums based on the aircraft you are flying. You might be more comfortable, for example, handling gusty crosswinds in a Cessna 172 versus the tailwheel Citabria you just got checked out in. Gusty winds also could influence which airports you will operate at—a long, wide runway might not be as problematic as a short, narrow one.
Also consider how the aircraft is equipped. If you will be flying a basic-VFR aircraft, you will want to fly in good visibility. However, if you have received the proper training and are proficient with the avionics in an aircraft equipped with on-board weather information, GPS moving map, an artificial horizon, and directional gyro, you might consider flying in stable MVFR conditions.
The key to expanding your personal minimums through real-world experience is to tackle one aspect—your skill level, the weather, the airport, or the aircraft—at a time and increase it incrementally. Don’t feel locked in to applying a universal set of minimums across each category because they might change based on the aircraft or weather conditions. Apply your minimums for each scenario. This will ensure you revisit the minimums before each flight and aren’t tempted to unnecessarily and possibly unsafely expand the minimums greatly in several categories at once.
