You’re seven times more likely to have a fatality in a general aviation (GA) airplane than you are in a car, per mile.
YOU being the average US’an, I guess? How are figures in European countries?
I give each passenger a short introduction. In the Piper I show them how to unlatch and open the door, in the Cirrus i tell them how to to fire the chute and, if there’s time, to shut down the engine.
When my son was 12 I gave him an introduction how to do a glide in the Warrior, and we once practiced that from 5000 down to 500 feet AGL. The Warrior is actually one of the few planes a kid can fly, because it’s almost impossible to stall/spin. He did fine, although I have no illusions about all the things that can go wrong landing on a field.
That’s maybe one of the things I like best about the Cirrus. Any 8 year old that can reach the handle to release the CAPS system.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Most passengers don’t have nearly enough understanding of aviation to make a sensible risk assessment. They have to rely on the PIC. (Just see what airline pax say in newspaper interviews after anything unusual happens on a flight – e.g. some serious turbulence or a missed approach from minima.)
That was exactly my point, they manage their risk by deciding if they want to delegate management of their safety to you, and their doing so may be entirely sensible. Once they’ve done it, it’s up to you to be responsible for yourself and for them, and not worry about their adult choice. Life is full of risks that we all manage with incomplete information, nobody is an expert on every risk situation that they successfully manage.
@Flyer59, the most skilled pilot I know started by flying with his dad as you describe. By the time he was 10 or 12 he was begging his dad (the owner of a small FBO) to take the tandem seating Citabria on every trip so he could fly from the front seat and pretend he was solo 
Jan_Olieslagers wrote:
My rule is easy, and was firmly pressed into my brains by all of my instructors: always have a viable plan B.
If no viable plan B is available for some section of the flight, then I do not fly.
Having a plan B is generally a good idea, and in some cases necessary, but I view this in the same way as I assess risk generally. If there is no viable plan B for a section of the flight, then I would estimate the risk increase by not having the plan B. If the chances of plan A going wrong is slight and the time without a viable plan B is reasonably short, then I wouldn’t care.
E.g. If I would normally always want a reasonable emergency landing site within gliding range (which I don’t), then I wouldn’t care if I didn’t have one for 5 minutes of a one hour flight.
In the same vein, I would not necessarily be satisfied with a plan B if the chance of both plans A and B failing is reasonably high. Then a plan C would be needed…
Also engine failures are not the most important cause of accidents – at least not if you exclude failures caused by engine mismanagement in which case it might not have helped with two engines.
Our view on risk has to do with our personality. There are personalities that are risk averse. Other personalities have no problem taking risks. And others again take risks, but they are calculated risks. That is why it is so difficult to decide for another what he should do. You might have another personality and might be driven by another motivation and have a completely different view on risks.
Our view on risk has to do with our personality. There are personalities that are risk averse. Other personalities have no problem taking risks. And others again take risks, but they are calculated risks. That is why it is so difficult to decide for another what he should do. You might have another personality and might be driven by another motivation and have a completely different view on risks.
My view on this is that one needs to first and foremost look at the technical data.
In GA it starts with the weather.
Too many people take a look at the sky, see 5 clouds and decide to not go.
Next time, they look at the sky, see 4 clouds and decide to not go.
You can see which way this is going…
Whereas if they looked at the tafs and metars, and the other stuff which better informed pilots use (IR, sferics, radar) they might have seen the same data in all the above cases and they would have done the flight in all of them.
A few years ago I did a presentation on “VFR in Europe” (the slides are under Articles) to some people at Shoreham, and when I said this, about half of them didn’t seem to be too happy with that. That’s fair enough, but these people will gradually frighten themselves and will drop out of flying, maybe sticking to the Shoreham to Bembridge burger run on CAVOK days. And some might kill themselves if they get it the wrong way round.
This procedure doesn’t need any special personality. Anyone can dig out this data and get on with it, or not.
IMHO if you need a “personality” to come into it, you have possibly assessed the tech stuff and gone ahead with the flight when it was objectively unsafe with regard to the capability of the aircraft.
Is an airline or other commercial pilot guided by his personality? No; he would be fired. He looks at the wx, minima, alternates, etc. Just the same as we should be doing. Anything different is going to kill us, or make us give up flying via falling confidence.
Unfortunately training this process needs some kind of a “workshop” held in a classroom. And almost nobody would want to pay for it, because they already have the papers entitling them to do what they want to do. With no mandatory ground school in the PPL, and close to zero operationally useful ground school in the IR, we are stuck with a system where people look at a taf and if it has more than one line, they cancel. Then I know a 3000hr pilot who cannot read tafs or metars…
It’s education, not personality.
The trouble begins where the pilots accepts risks for his passengers they do not understand – or which they would never agree on if they were aware of these risks.
It’s only 5 days ago a Californian father killed his whole family of when he took them on a VFR flight in IFR and icing conditions. These kids trusted their father, and it was completely irresponsible to start this flight.
I for one will try to evaluate the possible risk of a flight – and will always stay on the ground when there’s too many unknown factors. And i will not take anybody on a flight they would not do if they knew what i know about flying. A bit theoretical maybe, but i do not want to get other people into dangerous situations they have no chance to understand.
And i will not take anybody on a flight they would not do if they knew what i know about flying
I have difficulty working out what that means, but the only logical interpretation I can make is that it is equivalent to saying that you would not do such a flight anyway, so nothing actually changes.
It’s only 5 days ago a Californian father killed his whole family of when he took them on a VFR flight in IFR and icing conditions. These kids trusted their father, and it was completely irresponsible to start this flight.
Yes; that happens all the time (N2195B was next to mine in the same hangar, for example) which is why I said above about the commercial scenario being no different to the GA/pleasure flying scenario. Nobody wants this to happen.
You bet that US pilot didn’t know about radar, IR, sferics, icing, etc. He was prob90 one of the “I always fly” personality types which GA is full of. “I always fly” were the last words spoken by N2195B to my A&P/IA/ATP/CFII colleague, before he embedded his family in a French mountain, on a “technically impossible” flight (discussed here previously). Had he been presented with some decent data and had he been educated on interpretation, he would not have flown, and I know for a 100% fact that he had no idea about any of that.
Like I say above, data + education = a given level of safety. Personality is irrelevant.
GA is full of Type A types anyway, which is why we have so many pointless fatal accidents, especially in sectors where the marketing attracts Type A people preferentially. And this was unavoidable because younger Type A (predominantly business/professional high achievers) people are the only new market.
What i want to say is that not only my personal perception of the risk counts, but that as a responsible pilot i have to be able to learn and understand enough to be able to see the risks from a more neutral standpoint. It can well be that i will go on a flight alone i would not take my kids.
Many people and pilots are not able to think outside their own “box”, i see that not only in flying.
The Californian pilot from last week obviously climbed to 17.500 feet, could never get on top and finally accepted an IFR clearance before he finally lost control in a spiral … the airplane disintegrated beyond 240 kts GS, at least it looks like. When you see his track with many doglegs trying to get around the weather you ask yourself all the time … why the hell didn’t he turn back?
I think risk is not only an individual perception but can be quantified. There are things no pilot should ever do – like VFR into IMC.
Personality SHOULD be irrelevant, but unfortunately it’s not … i agree with all the rest. I am convinced that there’s personality types that should never fly. I have a friend who was interested, but from his driving i KNEW that he would kill himself. I told him that and he finally understood.
Personality cannot be removed completely because that’s how things are, but the more one can remove it, the safer flying will be.
That is what the commercial world does and for good reasons.
