Sadly, the only way we are going to achieve it is by educating ourselves. Ourselves!
That is the reality of life in most things, including flying, and recognizing it puts you one step ahead. “Training” is enough to get started. If you want to get really good at something you need to go beyond the norm, yourself.
airline ops will always be safer than piston GA but there is a great deal we can do.
I think that’s right because while flying safely is actively created, airline flying is a different thing than General Aviation, inflexible in its operations and also not particularly enjoyable for any of the participants. Most airline pilots would rather be flying GA for that reason, except for the money. Many spend the money they earn flying airliners to do so, accepting the intrinsic risks along with the benefits.
Arguably the French mathematician Simeón Denis Poisson suffered from mild nominative determinism (his distribution curve arguably having a bit of a fish tail) :)
GA accident statistics probably have some poissonic characteristics and if there is an actuary on the forum, it would be interesting to know if they are assessing risk for the GA fleet using a poissonic distribution. Famously the Prussian army employed this statistic to calculate how many soldiers could be expected to die in a given year by being kicked by a horse.
If you want to get really good at something you need to go beyond the norm, yourself.
There’s also a feedback issue here somewhere. The whole GA educational system is fixed on set minimum of skill/competence and that includes instructors also. There are some ratings of course, but for the most part it’s all up to the individual to go beyond the norm. That also includes certain risks.
maxbc wrote:
But there’s no saying if we will actually beat the odds or not (the tragic loss of Richard McSpadden comes to mind). Even with a lot of education, it would be really hard to lower the risk by 50%, and the risk order of magnitude would still be correct.
I don’t have EU stats handy, but I expect that they are not too different from USA stats. And they say that every single pilot can reduce their risk by more than 50% by doing some very simple things:
These sound so easy, but we don’t seem to be able to do them consistently.
What we COULD do is have a sort of club of safety-minded pilots, who would all vow to apply a few extra operational procedures (the procedures would in turn be adjusted little by little, by sharing experiences). The goal is to keep the procedures light, but unify them among all pilots. These extra procedures could include for example a checklist that would be completed at every decision point to fly or not. The checklist makes you check items one by one, checking that it’s safe to fly. All pilots have blind spots in their assessments of whether the flight should take place or not, and the checklist may compensate their particular blind spots at this final decision point. Many accidents happen while weather is not great at destination for instance, or terrain clearance has not been checked, or W&B is different from usual, etc. Having an additional operational procedure may shift the mission-focused mindset to a loyalty towards the club’s values mindset: if you fly while the checklist says you shouldn’t, you’re basically excluding yourself from the spirit of the club. Of course, if you get spotted not applying the checklist, or disregarding its results, you can get reported and kicked.
Also, there could be a form of continuous experience sharing, forcing pilots to recall a hazardous or dangerous situation, and sharing how they intend to keep out of such situation in the future. If you don’t share at least one experience every few years, you get kicked out. You mostly share the dangerous situations you encountered, and how you plan to avoid them in the future.
This could even include a systematic periodic peer evaluation (with the possibility to get kicked out eventually), probably not in flight (too complicated), but in writing. You could even have timed Q&A which test your aircraft’s and procedure knowledge, graded by other pilots. This may be a bit extreme, but I think this would mimic the continuous training and testing (and potential improving) you get in an airline. You could for instance post a wide-angle video of one of your flights, and you would get graded based on the (small) mistakes you make, allowing you to correct them in turn. You would get more points identifying mistakes when submitting the video than having no mistakes at all.
If the club brand is strong enough (a staple in safety, advertised on Wingly for members etc.), everyone will want it, it would create a benefit of being a member, drag pilots along and improve overall safety.
Hell, it’s a really wild idea (probably not a novel or a particularly good one), but I think the keys are 1) multiply experience gain by sharing it between many pilots 2) apply lessons learned via common procedures – otherwise experience gain might be useless – and 3) ensure a continuous improvement and proficiency mindset via some form of continuous training and/or peer evaluation.
Richard McSpadden
He wasn’t the PIC – as far as is known. It probably happened very fast.
I agree with your list but I don’t believe it makes much difference to those who actually crash, because
Don’t fly VFR into IMC.
Specifically this should be “don’t fly in IMC unless you are capable” – because squeezing between the lowering cloudbase and the rising ground is super dangerous.
Don’t stall your aircraft.
That can never happen in cruise, so it is down to carefully avoiding the need for low speed flight.
Use your checklist every time you fly.
There are important memory items.
I agree re fuel – that’s a big one. But also most GA doesn’t have a fuel totaliser…
Scheduled ops have Standard Operating Procedures for Standard Operating Situations.
GA is far more variable.
One very important safety trait is noticing that something is different this time, and trying to figure out what it is.
Has anyone here been involved with, or using the concept of Threat and Error Management (TEM) ? I have heard about it before, but thought it was exclusively some airline thing with little relevance to GA, for the same reason that for instance standard operating procedures isn’t all that relevant for GA. Norway CAA is “pushing” this now for GA. They explain it as some kind of foundation for airmanship. One sub concept is SRM (Single pilot recourse management).
Other concepts is “Fly, focus, act”. In essence the “Aviate” bit in aviate, navigate, communicate. You suddenly got a goose in the wind screen. Now, how do you solve that situation effectively without making it worse.
Will probably hear lots about this in the near future, but on the face of it, it seems to put the finger on the things I was referring to. Better risk handling, and especially in the air, on the fly, but much more than just that.
LeSving wrote:
Has anyone here been involved with, or using the concept of Threat and Error Management (TEM) ? I have heard about it before, but thought it was exclusively some airline thing with little relevance to GA, for the same reason that for instance standard operating procedures isn’t all that relevant for GA. Norway CAA is “pushing” this now for GA. They explain it as some kind of foundation for airmanship.
TEM is in the EASA LAPL and PPL syllabi. In fact, it’s mentioned in the first line of the respective “Flight instruction” syllabus.
TEM is defined as “the process of detecting and responding to the threats/errors with countermeasures which reduce or eliminate the consequences of threats/errors and errors, and mitigate the probability of threats/errors or undesired aircraft states.”
In other words, it is basically a structured way of doing what we know we should always have done but maybe not always do.
OK, had no idea. It’s more than 30 years since I got my PPL. Long before EASA existed 
Funny, LT has made this guide this year. References to Canadian, Australian and the US authorities. Nothing about EASA.
Anyway, I’m instructing ULs, and it’s there this will come in as far as I’m concerned, and in everyday flying. It sort of structurize the stuff in a more easy understanding way.
