EASA NCO General Aviation Safety

TEM thread

LeSving wrote:

The reality is more like if you keep on flying, you will eventually crash and burn, unless you are lucky and your age (or medical) will get you first.

Let’s examine that statement. For this, “crashing and burning”, this seems to suggest a fatal accident. “Luck” suggests dumb probability. The FAA says the GA fatal accident rate is just above 1 per 100k hours, let’s round it up to 2 per 100k hours to suggest a more reckless pilot. So essentially, to have a 63% chance of dying in a fatal GA accident with those odds you’d have to fly 50k hours.

Given that the most active GA pilots tend not to fly more than 100 hours a year (equating to about 5,000 hours in a lifetime), “you will eventually crash and burn” is in fact pretty unlikely and you’re overwhelmingly more likely to age out of flying than die doing it.

TME (threat and error management) and I’MSAFE are 2 relatively new concepts which we should probably have been using and some possibly have been since they learnt to fly.
They are both simple as in the way mnemonics have been used for years.
Check lists to check that you have fulfilled every item on your memorised “to do list” is something that many GA pilots dispense with as they go along, whereas professional pilots tend to always use them.
Why do we need another club to share our experiences with other pilots? We already have one. In France it’s called a REX which both FFA and FFPLUM each have. If something is of a more serious nature it becomes a CRESAG. These allow French pilots to educate themselves and others without having to travel to expensive hotels for seminars.
We are pilots. We are supposed to be intelligent enough and responsible enough to assess the risks of any flight, whether that is weather, fuel, temperature, notams etc. We think about a plan B before hand. EG alternates. That is TME.
We brief ourselves at various stages with what we are going to do if something goes wrong just so your brain finds something which might lie deep in your memory.
Most of it is common sense and we shouldn’t need to be taught it. Yet we are.
All we have to do is adhere to these simple principles to be safer.
We will never cut out all accldents or even all fatalities. Stuff happens to even the most experienced pilot.
But following certain awareness campaigns running out of fuel is no longer the prime cause of accidents. Parachutes have helped reduce fatalities for engine failures and inadvertant flight into IMC. Other technology has helped reduce air proxes and mid air collisions.
The biggest problem now appears to be pushing your limits. If you have no experience of flying in IMC conditions, get some or steer well clear.
Another major fatality cause, perhaps the biggest, appears to be CFIT. This can be reduced by recognising where threats are likely to arise and how to remain above MSA.
Flying is not difficult, decision making can be.

All true, but despite all that accidents still happen. My only point was that, compared to mere experience sharing (aiming at risk awareness), the will to actually DESIGN and IMPLEMENT new procedures based on common accidents, and forcing ourselves to an potentially auditable and objective discipline may go a long way, because it’s what’s done in airlines. The idea was to mutualize the experience sharing, and the actions taken in response to experience / accidents.

I’ve watched many accident investigation videos, I am very aware of many of the risks, yet I’m not sure this is enough to protect myself from occasional bad judgement, or simply from failing to check a particular item or risk factor on a specific day. Going to a new airport ? Check a couple items before you allow yourself to go there: have I talked to someone who recently landed there? Are there any particular local weather phenomena, terrain clearance peculiarities? I know it’s part of our SOP, but not having those checks written down somewhere (and maybe adjusted with time) is what makes mistakes sometimes slip the net. We eventually miss something important, and procedures help with scanning and checking every aspect. Checking ground clearance vs ceilings should not be done based on personal experience (the pilot remembering he needs to check that), there should be a SOP making us stay well clear of obstacles and weather. It should be part of a written checklist that’s completed at the planning stage of every flight, before the final go/no-go decision is made. The same goes for turn-around decision during flight, etc. We learn some during PPL, but I don’t think they cover enough situations (they shouldn’t anyway, because it would make PPL much longer to get). And they need to be maintained during the pilot’s life, which is easier to do if they are in the form of written SOP somewhere.

Also, maybe some pilots execute this well, but the GA average could be pulled down by many other pilots failing to apply parts of them. Again, writing down and sharing such procedures (as applied in the real world, not just during PPL training), if it doesn’t help you because you already apply them, could help others that don’t do it so well.

You are posting quite some stuff, for a mere PPL student… do you have some other aviation background?

maybe some pilots execute this well, but the GA average could be pulled down by many other pilots failing to apply parts of them.

Given that GA pilots aren’t in the Army, the GA average is an academic statistic. The perspective of a student pilot may be different but regimenting GA operations is not going to meet the needs or interests of the typical GA buyer, who buys and flies GA for the flexibility and individuality it offers. Imagine the reaction if one tried to enforce a similar SOP regime for car drivers.

Some of the type clubs (Bonanza and Cirrus come to mind) do promote specific training regimens for those types. I think new owners find that helpful given that individual type characteristics are otherwise something that may take a while to understand, with resulting historical issues in those types and for the pilots who fly them. Shortening the transition period for some particular types and their buyers is a good idea, when it’s practical. Other types have proven to have less issues.

Silvaire wrote:

Given that GA pilots aren’t in the Army, the GA average is an academic statistic. The perspective of a student pilot may be different but regimenting GA operations is not going to meet the needs or interests of the typical GA buyer, who buys and flies GA for the flexibility and individuality it offers. Imagine the reaction if one tried to enforce a similar SOP regime for car drivers.

The idea is not necessarily to enforce, but more to strive towards, and offer willing pilots the means to reliably stay out of danger. And yeah all this additional stuff may make GA operation less fun, into a sort of unpaid professional job, so it might be a non-starter. I think I’ll experiment with setting up personal procedures and see how it goes.

boscomantico wrote:

You are posting quite some stuff, for a mere PPL student… do you have some other aviation background?

I do lack experience, and I suspect it shows in my naive ideas :) but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking (and reading / watching) about GA dangers and mitigation techniques, and I have to give credit to the quality of the analyses I’ve seen / read, which go in detail about what makes GA dangerous, and by constrast what has made commercial air travel the safest means of travel. It’s also a personal issue, because if I disappear, my employer probably disappears shortly after, with a few people left behind, so I have to do all I can to mitigate risks. Anyway, I’m done spamming the topic now ^^

You are not spamming…

Everyone is free to discuss.

“You will eventually crash and burn” is in fact pretty unlikely and you’re overwhelmingly more likely to age out of flying than die doing it.

That’s what I wrote further down also. The point however was that this risk is not likely to be distributed evenly among pilots. There is no way of knowing [for a random passenger or anyone else for that matter] what the risk actually is unless the outcome is set (still alive or not). The other point was that it still is possible to reduce the risk, for instance by using available tools like TEM or similar stuff.

The third point was that we should at least inform unknowing passengers about the risks, and when bringing passengers we should also minimise the risk to the best of hour knowledge and capability. (The post was from another thread where this was a possible thing).

It’s OK to be an idiot and kill yourself. It’s not OK to kill others because you behave like an idiot. Unless of course they know you are an idiot and are happy with it