Training Tip: Assessing risk

Your pilot training gives you a head start on applying the skill of assessing and mitigating risk to nonflying life. That concept saturates every aspect of flight training, and becomes a basic way of thinking, from interpreting a weather briefing to make a safe go/no-go decision to updating the plan as conditions arise in flight.

Not everyone approaches risk management with guiding principles in mind, as I noted while reading the online comments of a group of nonpilots trying to decide whether to participate in a daily indoor physical-fitness activity as the first reports of positive coronavirus tests began showing up nearby. Most comments were well-informed and thoughtful, the commenters careful to urge self-protection or avoiding putting others at risk.

But there’s always one who has to make a statement: No, he would not be dissuaded from participating in the daily games by anything short of a positive diagnosis showing up within city limits. (If he were a pilot, I could imagine him charging off VFR into bad weather; I am having trouble imagining him returning from it.)

Ask any group of pilots how to manage a plainly risky scenario—thunderstorms along the route, severe turbulence, low visibility, freezing rain—and you get the full spectrum of risk-management solutions.

Remember, “The goal of risk management is to proactively identify safety-related hazards and mitigate the associated risks,” as notes the discussion of the subject (page 2-3) in the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge. “When a pilot follows good decision-making practices, the inherent risk in a flight is reduced or even eliminated,” it adds.

Here’s a review assignment for your socially distanced downtime: Refresh on the four fundamental risk-management principles the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge chapter describes, starting with the baseline tenet: “Accept no unnecessary risk.” (Emphasis added.)

Then take the AOPA Air Safety Institute’s online course, Do the Right Thing, Decision Making for Pilots.

As a practical-test matter, demonstrating “the ability to identify, assess and mitigate risks” is integral to every activity, even preflight tasks: In preflight, “failure to distinguish proficiency versus currency,” and “flying unfamiliar airplanes, or operating with unfamiliar flight display systems, and avionics” raise risk for that flight.

Does that make the flight a no-go?

Not necessarily. Risk management techniques (perhaps even a point-score system) help you methodically weigh benefits against hazards to decide.