Assess your risk

Mary Kuehn, FIRC chief flight instructor and program manager at the AOPA Air Safety Institute, and Chris Moser, AOPA senior director of flight training education, recently held a webinar on flight risk assessment tools (FRAT).

But what is risk management, really, and why is it useful and important to consider? According to chapter two of the FAA’s Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, “the goal of risk management is to proactively identify safety-related hazards and mitigate the associated risks. Risk management is an important component of aeronautical decision-making.”

Moser says it is about having a fixed set of rules to live by, every time you prepare to fly. “I want to take as much of the active decision-making out of my takeoff and flight. Having no plan at all is a big hazard,” he said. “I put myself in the mindset of when something happens—not if—this is what I will do about it.”

Kuehn draws this ground-based analogy: The cars on a busy street are a hazard. A pedestrian, about to cross the street, identifies the risk of being hit by a car. The act of looking both ways before crossing the busy street is risk management.

While commercial operations, including many flight schools and the airlines, have standard operating procedures—set operational minimums and rules that every employee must live and fly by—they are not required in GA.

In flight training, we learn early that IM SAFE is a good tool to analyze one’s physical and mental state. Taking that analysis one step further, we arrive at PAVE, which assesses factors around the aircraft, environment and weather, and external pressures that are instrumental in helping us decide on a course of action.

You may have also heard of the “Five Ps” that need to be briefed ahead of every flight: the Plan, Plane, Pilot, Passengers, and Programming. But don’t get them mixed up with the “Three Ps”: Perceive, Process, Perform, for what the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge calls “a continuous model for every aeronautical decision that you make.”

The FAA also likes the DECIDE model, a six-step loop assessing information while in flight and making your moves according to what that information tells you: Detect a problem, Estimate (the need to react), Choose a course of action, Identify solutions, Do the necessary actions, and Evaluate the effects of the actions.

“I prefer the simpler ASI model of ‘Anticipate, Recognize, Act’ and then I add an E to that—Evaluate,” Moser said.

There’s a new one: CHORRD, promoted by John and Martha King, which helps analyze the situation just before takeoff. CHORRD stands for: Conditions (what are they?), Hazards (anything I need to think about?), Operational changes (anything I need to change as a result of C or H?), Runway required and available (is it enough? what’s the excess?), Return (how would I do that, if needed?), and Departure (what’s my plan if I can continue?).

Another good acronym is CARE: Consequences, Alternatives, Reality, and External pressures. Or you could use the TEAM acronym to deal with a hazard and its impact on flight safety: Transfer, Eliminate, Accept, Mitigate.

It’s always helpful to write everything down ahead of time, without the pressure of an impending flight. There are several online tools. One of the most comprehensive is the FAA Safety Team’s version, available on the FAA website. The tools ask critical questions and assign points to each answer. The total number of points will lead you to a matrix that is often illustrated with green, amber, and red boxes denoting thresholds of risk. A score in the green means you’re good to go, one in the amber will tell you to be careful and think hard about your decision, and a result in the red denotes danger.

The Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge says with brutal honesty that, “if you find yourself saying that it will ‘probably’ be OK, it is definitely time for a solid reality check.”

[email protected]