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Perspectives
Better Safe Than Soar-y
One challenge that all GA travelers face on a routine basis is too important to ignore: The sometime fuzzy decision whether it’s safe to take to the skies or wiser to stay on the ground.
These decisions aren’t always easy, because we’re often so focused on making it on time to an appointment for business or personal reasons, or we’re just eager to get home. And more often than not, the consequences of not going appear to be much more real to us than the vaguely defined potential dangers of making a flight into uncertain conditions.
Not making a flight when the sky above is clear and you have somewhere else to be can be a frustrating, humiliating decision. You will always have other pilots telling you that you could have launched, and you will always have a nagging doubt that maybe you’re just a chicken.
So when we learned that John and Martha King, the royal family of aviation education, had decided to tackle this under-explored problem with a computer software program, we jumped at the opportunity to address this important issue.
What’s telling about the program is that the image on the CD-ROM is not just of a pilot, or an airplane, or even one of the Kings’ characteristic “thumbs-up” photos. It’s an image of a young family piling into an airplane, about to set off on a fun-filled adventure.
That’s the real world we live in, and the decisions we face—often with an airplane full of loved ones—are usually the toughest to make.
We suggest that pilots take the Kings’ program with a spouse, child or anyone with whom they regularly fly.
While the pilot ultimately must make the go/no-go decision, the pilot’s family and passengers necessarily influence that decision. Taking this program can help ensure that everyone has the same language to identify and discuss risks, leading to safer decisions and fewer disagreements when shutting down is the right call.
Then, when we fly off to those 10 unbeatable fly-in golf destinations (page 12), retreat for a weekend to Bodega Bay, Calif. (page 34), or revel in the roar around the track at the Indy 500 (page 26), we know that no matter what happens, we’ll get there when we get there, and we’ll be safe.
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