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To Go Or Not To Go?
by Sean Fulton | Photography by Robert Burroughs
There is no such thing as an emergency takeoff. Training experts John and Martha King share tips on how to deal with the ”can-do” inner voice.
I was reminded on a recent trip to Minneapolis that traveling by general aviation airplane can be both a blessing and a curse.
In an effort to avoid a snowstorm forecast to arrive the next morning, Joanne and I checked out of our hotel a
day early, wrapped up our last meeting at 4 p.m., and drove to the airport with plans to fly a few hours south to get ahead of the storm before calling it a night.
On the way to the airport we joked about how great it was to travel by GA, how the seven-hour trip home was more than justified by the fact that we could just pack up and leave any time we wanted to go, and how much more expensive and difficult it would have been to do that using commercial airlines.
It wasn’t until we had all our stuff packed into the plane and I was checking the weather that we got our first cold blast of reality. Less than 50 miles south of Minneapolis was a 2,000-foot overcast that stretched well into Indiana. Icing was predicted, and it was getting dark.
The looming snowstorm would take its time lumbering eastward. At this time of year, we understood that getting behind it would mean having to follow it all the way back to New York, adding at least one and perhaps as many as three days to our trip.
We also knew from the flight into Minneapolis that there were very few cities between us and Chicago, our intended overnight destination. The trip south would be in near total darkness, just 1,500 feet above the trees—if the overcast didn’t drop lower. The more we talked about it, the darker it got.
Joanne and I both wanted to get home, and we knew that not leaving at that moment would mean a much longer trip and potentially worse weather.
Joanne, a non-pilot, felt we should launch, pointing out that we had flown beneath a 2,000-
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“External pressure is the one risk factor that makes you tend to ignore all the other risk factors on a flight,” John says. |
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foot overcast many times before and that the trip south would be fairly short. I argued that we had never flown that low at night, and that the ceiling was already lower than expected and could drop even lower during the flight.
In the end, I decided not to go, and I’ll admit I felt pretty uncomfortable about it for most of the three days it took for us to finally get back home.
Just Say No?
The flexibility of GA travel and our ability to pack more value into every trip creates unique challenges for pilot and passenger alike. Sure, you can accomplish more, from squeezing in an extra client visit on a business trip to spending an extra night with relatives before returning home for the workweek. But that flexibility isn’t free—it includes challenges that we may not be adequately trained to deal with.
Martha and John King, flight instructors and founders of King Schools, recently faced a tough decision when they were involved in a launch party for Microsoft’s new version of Flight Simulator.
The couple had agreed to fly members of the press and key Microsoft employees from Seattle to Friday Harbor, where the airport was adequate for their Falcon jet only under fairly good conditions.
“We said to Microsoft, anybody you absolutely have to have at that dinner doesn’t go in our airplane,” Martha said. “There’s a 50-50 chance that when we get there and look it over, we’re not going to land. We’ll come back to Seattle or go someplace else and land and have a party ourselves, but we’re not going to Friday Harbor.”
Learning Your Limitations
While there are a number of risk factors in flying, the most insidious and dangerous is what the Kings describe as “external pressures”—factors that relate more to your reasons for taking the flight than to the circumstances of the flight itself. Desires to beat bad weather, show up for an important business meeting, get home to your family, are all external pressures that can make good pilots do dumb things.
An external pressure “lurks with you on the flight…it stays with you all the time,” John King says. “An external pressure is the one risk factor that makes you tend to ignore all the other risk factors on a flight.”
And perhaps the most insidious part of external pressures is that most people who fly fail to recognize them.
While much of pilot training focuses on decisions made by the pilot in command, those decisions are in many cases influenced by those around us, our family and friends. Sometimes, those influences can push us to do things we shouldn’t.
Getting home to tend to a family emergency or attend a child’s baseball game can convince a business traveler to push on when the weather has fallen far below his or her personal minimums. Friends waiting at the airport can cause a pilot to enjoy the thrills of an off-airport landing instead of stopping for fuel when headwinds and ground speed are worse than expected.
“Pilots expose themselves and their passengers to a risk factor and are [often] unaware of it even after they’ve been through it,” John says. “If they don’t happen to scare themselves, they may be unaware of the risk they took.”
He points to an accident near his home in which the pilot of a Cessna 210 crashed into a mountain while scud running in extremely poor conditions.
“Iron Mountain has been there for millions of years, and yet this guy took off and hit it,” John says. “And that guy who took off on that day didn’t have a clue that he was going to die. The reason was that he had probably done it dozens of times and gotten away with it.
“He didn’t know his odds, and his odds were a lot worse than he thought they were,” John says.
Airline passengers know never to book the last flight of the day when a time-sensitive event is at stake because there’s always a chance the flight will be delayed or cancelled. So why do so many of us in GA fail to give ourselves the same alternatives when we fly airplanes that are often nowhere near the capabilities of the airlines?
Getting home to the family at the end of a long trip is probably one of the more difficult pressures to shake. “You have to mentally relieve yourself of that pressure,” John says. “You’re not going to be together if you kill yourself in the mountains on the way home.”
John notes that some emergency services organizations don’t tell their helicopter pilots the condition or nature of a call when they are dispatched. They want the pilot to make the decision to take off or not based solely on the conditions and the safety of the crew, without the external burden of knowing a patient’s life might be at stake if the flight is grounded.
Take CARE
The Kings point out that, historically, very little thought is given to training GA pilots on how to recognize and deal with external pressures,
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“If you’re sitting there scared to death at what you’re about to do, then maybe you shouldn’t do it,” Martha advises. |
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or the ways such pressures can affect flight safety, even though these “real world” problems can be as dangerous as icing or a stiff cross-wind.
To fill this void, the Kings have developed a CD-ROM training program that helps pilots learn the skills to make safe decisions in real-world GA travel. The program, called Practical Risk Management for Pilots, helps define a set of tools that pilots and their families can use to assess risks and make safe decisions.
An important part of the program is the CARE checklist, which you can use to assess risks and inform your decisions both before and during a flight. The acronym stands for:
Consequences: What could happen if you do what you’re about to do, and what would you do when faced with that consequence. In my case, if I take off at night beneath a 2,000-foot overcast and the ceiling drops lower, the consequences would be flying in night IMC and likely icing conditions over unfamiliar territory.
Alternatives: If you do what you’re contemplating, what alternatives do you have if things don’t work as planned. Again, if the ceilings dropped or a problem developed with the airplane, would I have a safe place to land, either on or off an airport?
Reality: Deal with the situation as it really is, not as you’d like it to be. In my case, I hadn’t expected the overcast to come in so early, and the fact that it was there forced me to re-evaluate our decision to leave. The fact that the weather was worse than predicted was also an indicator that it would likely deteriorate faster than predicted.
External Pressures: Recognize external pressures and learn to remove them. For me, the pressure was a desire to get home and avoid getting stuck behind a front. An additional factor was my wife’s unfailing confidence in my ability to do something I wasn’t sure was safe. The bad weather moving into the area didn’t make my trip any safer, but it made me more willing to ignore the risks in order to accomplish my goal.
The Kings point out that pilots are goal-oriented people, and our families have grown used to us accomplishing what we set out to do. Not being able to make a trip, having to fold your hands and admit that something is unsafe or is beyond your capabilities, is difficult not just for the pilot, but also for those who depend on him or her to make the trip. And these well-meaning family members can unwittingly coax even a careful pilot to make bad decisions.
“We have seen bright, capable, responsible people take unbelievable risks, and you have to say to yourself, ‘What were they thinking?’ They were thinking that they had to accomplish their goal,” John says.
Four Golden Rules
So, how can a pilot or non-pilot spouse avoid the pitfalls of external pressures?
First, develop personal minimums when you’re not contemplating a trip and then stick to them when it’s time to go. “People sometimes look at what the actual is and say, ‘Let me tinker with my minimums until they match,’ “ Martha says. In a word, DON’T.
Second, learn the consequences of the different risks you face in flying. We’re all taught in private pilot training that stronger headwinds mean more time in the air and more fuel consumed, and so we need to monitor time aloft and make additional fuel stops if needed. But the Kings point out that stronger winds—head winds or tail winds—can also mean vastly different weather at your destination than what was forecast, since weather is moved around by the wind. A good rule of thumb, they say, is to always check your ground speed when you level off in cruise, and if it’s different than what you expected, anticipate changing conditions en route and at your destination.
Third, always have alternatives. The Kings point out that from the moment you take off until you taxi up to the FBO at your destination, your alternatives are constantly being reduced. As the trip progresses, you become more and more tired. You may be hungry or have to go to the bathroom. Your desire to get to your destination increases as your fuel supply decreases.
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Checklist for Removing External Pressures
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Pack an overnight bag even for 1-day trips
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Don’t have someone wait for you at the airport
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Make frequent fuel/bathroom stops
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Plan alternatives for getting to important events
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Resist the urge to change personal minimums
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Leave extra time for travel to important events
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Perform a “Gut Check”
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Click here to Download a PDF of the checklist so you can print it out and carry it with you.
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All of these factors affect the decisions you make in the air, and your ability to give yourself alternatives—having an alternative airport in mind, bringing along food or planning extra fuel reserves—will put you in a position to make the best possible decisions.
Fourth, actively identify and eliminate external pressures. “You have to develop strategies so that you unload the pressure that would otherwise be on yourself,” John says.
For example, the Kings prefer not to have people wait for them at their destination airport because they feel it might present additional pressure to arrive on time. Most pilots pad their travel schedules with an extra day or two to ensure they can still make it to important appointments without putting themselves at risk. The same wiggle room should be given for personal commitments, such as children’s sporting events and family get-togethers.
Finally, be honest with yourself and your passengers about your abilities. John and Martha, both experienced pilots and instructors who have been flying for more than 30 years, have a simple system for dealing with go/no-go decisions. “The most chicken person wins,” John says. “If we’re in a situation where one of us says, ‘I’m not comfortable with this,’ then the other has to say, ‘OK, you’re right, let’s go do something else.’ “
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Well-meaning family members can unwittingly coax even a careful pilot to make bad decisions. |
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In our case, Joanne, a non-pilot, felt we could handle the trip, while I, the PIC, wasn’t so sure. Martha calls this a “gut check.”
“If you’re sitting there scared to death at what you’re about to do, then maybe you shouldn’t do i,.” Martha says. “If you’re scared at the thought of something, then maybe you should go out and get an instructor and talk about it.”
Remember that the real goal in general aviation is not just getting there, but getting there safely, and having fun doing it. 
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