Your first general-aviation excursion with a spouse or friend can be one of the best experiences in all of flying. It’s a thrill to get to a vacation spot or your favorite paradise more quickly than just about everyone else; being free of earth’s busy roads and traffic congestion brings pilots and passengers alike a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction.

Amid all these warm and fuzzy feelings, an idea pops into your head. It seems crazy at first, but as you sit there listening to the hum of the engine muffled by your expensive headset, it starts to become ever more real—like an out-of-body experience in which you see it happening but can’t do anything to stop it.

“What if something happened to me?” you wonder. “What if I got sick or passed out? What if something happened to the airplane...if the engine stopped or we lost our radios? What would I do? More importantly, what would we do?”

It’s no longer just you that counts. During training, you relied on your instructor. When you began to solo, you learned how to master every unexpected situation that could arise and deal with it in a calm and professional manner (right?).

But now it’s not just you. Now, you have another person or persons in the cockpit. These are people who will not only be affected by how well you handle an emergency, they can have a large part in how well you handle the emergency.

After all, it’s hard to remain level-headed and think clearly when your front-seat passenger grabs the yoke and screams “We’re all going to die!” at the top of his or her lungs, isn’t it?

If you fly regularly with the same person, be it a family member, companion or spouse, it’s possible to bring your relationship to a higher level by sharing practices and procedures that lead to a safe flight.

Sharing the flight workload and giving informal training to your companion will increase the pleasure for you, and make progressive flights safer and more enjoyable as well. Your activities keep both the pilot and passenger alert and interested.

Pilots have been known to fall asleep at the stick on long cross country trips—not a good idea, especially in single pilot operations. Getting your passenger involved is a great way to keep both of you engaged throughout the trip, and it’s a good example of cockpit resource management.

Surprisingly, the person in the right seat may really enjoy knowing how to help out, and even be willing and able to handle the aircraft under some circumstances.

What are the types of duties that are appropriate for a non-rated passenger? Maintaining an organized cockpit is one example. A passenger can have custody of charts and hand them to you as needed. He or she can read an excerpt from the Airport Facility Directory if information is required, or follow the aircraft’s position on the charts while you handle flying responsibilities.

As your flying buddy gets more time in the air, there is no reason why he or she can’t have the controls for a while in good VFR conditions. You’ll have to supervise and make sure that everything is under control, of course.

Teach them that straight-and-level flight involves looking at a distant point and making small pitch changes to maintain the position of that point in the windshield. Turns require a bit more skill, but they can be learned.

This simple training can be a great benefit to you if there is something you need to do, and while your autopilot could do the same thing, it can’t look out the window for weather or steer away from other aircraft without input from you. A well-coached and talented passenger can alert you to these hazards and help avoid them.

If you are fortunate enough to have a collision-avoidance system and believe it is going to take care of you always, think again. There are still many aircraft without transponders. Sometimes, aircraft with transponders have pilots who forget to turn them on. Transponders also malfunction. Gliders, birds and gung-ho parachutists dropping out of clouds in different parts of the country create big surprises for unsuspecting aviators—especially when the pilot’s attention is focused inside the aircraft and he thinks the collision-avoidance system will save the day.

Having a passenger look for traffic is a great idea, and it doesn’t take much effort to teach a passenger the traffic call-out system by reference to the hour hand of a clock. Teaching your passenger to look at different patches of sky for a few seconds at a time in order to pick out the motion of another aircraft is within the capability of most pilots, even though they are not instructors.

The blind spots on each side of the aircraft are not the same, and you may be surprised that some passengers are better at finding traffic than are you, the pilot. Spotting a moving target easily is more innate for some people than others.

Even children can learn these skills, and it’s a great way to keep them engaged and occupied during long trips.

Talking on the radio is a lot of fun. It spawned a whole industry during the CB craze many years ago. That passenger next to you might love to be taught how to tune the radio and how to communicate in a variety of circumstances.

It’s great to have the passenger make the call outs at an uncontrolled field, particularly if you are coming into a challenging airport. If you have two radios and split communications, your passenger can pick up an ATIS broadcast or monitor one frequency while you talk to Flight Watch.

Just be careful. Your companion might be tempted to talk too much and start tying up the frequency! Remember, this is not to say that you can’t do everything yourself. However, sharing is fun, and may even give your passenger the idea to go for a license on his or her own.

If you do fly with the same person often, why not consider getting him or her some pinch-hitter training with a flight instructor? A basic course will go over aircraft control. The trainee will be familiarized with methods of finding a suitable airport for landing, and learn to put the aircraft on the ground in a condition such that everyone can walk away from the landing.

Many aircraft have GPS capability today, and it’s not a bad idea to have the passenger able to handle some of the navigation functions—at least those which could lead the plane to an airport in an emergency.

The fondness of pilots for their companions logically leads to a consideration of how to make sure passengers are safe if the pilot becomes disabled in the air. There is a good reason why two pilots are used in commercial air transport. It’s safer when someone who knows something can watch the person who has control over the flight and can take over in an emergency.

In actual fact, many transport category aircraft could be flown by one pilot. It’s neither safe nor allowed by law for good reason, although the FAA does grant waivers for some operations. With the right training, your passenger becomes a very valuable watchdog at the very least.

After all, what pilot hasn’t thoughtlessly made a stupid mistake or series of bad decisions? It makes sense to have your passenger handle the aircraft checklist.

In an emergency, a passenger can easily read off items on the checklist that a busy pilot may skip over. Many of the checklists in use today are multi-page, bound volumes that are often not used because it’s too difficult to fly the plane and flip through the pages at the same time. But with a competent passenger managing the checklist, the process becomes much more manageable.

If you fly an aircraft with a ballistic parachute, brief the passenger on the conditions when it is appropriate to be used and how it is deployed.

Remember to identify weather that has to be avoided, and stay away from situations that require more skill than you have. Share your decision-making process with your passengers, so that they know not only what decision you have made, but also why. Never allow anyone—including a passenger—to pressure you into making a flight. Tomorrow is another day, and in fact it may be a better day to make the trip you have planned. If your passenger becomes part of the decision-making process, the trip will go more smoothly.

Sometimes you’ll fly with passengers who know little-to-nothing about aviation. Flying with passengers is a large responsibility; this is especially true when the passengers know little to nothing about the hazards of flight. Your passengers trust that you are using sound judgment. If you get into a troubling situation, you may frighten them to the point where they will not want to fly with you again.

By sharing some of your knowledge and your responsibility with them, you can keep them interested in the flight, and potentially gain some valuable help just when you need it most.

—Richard is the chief flight instructor at Panorama, which is a full-service FBO and Cessna Pilot Center located at Westchester County Airport (HPN) in White Plains, NY.