Good judgment, the saying goes, comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. As you learned to fly, most of the training focused either the required knowledge, or on the actual techniques of flight. Some instructors – not all, by any means – presented some scenarios either in the classroom, or in flight, that required the exercise of judgment. Though this approach may check how your judgment works, it doesn’t teach judgment.

Fundamental to the successful application of judgment is understanding the nature of risk, which will be the topic next month, and an attitude that willingly applies that judgment.

Our willingness to assess risk depends upon the safety attitude – and that’s taught even more rarely. Risk assessment is at least a two part function: one performed before the flight (preflight, weather brief, route selection, fuel calculations, alternate plans, …), and the ongoing process of analysis and decision making. Here is where the safety attitude comes in.

Remember that when you got your license, your instructor told you, “You now have a license to learn.” In addition to the on-going process of learning techniques, and developing skills, we need the continual process of learning better judgment, and embracing the safety attitude. The most important part of the safety attitude is the recognition that, “I am not as safe as I should be.” It’s a startling concept for a pilot to accept. But as Plato, I think, said, “If you would become good, you must first believe you are bad.” A bit harsh, perhaps, but if you don’t honestly believe you need to improve, you won’t. Note that it isn’t “can improve”, but “need to improve”. Oddly, most safety articles talk about the application of judgment in particular situations, but few address the crux of the issue, the pilot’s inclination to assess risks and the attitude that will result in safer flight. The following are my observations over a 30+ year flying and teaching career.

It seems to me that there are three applications of the safety attitude through risk assessment that are vitally important to the safety of flight.

1. The first is a complete and honest inventory of the things we have done (good and bad; wise and unwise; safe, unsafe and dangerous). What (if anything) were we thinking at the time? How could we avoid similar problems or ensure the repetition of good practices in the future? What went right as a result of a good decision, and how can we ensure that we do similar things in the future? If you can’t come up with a list well into double digits, you’re either not trying, or you’ve never gone flying.

2. Second, we need to look at our standard procedures and assess the risks of each to determine if there is a safer way in which to do them. Remember, just because they work, that doesn’t mean they are safe, or even if safe that they are the safest way in which to do things. What would the result be if a different action were performed?

3. Finally, when we are doing something different from our normal procedure we need to do a real-time risk assessment to determine if it is what we should be doing. Such an analysis, if performed, would have kept a member from running an Archer’s spinning prop into the wingtip of our C-T210. It would have kept a member from taxiing over a chock and hitting the rudder of another plane. It would have kept a member from landing a P-210 pogo-stick style on its nose wheel three times on a single landing, bending the prop and requiring an engine overhaul.

The scary part is that our planes and pilots are involved in literally hundreds of other occurrences each month in which the outcome hasn’t been as bad, and in which an airplane hasn’t been damaged. But when there are enough occurrences of poor safety practices, enough cases in which no specific safety-related thought is given, there will be accidents, there will be damage, there will be injuries, and there will be fatalities.

In addition to risk analysis being fundamental to the safety attitude, I have to write about something I’ve observed all too often –pilot arrogance. Sure, it’s important to be confident in our ability to perform a maneuver, or to conduct a flight safely. But if that confidence isn’t based upon a realistic risk analysis, it’s misplaced. Worse, we’ve seen all too many cases of pilots who believe the rules don’t apply to them. These are the people who park their cars in no parking or handicap zones serene in the knowledge they won’t get a ticket or towed, and even if they get a ticket, what’s a few dollars? In that case, it’s mostly an annoyance to the rest of us, but that attitude in a club plane gets planes bent and people injured or killed. It costs the rest of us through increased insurance, and it takes planes off-line when we need more of them.

The concluding point. The analysis isn’t enough; a proper safety attitude requires that we make changes based on that analysis. If you believe you have no room for improvement, you’re wrong. If you read safety articles in Flying or AOPA Pilot and think, “I’d never do anything that stupid,” you’ve missed the point. In many cases we’ve done things that stupid and have gotten away with them because of better luck than the pilot who wrote the article. If you believe, “It can’t happen to me”, please submit your resignation with your monthly payment. The rest of us can’t afford to have you in the club.