Safety: Over the last three years our accident rate has quite frankly been too high. After chatting with a SoCal colleague whom manages a similar flying club, whose ratio is nearly null in terms of accidents, I know there is a lot more that can be done. We need to focus all our energies in being actively safe pilots. The most typical accident could be avoided simply recognizing when a landing currently is or is becoming unstable and then deciding to go around. There are a litany of other poor choices which have lead to accidents, hence our focus will be to find ways to teach better pilot decision making skills and recognize those that do not demonstrate competency in this area.

Another major focus of the new year will be to improve the checkout and phase check procedures. I believe that paperwork requirements have gotten a little off track. It seems that we are trying to fix upstream problems with too many down stream solutions. In the end they do not seem to focus the solutions in the correct areas.

These goals are not mutually exclusive and will lead to both safer pilots and ultimately a better member experience.

We will utilize the web more as a key resource for dispensing check-out data. We have already changed processes to audit the forms and docs on a more regular basis to ensure their currency and relevance. We will be adding AFM and instructional manuals for member access, and create a web based training area to house short training videos and seminar clips.

A final area will be creating scenario based safety seminars where the basis of discussion will be reviewing club accidents and incidents. In the end, education is the best source of prevention.

Thanks to all and here's to a safe and prosperous 2009 !

In the long run, usually, the positives balance the negatives and often come out ahead.  Sometimes you have to look pretty hard to find the positives.  Take the current financial situation/mess/disaster/muck-up.  We all have 201Ks instead of 401Ks, and even in the booming California housing market, home equity isn’t what it used to be.  On the other hand, it’s a great time to pick up bargains in both the stock and the housing markets.  We probably shouldn’t talk about how long it will take for those bargains to pay off. 

In the flying game, gas, including 100LL, has dropped in price, and flying has become less expensive.

In another aspect of flying, the evidence would indicate that we don’t fly as well as we could.  If we were to analyze our own flying and be critical about it, we could find at least a couple of areas that we could do better at.  Weather seems to be a popular area for people not to know enough about.  This is a great time of year for honing your weather skills.  Even if you’re not going anywhere, pretend you are out of the area, and look at the prog charts and other weather-related tools and see if you can tell if tomorrow or the next day would be a better day to return to the Bay Area.  What time of day would work?  What would you use as an alternate?  Then see it the weather turns out to be what you predicted.  Could you get over the Sierras if that is the direction you’re pretending to come from?  Would you have ended up with icing?  So we can turn the negative of some pretty scroungy weather into a positive.

What about the mechanical part of flying?  Could we fly to the Practical Test Standards in every airplane we fly?  And even if we could, there are some maneuvers that could still use some tweaking.  I say this both from my own experience and my own flying skills, but from seeing how people fly when they come for Flight Reviews, recurrent training, and aircraft checkouts.

Another popular negative is the one that comes with the CASSi notice that you’re out of currency in a plane you’re trying to reserve.  We all know that it happens for reasons often not under our control.  The plane we wanted to fly is down at the time that would have kept us from drifting out of currency.  The entire day we wanted to fly was 1/4 mile and 100 feet.  I’ve talked extensively with the Chief Pilots before during and after my tenure as West Valley GM, and universally, one of their high workload items is the phone calls about, “I’m only a day out of currency, can’t I get a waiver?”  There’s a double negative here.  From the Chief Pilot’s perspective, it’s a huge workload, and it’s frustrating the our pilots still don’t seem to understand that they aren’t one day out of currency, they are probably more like 30 to 60 days out of currency (or more).  Virtually every instructor in the club will happily tell you how far off their game they feel if they go a mere two weeks without flying a particular model of plane.

From the pilot’s perspective, it’s a negative because he has to go fly with an instructor and do some inane maneuvers just to be able to fly PIC again.  Let’s look for the positive here, and there is one.  Instead of treating a currency flight as an administrative chore to be performed so a box can be checked, treat it as a chance to learn something new, or to fine tune a skill that could use some work.  When we go to FlightSafety or SimCom for six month or one year recurrent training, we usually have a couple of specific things to try.  For example, the last time I went to Pilatus recurrent, I wanted to see what would happen if I hit the outer marker at 180 KIAS, no flaps, no gear, and no power, and flew the glideslope down at a continually decreasing airspeed, adding flaps and gear at the appropriate times to see if an ILS could actually be flown after a power failure if the correct airspeed was chosen.

Not everyone will have the same set of needs, which is part of why an instructor has the basic maneuvers as a place to start, but if you have maneuvers you’d like to work on, the process can be much more relevant to your needs.  And you know what they are better than the instructor who sees you a couple of time a year, or perhaps less.  If you come into the session with specific things you’d like to learn or accomplish, you can quite effectively turn a negative into a positive.

And the Chief Pilot will have one less thing to deal with in the in-basket.