Matthew Waugh

For pilots judgment is an important skill to allows us to assess a situation and determine an appropriate course of action. Judgment is hard to teach except through experience, but it certainly can be learned. There are many ways to learn judgment, here’s one of the ways I continue to enhance my ability to make the correct judgment call.

In aviation we learn from the mistakes of others. Most magazines and newspapers will include a regular column (or more) reporting on and analyzing recent aviation accidents. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) makes available preliminary and final reports on the accidents they investigate (http://www.ntsb.gov). Go to the monthly lists and skim down them. Some of the accidents are hard to relate to our form of General Aviation (GA) flying. For example I’ve rarely had a problem with the pushback tug on my C172 backing me into the passenger boarding ramp. Many of the accidents occur to GA planes involved in the kind of flying that you and I do.

As you read each accident report you’ll often be able to make your own call on the cause of the accident. Some accidents are just that, accidents. Stuff happens you can’t predict and an accident occurs. These are rare events however. Most of the time you can see one or a number of factors that may have caused the accident. We’re not trying to assign blame here, it’s just for our own purposes and sometimes we may not know all the facts, but the NTSB often makes it easier to read between the lines.

For example accident reports may contain the information that “no evidence of fuel spill was present at the site”, which is code for “the pilot ran out of gas”. Sometimes the report will make specific mention of the winds at a nearby airport which can often be related to the runway in use.

How is this useful in improving our judgment? As you make decisions relating to each of your flights you should ask yourself “how will this read in the accident report?” If you’re tempted to use the closest runway even though there’s a 5K tailwind the question is not can the takeoff be performed, the question is, if it goes wrong, how will it read in the accident report? Silly pilot, trying to save time sacrificed safety for speed.

The weather reports show the ceilings at 2000 feet and visibility is 4 miles. It’s legal VFR, why wouldn’t you take the flight? Well you might, but before you go ask yourself how it would read in the accident report. That’s marginal VFR, it doesn’t take much more to go wrong and you could be the subject of an accident report that the rest of us will read and  think “silly pilot, scud running”.