Flight Training - November/December 2020 - 46

They're not likely to run off
the end of a runway because they
misjudged the length; or fail to
add enough fuel to the tanks; or
skip doing a weight-and-balance
calculation. Their decision-making skills are newly honed and will
remain that way-for a while. But
these skills won't remain in top
condition.
Paul Craig, the longtime ﬂight
instructor and aviation educator
who analyzed 16 years' worth of
general aviation fatal accidents in
the ﬁrst edition of his book The
Killing Zone, found that the greatest number of accidents involved
pilots who had logged between
50 and 350 total ﬂight hours.
That ﬁrst batch of accident data
spanned the years 1983 to 1999.
When he updated the book to
analyze fatal accidents between
2000 and 2011, Craig found that
nothing had really changed:
Pilots with between 51 and 350
hours had the highest number of
fatal accidents.
Will you become a super
pilot once you cross that 350hour benchmark? If you stay
proﬁcient, you will be a safer
pilot-but your ﬂying ﬁtness
regimen can't neglect practicing
good decision making. To do that
would be like skipping leg day in
your overall ﬁtness routine.
"Flying requires a lot of
decision-making," said Richard
McSpadden, senior vice president
of the AOPA Air Safety Institute.
"We need to work at the skills for
decision-making, just like we need
to work at stick and rudder."

GOOD PILOTS
McSpadden, a retired U.S. Air
Force pilot who led the USAF
Thunderbirds, began pondering
decision-making after recognizing
that what we think of as "good
pilots"-proﬁcient pilots with
many years and hours of stick and
rudder logged-can be as susceptible to pilot error as anyone else.
"I would sit back and think,
These were excellent, conscien46

FLIGHT TRAINING NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020

What would you do?
Test your decision-making
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One such scenario
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tious pilots," McSpadden said. "If
they fell into the trap or whatever led up to it-or whatever
circumstance cloaked better
judgment-so could I. I wanted
to spend time understanding the
dynamics of that."
While McSpadden has ﬂown
with "great pilots who've had a
momentary lapse in judgment that
cost lives or expensive equipment,"
the rest of us need only draw on
two notable examples from the
past 20 years. In 2006, A. Scott
Crossﬁeld-a famous test pilot

who was the ﬁrst to ﬂy at twice the
speed of sound-fatally crashed in
a Cessna 210 when he encountered
a thunderstorm and didn't deviate
in time to get out of it. In 2007,
Steve Fossett, the ﬁrst man to ﬂy
solo nonstop around the world
in a balloon and in a ﬁxed-wing
aircraft, disappeared while ﬂying
his Super Decathlon in Nevada.
A year later the wreckage of the
airplane and the pilot's identiﬁcation were found. The National
Transportation Safety Board found
the probable cause of the crash to
be an inadvertent encounter with
downdrafts above mountainous
terrain that exceeded the climb
capability of the airplane he was
ﬂying. Downdrafts, high density
altitude, and mountain terrain were
considered contributing factors to
the accident.

AVOID SNAP
JUDGMENTS
If we recognize how our brains
operate and that despite our
best efforts, sometimes our
decision-making process is
hopelessly flawed, the training
has begun. "We are prone to
make quick decisions, more
than optimum decisions,"
McSpadden said, "and we place
too much faith in our intuition
or our 'gut feel.'"
We are powerfully susceptible to biased logic when we
have a keen self-interest at stake,
McSpadden explained. "Once
we make a decision, we tend to
overvalue data that supports our
decision and undervalue data
that suggests we should reconsider," he said.
Put this into an aviation
context. How many times have
you-or a pilot you know-justiﬁed an aeronautical decision
because "we did it before and it
worked out OK"?
"The brain loves to tag
something to something it knows
already," McSpadden said.
To complicate matters, we
are not trained to think in terms
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