Tailwind Tuesday: No Unnecessary Risk
Accepting Risk is Dumb
Welcome back to Tailwind Tuesday. With the multiple high-profile accidents this year, I thought we should discuss how pilots mitigate risks while flying. I’m amazed by how many people worry for my safety as a pilot. “Don’t you know those things are dangerous? I know someone who died in a plane crash.” Yes, pilots know the risks we accept when defying gravity. We have decided that the rewards far outweigh the risks. Commercial aviation is still the safest form of transportation on Earth. It’s also one of the fastest; drive 18 hours or fly 3? I love aviation, and even though one bad mistake can kill, we take everything we do in the cockpit seriously. It’s not a game you can casually play because it can cause a casualty. So, let’s dive into how pilots avoid excessive danger during flight.
“Accept no unnecessary risk.” This phrase is as much a command as it is a statement. The laws of aviation state that you find three types of pilots. You can find old pilots and bold pilots, but rarely can you find an old bold pilot. Old pilots are the ones who lived through things because they reduced the risks of flying. Bold pilots saw the hazards and risks and said they were tougher. Old and bold pilots got lucky and lived to fly another day. Flying can be hazardous, depending on the circumstances. If you want to have a long, fruitful career in aviation, you had better learn from the old pilots and the stories about the bold ones.
Our job as aviators is to safely get from point A to point B. There are inherent risks we accept as pilots, like weather changes, landing, engine loss, and many more. The reason these events may be more dangerous than, let’s say, driving a car is that you don’t get to pull over and wait on the side of the road for AAA to come to rescue you. If something goes wrong, you must figure it out and find a way to land that doesn’t kill anyone.
Risks and Hazards
The FAA defines a Hazard and a Risk in the following ways:
Hazard – a condition that could foreseeably cause or contribute to an aircraft accident as defined in 49 CFR part 830, section 830.2.
Risk – the composite of predicted severity and likelihood of the potential effect of a hazard.
Now, that’s a whole lot of words that probably don’t mean much to you, so here’s how I would define these things:
Hazard – Something that could cause or help cause an airplane accident.
Risk – How dangerous something is based on how bad the outcome could be and how likely it is to happen.
Before diving into minimizing these hazards, let’s look at some examples.
Southwest / Flexjet (Risk level: Normal, Hazard level: high)
On March 5, 2024, at 8:50 a.m. local time, a Southwest Airlines plane had to abort its landing at Chicago Midway Airport to avoid a private jet that entered the runway without authorization. The Southwest flight, arriving from Omaha, performed a go-around and landed safely.
The private Bombardier Challenger 350, operated by Flexjet, was supposed to hold short of the runway but did not follow air traffic control instructions. The FAA and NTSB are investigating, with officials blaming the Flexjet crew for the error. The planes came within approximately 2,050 feet of each other before the Southwest pilots took evasive action.
Flight Instructor (Risk level: High, Hazard level: High)
On September 27, 2023, at 10:49 p.m. local time, a Piper PA-28-161 crashed near Whitesville, Kentucky, killing both the flight instructor and student pilot. The aircraft, operated by Eagle Flight Academy, was on a night training flight from Bowling Green to Owensboro when it encountered severe weather.
Air traffic control warned the pilots of heavy precipitation, and the instructor requested an instrument clearance while reporting extreme turbulence. Shortly after, the aircraft entered an uncontrolled descent and crashed, scattering wreckage over a 25-acre area. Investigators found no mechanical failures, and the cause appears to be weather-related loss of control.
What’s the job of a flight instructor? Is it to help a student to pass a checkride? Or help them navigate the complex world of becoming a pilot? Or is it maybe to endorse a pilot every two years so they can keep flying? A flight instructor’s job is all of the above and, even more importantly, to improve aviation safety and instill a safe mindset into his or her students.
Pilots use methods and systems to see potential risks and hazards and learn how to avoid them. The pilots in the Southwest incident used something taught from the beginning of a pilot’s flight training through every recurrent training they do in their professional career: the go-around. Pilots practice go-arounds so they are quick, accurate, and precise. “Cram, Climb, and Clean,” or in a more detailed explanation, a pilot initiates a go-around by adding full power, pitching up to climb, retracting the gear, and flaps at a safe altitude. The Southwest pilots avoided the hazard of crashing into the Flexjet airplane by relying on standard operating procedures and primary training.
The Southwest pilots might have been able to stop their aircraft in time, and the Flexjet pilot might have cleared the runway in time, but both accepted “unnecessary risks.” Taxiing at busy airports is a riskier event than most would believe, which is why pilots, especially during ground operations, must maintain situational awareness and avoid confusion. It’s easy to get turned around, so always ask for clarification if you’re confused about a clearance from ATC. The Flexjet pilots accepted unnecessary risk by not confirming their clearance, potentially costing hundreds of lives.
What about that flight instructor and student story?
I could go on for hours about this story and everything that went wrong. The CFI was extremely unprofessional and took this career lightly, killing him and his students. He spent most of the flight posting to social media on his smartphone; he didn’t turn around, he decided to continue the flight into a thunderstorm after encountering severe turbulence, and he was bad-mouthing the student the whole time to his friends on social media. This instructor wasn’t just a bold pilot; he was an idiot who killed himself and a student.
He could have mitigated these risks by doing a proper preflight briefing and canceling or delaying the flight. He didn’t do that because he wanted the hours; clearly, the student didn’t know better (poor primary training). The instructor could have used this to show the student how to divert and know when to just turn around, but he didn’t do it. He could have looked at his situation instead of snapping about it. The instructor could have done a risk and hazard analysis for the flight and seen the warning signs. Flying doesn’t favor fools, day or night, VFR or IFR, Single or multi-engine, Mountains or no Mountains. You get to pick two. Unfortunately, this instructor picked them all and quickly learned what happens when you laugh in the face of flying.
We want to avoid getting ourselves into these situations in the first place. So, how can we assess a flight’s potential risks and hazards? Pilots have a ton of safety tools at our disposal. Sayings, acronyms, and models, I don’t care which you choose to use, but at least use one of them.
Sayings: “Old, bold, but not old and bold,” “Pick Two: Day/Night, VFR/IFR, Single/Multi engine, Flat/Mountains,” “The only time you have too much fuel is when you’re on fire.”
Acronyms: PAVE, IMSAFE, DECIDE, TEAM, CARE, etc.
Models: 5x5 Risk matrix, SHELL model (Software, Hardware, Environment, Liveware, Liveware), Swiss Cheese Model (Failures align when holes in layers [latent and active errors] allow an accident), PEAR (People, Environment, Actions, Resources).
Pilots use these models to help predict and eliminate potential hazards and risks for each flight. Accidents occur when the risk level is high, and people don’t perceive hazards. Pilots fall victim to hidden hazards, and even the best pilots make mistakes. Human error accounts for almost 80% of all aviation accidents, so we must understand it and use the available tools to improve safety.
I live my life through the lens of avoiding “unnecessary risks.” That isn’t to say that risk is bad or that you should avoid it completely, but you should not accept unnecessary risks. Have you heard the saying, “More risk, more reward?” It’s not incorrect, but I want to avoid taking foolish risks. Here’s an example: I’m a multi-engine flight instructor, and we practice engine failures because pilots must understand what to do when one of their engines fails. I could shut the engine off shortly after take-off while we’re still climbing and give the pilot an actual engine failure during training. Alternatively, I could simulate it by reducing the engine’s power. Completely shutting the engine off is an example of “unnecessary risk” because most light twins lose 90% or more of their climb performance on a single engine. Unlike a simulated engine failure, you’ve eliminated your way out by adding more power to the other engine if things go poorly. Every time you shut the engine off, there’s a chance it won’t turn back on. So, if you shut an engine off in flight, ensure you have an airport where you can land and plenty of altitude to glide to a safe landing spot on a single engine. We accept risks, but let’s not put ourselves into tough situations more than necessary.
Now, what about you? How can you use this concept of not accepting any unnecessary risk to your life? You can make conscious decisions to avoid unnecessary risks, like filling up your gas tank before you see the needle hit E for empty. Or diversifying your investment portfolio or even just slowing down when you drive. We accept unnecessary risks when we seek marginal improvements that outweigh the danger they create. Don’t avoid risk completely, but take smart and educated risks rather than doing things on a whim. So, until next week, keep your wings flying and avoid accepting any unnecessary risk.
CFI, out.
Articles:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/us/chicago-midway-airport-near-miss-planes/index.html