You can imagine our deep sense of grief when occasionally we’d return to a city on our ground-school circuit and someone would say, “Did you hear about Bill?” “No,” we’d say, “what happened to Bill?” They would then explain the aircraft crash that had killed Bill. It happened all too often. We began to realize the things that were killing these learning pilots were things the FAA was not asking on the knowledge tests.
Why Pilots Must Demonstrate Risk Management
Key Takeaways:
- Initially, FAA pilot knowledge tests were criticized for focusing on irrelevant trivia and secret questions, neglecting crucial real-world risk management skills that contributed to pilot fatalities.
- An Aviation Rule-making Committee (ARC) and subsequent working group fostered a nine-year period of collaboration, transforming an adversarial relationship between the FAA and the aviation community into one of mutual respect.
- This collaboration led to the development of comprehensive Airman Certification Standards (ACS), which now require pilots to demonstrate the ability to identify and mitigate risks during certification, addressing a primary cause of fatalities.
- A key regret remains the FAA's decision not to return test questions to the public domain, hindering valuable input from the aviation community and transparency.
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