Everyone talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it.” (Stop me if you’ve heard that before.) The same could be said about managing the risk of general aviation. We—both this magazine and the industry as a whole—spend a lot of time preaching to pilots about the mechanics of understanding weather forecasts, determining if the aircraft is capable, and making honest evaluations of our own performance in considering how and when to conduct a flight. But once we identify the need to mitigate a risk, we sometimes have little space left over to describe the tools we can use. Let’s try to fix that.
The typical GA pilot is exposed to three broad risks: weather, aircraft suitability and pilot capability. When the proposed flight raises complications in these three basic areas, we should consider what we can do to bring the increased risk down to acceptable levels while still accomplishing the mission.
