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Sky Kings: Waiting for the Perfect Flight

Gemini Sparkle

Key Takeaways:

  • Even experienced pilots like the author make numerous "little mistakes" during flights, especially when rusty, but their expertise lies in effectively catching and correcting these errors before they escalate into serious problems.
  • Mistakes are categorized into skill, procedural, and critically, "situational mistakes," which involve putting oneself into risky situations due to a lack of knowledge and are often the most dangerous for novices.
  • Effective crew resource management is crucial for trapping errors, and true expertise is demonstrated not by perfection, but by the awareness of imperfections and the ability to learn and recover from mistakes.
  • The upcoming FAA Airman Certification Standards (ACS) aim to improve pilot training by focusing on the knowledge required to identify and mitigate these dangerous situational risks.
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Maybe, someday, at the end of a flight I will be able to say, “My performance as a pilot was perfect on that flight. I didn’t make a single mistake.” So far I have never come close. My performance (and John’s) on a recent flight is a great example. It was time for us to fly just to keep current. We hadn’t been able to fly our old Falcon 10 for nearly a month. That’s a long time for us, because things move fast in that airplane and we get rusty pretty quickly.

We decided on a flight from our San Diego home base at Montgomery Field to San Luis Obispo in central California. The Falcon 10 requires two pilots, so this would be a proficiency flight for both of us and a chance to hone our crew coordination. I would be captain on this leg and John would be copilot.

Martha King

Martha King and John King take turns writing Sky Kings. They have shared flying and teaching aviation for more than 50 years.

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