Unusual Attitudes: The Matrix and Me

Wednesday, September 18, 2013 at 11:37 PM ET

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** The FAA says charts like this one can help determine overall risk by comparing the likelihood of an event and the consequence of that event.**

Key Takeaways:

The author critiques the FAA's formal risk management training and tools (e.g., risk matrices and acronyms) as overly academic and insufficient for teaching common sense, which he believes is crucial for effectively assessing flight risks.
He illustrates this point by discussing a fatal accident where a pilot with significant health and skill issues crashed due to fuel mismanagement, questioning whether formal risk management tools would have been applied or effective for someone so deficient in judgment.
The author further supports his argument by recounting his own emergency landing after mismanaging a complex fuel system, admitting his decision was influenced by avoiding a reprimand rather than common sense, highlighting that good judgment is key to preventing situations requiring superior flying skills.

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A two-man team from Oklahoma City was in town last month with the “live” portion of the FAA’s designated pilot examiner renewal seminar. Half of the mandatory training happens online, but we still get eight hours in one of those hotel meeting rooms; if the air conditioning is cold enough and the coffee strong and plentiful enough, most examiners remain at least semi-conscious through endless PowerPoint slides — mostly paragraphs from handbooks or the regulations.

After too much time with obscure certification issues (a sport pilot with a powered parachute rating who wants to add weight shift control, for example), we got into Risk Management, Aeronautical Decision Making and Single-Pilot Resource Management. The FAA’s in love with this stuff, which I suspect is the product of “academics” who don’t fly airplanes — at least beyond the traffic pattern. Along with cute acronyms like PAVE and DECIDE and I’M SAFE, there’s a nifty matrix to consult before “risking” a flight. It’s kind of an aeronautical Ouija board.