Everything we do in life carries risk. An undesired outcome often is influenced by factors we can’t control—someone running a stop sign, for example, or a perfectly good engine deciding to fail. But many other risks of a specific activity can be anticipated. It’s why we wear a helmet when riding a bicycle, or earn our instrument rating if we regularly fly an airplane beyond the traffic pattern. Serving as a pilot in command offers many ways to increase our risks, but it also brings opportunities to mitigate them.
Pilots do that to some extent on every flight. We don’t always do all things we can do, and we don’t always do those things well. But history gives us ample evidence of how we can become a statistic. Maybe by always paying attention to some of the most frequent factors appearing in accident reports, we can avoid having to complete one? Put another way, by understanding what others have done wrong, or failed to do at all, we can incorporate that knowledge in our planning and our flying. With it, we can mitigate a lot of the risks inherent in aviation. To find out which risks and factors we need to focus on the most, we dove into the AOPA Air Safety Institute’s most recent annual report on general aviation safety, its 27th Joseph T. Nall Report, for the latest statistics.
