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It Depends

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Key Takeaways:

  • Aviation risk assessment quizzes and scenarios often oversimplify situations, lacking crucial details needed for realistic decision-making.
  • Real-world flight decisions depend on numerous factors like specific weather conditions, terrain, aircraft readiness, and pilot familiarity, which are frequently omitted from basic scenarios.
  • These scenarios often fail to include practical pilot options for mitigating risk, such as filing IFR, waiting for improved conditions, or delaying the flight.
  • The author contends that the only realistic response to "What would you do?" in such simplified scenarios is "It depends," due to the complexity of actual flight planning.
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If you’re like me, you subscribe to several aviation-related information sources, of which there are many genres. Some of the ones I pay attention to include brief quizzes plus scenarios designed for us to self-assess how risky a proposed operation might be. An example might be asking if you would take off in a VFR-only airplane under a 2000-foot ceiling with five miles of visibility for a 100-nm flight. Maybe the content offers an option to select a minimum ceiling or visibility that meet your criteria. There’s no “correct” answer to these quizzes; your response supposedly relates to how much risk you’ll accept. If only it was that simple.

A lot of scenario-based training is like this: What would you do in this situation? What if the flight was planned at night, or if there was mountainous terrain along the route? What if…? To me, the only real response is, “It depends.”

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