Personal Minimums?

We typically dont recommend establishing hard weather or runway minimums. Why refuse to fly an ILS to 200 and a half if the tops are at 500?

Editorial Staff

Friday, September 25, 2015 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Rigid "hard" personal minimums are generally discouraged as flight decisions should be flexible and consider a host of unquantifiable factors like personal well-being and recent experience.
A Flight Risk Assessment Tool (FRAT) is recommended to objectively evaluate flight risks by systematically tallying positive and negative factors for a proposed flight.
It's crucial to ensure positive factors outweigh negative ones; if they don't, either rearrange the flight circumstances or cancel the flight to maintain safety.

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We typically don’t recommend establishing hard weather or runway minimums. Why refuse to fly an ILS to 200 and a half if the tops are at 500?

Personal minimums are made to be broken. And the decision to engage in any specific operation should be based on a host of factors, many of which an objective standard can’t measure. How you’re feeling, for example, or how long it’s been since you did a max-performance landing in a stiff crosswind..

Even if we don’t have a formal set of personal minimums, it makes sense to count up how many strikes there are against making a successful flight. The FAA teaches this by advocating use of a flight risk assessment tool, or FRAT.

The trick is adding up the pluses and minuses presented by the proposed flight’s circumstances. You definitely should have more pluses than minuses. When you don’t, rearrange things until you do, or cancel the flight.