Personal Minimums

Perhaps its my airline background, or perhaps Im just arrogant. But I would never think of planning an IFR flight unless I felt proficient enough to fly any reasonable approach all the way to published minimums. Sure, something might happen on the day of the flight or even on the way that might cause me to increase the margins a bit-and recognizing and reacting to that is a good thing-but planning to fly and simply excusing a lack of proficiency by increasing minimums seems to miss the point.

Frank Bowlin

Saturday, July 07, 2018 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

The article critiques the common advice for pilots to set higher personal minimums, arguing it creates a dangerous precedent by excusing a lack of proficiency.
Instead of increasing minimums due to deficiencies, the author advocates for pilots to focus on maintaining a high level of proficiency to confidently fly to published minimums.
Drawing from airline experience, the author emphasizes the importance of continuous training to be capable of flying to published minimums, even if rarely required in practice.

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Recently I took recurrent training as an insurance requirement—a good thing, for sure. As part of the pre-course review and studying, they sent me some FAA material about developing personal minimums At first glance, this seems like a prudent thing to do, and it suggests raising minimums to which you’ll fly based on recency of experience, winds, time of day, runway length, IMSAFE or PAVE considerations, and the like.

The day you took your instrument checkride, your minimums were the ones published on the chart, right? Can you imagine taking off the hood at 500 to go on an ILS during your checkride, and telling the examiner that you didn’t feel comfortable going any lower?