Risk And Consequences

One of the first and most obvious choices we make when using a personal airplane is routing. We want to get from Point A to Point B, usually by the shortest, most direct route. So far, so good. What if that route increases the consequences of the risk in question, namely that our sole powerplant will fail at the worst possible time? Maybe change the route?

Joseph E. (Jeb) Burnside

Tuesday, March 07, 2017 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Aviation risk management should prioritize understanding and mitigating the *consequences* of potential failures, as these significantly increase with challenging flight conditions (e.g., night, IMC, mountainous terrain), even if the likelihood of the failure itself remains constant.
To manage these elevated consequences, pilots can employ strategies such as adjusting flight routing to avoid hazardous areas, shifting departure times to more favorable conditions, and utilizing aircraft with appropriate equipment and capabilities for the planned flight.

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Consider a route I’ve flown several times before: from the Washington, D.C., area to Asheville, N.C. Back before GPS, you eventually got on V222 at Lynchburg, Va., and motored off to the southwest. The highest minimum en route altitude (MEA) is/was 6000 feet, and flying it in good visual conditions (VMC) highlights why: This is some of the highest, most rugged terrain east of the Mississippi River.

Flying that route is a nothingburger in good-day VMC, even in a basic single. The engine is no more likely to quit over mountains than anyplace else, and engine failures always are problematic when flying a single. But what if we changed the flight’s conditions to, say, bumpy night IMC in that same basic single? Suddenly, that nothingburger got spicy.