Unusual Attitudes: The Matrix and Me

Wednesday, September 18, 2013 at 11:37 PM ET

Verified

** The FAA says charts like this one can help determine overall risk by comparing the likelihood of an event and the consequence of that event.**

Key Takeaways:

The author critiques the FAA's formal risk management training and tools, such as risk matrices and acronyms, as overly academic, impractical, and a poor substitute for common sense in aviation decision-making.
Using an NTSB accident report and his own dead-stick landing experience, the author illustrates how a lack of common sense and sound judgment, rather than the absence of theoretical risk assessment, often leads to hazardous situations.
The article emphasizes that true aviation safety relies on superior pilot judgment and common sense to prevent dangerous situations, rather than relying on complex frameworks that may not be applied by those most in need of better decision-making.

See a mistake? Contact us.

A two-man team from Oklahoma City was in town last month with the “live” portion of the FAA’s designated pilot examiner renewal seminar. Half of the mandatory training happens online, but we still get eight hours in one of those hotel meeting rooms; if the air conditioning is cold enough and the coffee strong and plentiful enough, most examiners remain at least semi-conscious through endless PowerPoint slides — mostly paragraphs from handbooks or the regulations.

After too much time with obscure certification issues (a sport pilot with a powered parachute rating who wants to add weight shift control, for example), we got into Risk Management, Aeronautical Decision Making and Single-Pilot Resource Management. The FAA’s in love with this stuff, which I suspect is the product of “academics” who don’t fly airplanes — at least beyond the traffic pattern. Along with cute acronyms like PAVE and DECIDE and I’M SAFE, there’s a nifty matrix to consult before “risking” a flight. It’s kind of an aeronautical Ouija board.