Unusual Attitudes: The Matrix and Me

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

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** 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, particularly its matrices and acronyms, as overly academic and ineffective for teaching the essential common sense and judgment required in aviation.
He illustrates this point with an NTSB accident report of a pilot with severe judgment deficiencies and his own experience of a dead-stick landing due to fuel mismanagement, both highlighting how practical judgment errors can override formal risk assessment.
The article emphasizes that superior judgment is crucial for preventing dangerous situations, underscoring that truly superior pilots use good judgment to avoid needing superior skills in an emergency.

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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.