Top Ten Tips for Managing Risk

These aren’t pilot secrets, but if your preflight planning tells you some of the risks you’re facing are too great, consider this advice to help mitigate them.

Joseph E. (Jeb) Burnside

Wednesday, July 03, 2024 at 09:14 AM ET

Verified

MVFR turning to IFR is serious business, so learning to read a weather report and understanding trends is critical for pilot safety. [Credit: FLYING Archive]

Key Takeaways:

General aviation risk management focuses on three key areas: weather, aircraft suitability, and pilot capability, each requiring specific mitigation strategies.
Weather risks can be managed by thorough preflight briefings, adjusting flight timing, rerouting around adverse conditions, and changing altitude.
Aircraft-related risk mitigation emphasizes ensuring sufficient fuel, utilizing faster aircraft for flexibility and weather avoidance, and flying at higher altitudes for increased safety margins and efficiency.
Pilot responsibility involves honest self-assessment of physical condition and skill proficiency, alongside flexible and imaginative decision-making to adapt to evolving flight conditions.

See a mistake? Contact us.

Everyone talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.” Stop me if you’ve heard that before.

The same could be said about managing the risk of general aviation. We—both FLYING and the industry as a whole—spend a lot of time preaching to pilots about the mechanics of understanding weather forecasts, determining if the aircraft is capable, and making honest evaluations of our own performance in considering how and when to conduct a flight. But once we identify the need to mitigate a risk, we sometimes have little space left over to describe the tools we can use.