It’s impossible to deny the importance of risk management in maintaining safe flight operations. Accident data consistently show the root cause of some 75 percent of general aviation’s fatal accidents is the pilot’s poor or non-existent risk-management skills. Whether they were never properly trained to consider the consequences of their decisions, didn’t understand those consequences or minimized their importance, we’ll never know. But we do know that a large proportion of them could have been prevented if the accident pilots had performed even minimal analysis of the risks presented by their proposed flight.
Pilots need to understand risk management principles and be able to apply them before and during flights. A flight-risk assessment tool (FRAT) can streamline this process, but it shouldn’t be used mechanically. In addition, using a “scoring” or numerical risk rating to make a “go/no-go” decision is less effective and desirable than intelligently identifying, assessing and mitigating identified risks so that the mission can be completed.
