Hazard and Risk for the Remote Pilot (part 2)

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Hazard and Risk for the Remote Pilot (part 1)

For example, pilots of helicopter emergency services (EMS) have been known (more than other groups) to make flight decisions that add significant weight to the patient’s welfare. These pilots add weight to the intangible factors (the patient in this case) and fail to appropriately quantify actual hazards, such as fatigue or weather, when making flight decisions. The single pilot who has no other crew member for consultation must wrestle with intangible factors that draw one into a hazardous position.

Therefore, he or she has a greater vulnerability than a full crew. So I’ll touch back on the EMS thing just for a minute. I did it for five years, and I can tell you fatigue comes out the most as you’ve worked a week flying, and you’re out flying at night, and you’re using night-vision goggles, and I can just tell you, fatigue is when you really start noticing how it affects everything that you do. So you have to have risk assessment. You have to be thinking of these things. When you know you’re tired, you have to make a decision again, do I go, or do I not go? And if I am going to go, I’m going to have to be very, very careful.

And I just said in the presentation, the EMS pilots are bad about putting the pressure on themselves or letting outside/external pressures from other places kind of overtake them. One of the best ways single pilots can mitigate risk is to use the IMSAFE checklist to determine physical and mental readiness for flying:

Illness – Am I sick? Illness is an obvious pilot risk.

Medication – Am I taking any medicines that might affect my judgement or make me drowsy? Stress – Am I under psychological pressure from the job? Do I have money, health, or family problems? Stress causes concentration and performance problems. While the regulations list medical conditions that require grounding, stress is not among them. The pilot should consider the effects of stress on performance.

Alcohol – Have I been drinking within 8 hours? Within 24 hours? As little as one ounce of liquor, one bottle of beer, or four ounces of wine can impair flying skills. Alcohol also renders a pilot more susceptible to disorientation and hypoxia.

Fatigue – Am I tired and not adequately rested? Fatigue continues to be the one most insidious hazard to flight safety. As it might not be apparent to a pilot until serious errors are made.

Emotion – Am I emotionally upset? The PAVE Checklist. Another way to mitigate risk is to perceive hazards.

Hazard and Risk for the Remote Pilot (part 1)

By incorporating the PAVE checklist into preflight planning, the pilot divides the risk of flight into four categories: Pilot-in-command (PIC) Aircraft V EnVironment, and External pressures (PAVE) which form part of a pilot’s decision-making process. With the PAVE checklist, pilots have a simple way to remember each category to examine for risk prior to each flight.

Once a pilot identifies the risks of a flight, he or she needs to decide whether the risk, or combination of risk, can be managed safely and successfully. If not, make the decision to cancel the flight. If the pilot decides to continue with the flight, he or she should develop strategies to mitigate the risk.

One way a pilot can control the risk is to set personal minimums for items in each risk category. These are limits unique to that individual pilot’s current level of experience and proficiency.

P = Pilot-in-Command (PIC). The pilot is one of risk factors in a flight. The pilot must ask, “Am I ready for this flight?” in terms of experience, recency, currency, physical, and emotional condition. The IMSAFE checklist provides the answers.

A = Aircraft. What limitations will the aircraft impose upon the trip? Ask the following questions. Is this the right aircraft for the flight? Am I familiar with and current in this aircraft? Can this aircraft carry the planned load?

V = EnVironment Weather. Weather is a major environmental consideration. Earlier I suggested pilots set their own personal minimums, especially when it comes to weather. As pilots evaluate the weather for a particular flight, they should consider the following: • What is the current ceiling and visibility? • Consider the possibility that the weather may be different than forecast. • Are there any thunderstorms present or forecast? • If there are clouds, is there any icing, current or forecast? • What is the temperature/dew point spread and the current temperature at altitude? • Terrain Evaluation of terrain is another important component of analyzing the flight environment. • Airspace. Check the airspace and any temporary flight restrictions (TFRs). We talked about those earlier in this course of training.

E = External Pressures External pressures are influences external to the flight that create a sense of pressure to complete a flight -- often at the expense of safety. Factors that can be external pressures include the following: • The desire to demonstrate pilot qualifications. • The desire to impress someone. (Probably the two most dangerous words in aviation are “Watch this!”) As pilots, we’ve all learned this from the very beginning.

Hazard and Risk for the Remote Pilot (part 1)

 The pilot’s general goal-completion orientation. • Emotional pressure associated with acknowledging that skill and experience levels may be lower than a pilot would like them to be. Pride can be a powerful external factor! Management of external pressure is the single most important key to risk management because it is the one risk-factor category that can cause a pilot to ignore all the other risk factors. The use of personal standard operating procedures (SOPs) is one way to manage external pressures. The goal is to supply a release for the external pressures of a flight.

I want to go back and touch on weather just a little bit. Weather is a big one. And, again, remote pilot, private pilot, all the way across the board, weather is one of the hardest things to learn. It’s one of the biggest factors when we go fly, whether we’re going to have a safe flight or not. So I want to cover some of these things.

What are the current ceiling and visibility. If you have low clouds and low visibility, that’s bad news. You don’t want to fly with low clouds and low visibility. You want to have plenty of visibility, obviously. Consider the possibility that the weather may be different than forecast. This I want to tell you happens all the time. A forecast is a forecast, okay? You can’t trust it. You can use it as kind of a guide, but so many times the weather does not do what is forecasted.

So you’ve got to keep that in mind. And are there any thunderstorms present or forecasted? You don’t want to be out flying in your small aircraft anywhere near a thunderstorm. We don’t in helicopters. Why would you want to with a small aircraft? Are there any clouds? Any icing, current or forecast? Temperature dew-point spread in the current temperature at altitude? That temperature dew-point spread, if they’re close that means fog (good possibility of fog coming), so you really have to watch it when your temperature and dew point is close together.

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