1.
WARNING SIGNS IN PILOTS
What Scares the Experts
Some Initial Findings from AERI
Bill Rhodes
Copyright, Aerworthy Consulting, LLC
September 2009

2.
Airmanship Education and Research Initiative
(AERI)
AERI’s Sponsors
 Avemco Insurance Company
 Cirrus Aircraft Corporation
 Advanced Aviation Simulators, Inc.
 Independence Aviation, LLC.
 Research Boston Corp.
 University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
 University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

3.
An Informal Survey
■ … of a group of aviation enthusiasts
■ Facts
■ Predictions

4.
What is scary?

5.
A Telling Tale
■ I began asking around about
what scares experts
■ Patterns emerged (we’ll see
some soon)
■ Then, eerily, some individuals
I knew emerged
■ Even more eerily…

6.
The Experts: Hands-on Experience
■ Mature, highly experienced (OK, mostly
old) pilots
■ Insurance—Underwriters and Claims
■ Experienced CFI’s
■ Accident Investigators

7.
Expert Pilots--Observed
■ Experimental Design (Partial)
- Simulator work
- Confidence-inspiring reactions
■ Results
- More patterns
- Positive reactions
■ Limitations: Sample size

8.
What to do… or Who to be?
■ Doing is important
- Industry teaches what to do
- Often, pilots know what to do, and fail to do it
■ The sort of person one is matters a lot
- Common knowledge among GA insiders
■ But…
- Little or no theory of airmanship
- No convenient language
■ Working these issues…

9.
So, What Scares Experts?

10.
HTS1: Take risks
■ But doesn’t flying always involve risk?
■ A question of calibration
■ Risk-management
■ Self-Assessment

11.
HTS2: Know it all
■ Resist advice and instruction
- Hurry through instruction
- Don’t study; don’t listen
- Blame airplane, sim, instructor
■ Brag a lot
- Status Consciousness
- If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard
“pilot” and “ego” in the same sentence …

12.
HTS3: Plan on the
unrealistic/barely realistic
■ Lack of awareness of risk
■ Full (or beyond) exploitation of
airplane’s capabilities
■ Full (or beyond) exploitation of
own capabilities

13.
HTS4: Be in a hurry
■ Gotta get moving
■ Gotta get there
■ Gotta speed through training
■ Got no time for the real business of flying

14.
HTS5: Be extremely confident in
piloting skills
■ We need confidence, of course…
■ The trick seems to be in knowing how
confident to be
■ And in being realistic about ourselves and
what we attempt

15.
HTS6: Advance very quickly
■ Upgrade quickly to high-performance equipment
■ Race through instruction/ratings

16.
HTS7: Show off
■ Pilots and their airplanes really are doing
something remarkable
■ “Pushing it”

17.
HTS8: Ignore the Book(s) and the Mentors
■ Performance
■ Avionics and Accessories
■ Weather
■ Human factors

18.
“Scary Pilot” Syndrome
■ Lack of Skills? No!
■ Lack of Humility? YES!
■ CFI’s can easily work to develop skills
■ But a scary character is a challenge

19.
So…Who should a pilot try to be?
■ Well, not scary!
■ What are the qualities we trust?
■ Not sure yet, but looks like:
- Self-Knowledge
- Self-Mastery
- Caring about what’s really important
- Giving aviation the time and devotion it
(and families) deserve