Safety is not a matter isolated incidents but attitudes, behaviors and personality traits. Certain known clusters of behaviors coalesce into personalities that scare experts (and lead to accidents)

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