About Good Pilots and Bad Pilots

Jose wrote:

An example of one of my errors was before I got my IFR ticket, I
decided to
launch on a forecast of broken 4000 foot ceilings and tops at 6000.
Forecast was to improve by the time I got to my destination. I did
flight
following at 8000 so I could be VFR over the top and be in the clear
smooth
air. You can guess what happened. Forecast was a bust.


Where was the error? If you had outs the whole way and didn't get
yourself up a (figurative) box canyon, you were fine. You were not
"Caught VFR on top", since VFR fields were in range. Needing to divert
is not a sign of error.

You were more vulnerable, as the fan could have quit leaving you to
descend through cloud. But you have a similar vulnerability flying over
water. Flying is risky; we accept the risk for the benefit.

Does the above make me a bad pilot for...


In my book, being a bad (or good) pilot requires a consistant pattern of
bad (or good) decisions. A single instance does not have predicitive
value.

Do you mean predictive value? If that is the case, then you really
can't predict much based on a pilots style or behavior. I've know lots
of pilots who are very risk oriented and have never had an accident or
incident and I know a few who are very conservative and safety conscious
who have. I stand by my earlier assertion that it is results that
count, not intent, style, good living, whatever.

Matt

Hi Gene;
I've discovered through my career that I do most of my flight safety
"thinking" in between flights where I have a tendency toward self evaluation
on what I did and what I could have done to make the flight better. Doing
this sort of put me in a constant state of "awareness" about my flying in
general and resulted in my making those small adjustmants and improvements
that are necessary to longivity in the business.
I've always been convinced that it's the pilots who "think" about what
they're doing all the time, whether in flight or on the ground between
flights who have the best chance at a higher level of flight safety. Pilots
who put their mind away with the airplane in the hangar don't fare as well
in the long run.
I've had some of those "bad pilot moments" myself. :-)
Dudley

"Gene Seibel" wrote in message
oups.com...
Very good post. I'm one of those GA guys that's had my "bad pilot"
moments - a Tri-Pacer on its back twice and out of fuel once. I have
done my best of learn from my mistakes and avoid them in the future. As
I get older that has become both easier and harder. Sometimes I can
recognize a chain of bad events beginning to form and put a stop to it.
Other times something will pop up suddenly and I'll kick myself for
days about how I reacted. I've survived 29 years and 2700 hours, but
it'll take just as much work and attention to survive my next flight as
it did the first one.
--
Gene Seibel
Tales of Flight - http://pad39a.com/gene/tales.html
Because I fly, I envy no one.

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 18:25:54 GMT, Matt Whiting wrote:

A Lieberman wrote:
On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 13:56:11 GMT, Jose wrote:


There is no excuse for most pilot error. But there are reasons.


I'd have to disagree with the first sentence. Making a decision based on
facts known at the time of launch can substantially change after the wheels
go up.

An example of one of my errors was before I got my IFR ticket, I decided to
launch on a forecast of broken 4000 foot ceilings and tops at 6000.
Forecast was to improve by the time I got to my destination. I did flight
following at 8000 so I could be VFR over the top and be in the clear smooth
air. You can guess what happened. Forecast was a bust.

Did I make an error on launch. Hardly. VFR conditions predicted. By the
time I got to the destination, field was IFR with 800 foot ceilings. End
result, no biggie, 'fess up to center, went to another field that had VFR.

You absolutely made an error. You launched based only one a weather
forecast (which we all know are inherently inaccurate) and with no good
plan B. What if there had been no VFR weather within your fuel range?
These are exactly the bad pilot decisions that we are talking about.

While I didn't state it in my original post, this forecast was just before
wheels up. I got a full briefing one hour before departure.

Conditions were VFR for the first hour of my flight, VFR overcast for the
remainder of the flight. (ceilings were to be VFR, and I elected over the
top)

So, when going that kind of distance, I don't have a choice but to go on
forecast. So, where is my error? Conditions were VFR.

Does the above make me a bad pilot for getting caught VFR on top. I made a
launch decision based on the best information at hand. If you make a
judgment on the surface, one would think how could a pilot get stuck on
top. Things happen. To make a blanket statement there is no excuse for
most pilot errors is wrong.

Not having a plan B (and even a plan C if the conditions are marginal)
is a sign of a bad pilot.

What's there to plan if I was to expecting to encounter VFR conditions
other then headwind conditions? It was severe clear on departure and the
forecast was for scattered clouds on arrival.

Allen

"Dudley Henriques" wrote in message
link.net...
Hi Gene;
I've discovered through my career that I do most of my flight safety
"thinking" in between flights where I have a tendency toward self
evaluation on what I did and what I could have done to make the flight
better.


Sports psychologists will tell you that 80 percent of most activity is
mental and 20 percent physical. So practicing mentally is suggested, indeed
demanded, for high-performance athletes. There is every reason that it
should be practiced by pilots.

Your potential for superior performance is not just based on your skill at
the activity, but your mental attitude... in many very different categories.
So when I see this thread on "good pilots", what does that really mean? He
may be very skilful at extricating an aircraft from an unusual attitude at
400 AGL, but he doesn't keep a very good visual lookout. He may be able to
flight-plan accurately to the second, but he skips through the pre-flight.
He is real skilful at finding a runway in 200-1/2, so he takes chances and
flies VFR into IMC.

Or alternately, he knows every reg in the book, every word of the safety
seminar, but he still skids his turn-to-final, always lands in a crosswind
with side-force on the gear, and becomes a panicked passenger when the
engine fails.

I believe that very few of us are "good pilots". If the required *mental*
and physical skills of piloting were classified and scored honestly, most of
us would score well is some categories and poorly in others; some
*exceedingly* well in some and *very* poorly in others.

Some of us would be mediocre in all.

Only a very few would score highly in all categories, all of the time. The
NTSB is full of multi-thousand commercial "good pilots" who did a stupid
thing, such as this example of empty-tank selection for takeoff:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?e...09X01183&key=1

As a pilot, I can only pledge to try to improve those categories at which I
score poorly. Will I reach a "good-pilot" level of proficiency in them all?
I doubt it. It won't stop me from trying. Will I become a statistic before
reaching proficiency in every physical and mental category? Maybe. Maybe I
know enough about my shortcomings so that I avoid the situations which I am
apt to handle poorly. And maybe I pay special attention to those mental
skills which I know to be weak.

And maybe that is enough to cheat the statistician just a little bit, and
that is all that I can ask of myself.

Do you mean predictive value?

Yes.

If that is the case, then you really can't predict much based on a pilots style or behavior. I've know lots of pilots who are very risk oriented and have never had an accident or incident and I know a few who are very conservative and safety conscious who have. I stand by my earlier assertion that it is results that count, not intent, style, good living, whatever.

The race isn't alwasy to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but
that's the way to bet.

Jose
--
Money: what you need when you run out of brains.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

"Icebound" wrote in message
...

"Dudley Henriques" wrote in message
link.net...
Hi Gene;
I've discovered through my career that I do most of my flight safety
"thinking" in between flights where I have a tendency toward self
evaluation on what I did and what I could have done to make the flight
better.


Sports psychologists will tell you that 80 percent of most activity is
mental and 20 percent physical. So practicing mentally is suggested,
indeed demanded, for high-performance athletes. There is every reason
that it should be practiced by pilots.

Your potential for superior performance is not just based on your skill at
the activity, but your mental attitude... in many very different
categories. So when I see this thread on "good pilots", what does that
really mean? He may be very skilful at extricating an aircraft from an
unusual attitude at 400 AGL, but he doesn't keep a very good visual
lookout. He may be able to flight-plan accurately to the second, but he
skips through the pre-flight. He is real skilful at finding a runway in
200-1/2, so he takes chances and flies VFR into IMC.

Or alternately, he knows every reg in the book, every word of the safety
seminar, but he still skids his turn-to-final, always lands in a crosswind
with side-force on the gear, and becomes a panicked passenger when the
engine fails.

I believe that very few of us are "good pilots". If the required
*mental* and physical skills of piloting were classified and scored
honestly, most of us would score well is some categories and poorly in
others; some *exceedingly* well in some and *very* poorly in others.

Some of us would be mediocre in all.

Only a very few would score highly in all categories, all of the time.
The NTSB is full of multi-thousand commercial "good pilots" who did a
stupid thing, such as this example of empty-tank selection for takeoff:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?e...09X01183&key=1

As a pilot, I can only pledge to try to improve those categories at which
I score poorly. Will I reach a "good-pilot" level of proficiency in them
all? I doubt it. It won't stop me from trying. Will I become a statistic
before reaching proficiency in every physical and mental category? Maybe.
Maybe I know enough about my shortcomings so that I avoid the situations
which I am apt to handle poorly. And maybe I pay special attention to
those mental skills which I know to be weak.

And maybe that is enough to cheat the statistician just a little bit, and
that is all that I can ask of myself.

From my first post;

"The truth is that at any given moment in time, a pilot can be either a good
pilot or a bad one. The trick is to constantly be leaning heavily on the
good" side. "

......and that, as you have so correctly stated, is all we can do, and it's
in doing this to the best of our ability that keeps us in the game :-)

Dudley Henriques

"Dudley Henriques" wrote in message

I've always been convinced that it's the pilots who "think" about what
they're doing.... who have the best chance at a higher level of flight
safety.

I agree. Almost 40 years ago now, a long passed fellow named George Day
started my commercial certificate training with a very short flight wherein
he asked me to demonstrate a left bank.....right bank....pitch up......
pitch down........ok, let's go back and land.

That's good, he said after we shut down. Now, everything else you need to
know and do to fly professionally is mental. Thinking is what seperates the
professionals from the amateurs. Get the right attitude to start, and keep
it right, and you'll be fine. He then handed me a book called "Song of the
Sky", by Guy Murchie, and told me to come back next week. [the book dates
from the early fifties, and may be overly sentimentalized for today's
tastes, but is still worth the read, in my view, if you can find it.]

I have subsequently flown 22 years professionally without a catastrophic
failure of anything, without ever having to declare an emergency. I am
convinced that George, although a world-class curmudgeon, had it right about
thinking and professionalism. His advice, along with a very healthy
allotment of good luck, got me through.

John Gaquin

A Lieberman wrote:
On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 18:25:54 GMT, Matt Whiting wrote:


A Lieberman wrote:

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 13:56:11 GMT, Jose wrote:



There is no excuse for most pilot error. But there are reasons.


I'd have to disagree with the first sentence. Making a decision based on
facts known at the time of launch can substantially change after the wheels
go up.

An example of one of my errors was before I got my IFR ticket, I decided to
launch on a forecast of broken 4000 foot ceilings and tops at 6000.
Forecast was to improve by the time I got to my destination. I did flight
following at 8000 so I could be VFR over the top and be in the clear smooth
air. You can guess what happened. Forecast was a bust.

Did I make an error on launch. Hardly. VFR conditions predicted. By the
time I got to the destination, field was IFR with 800 foot ceilings. End
result, no biggie, 'fess up to center, went to another field that had VFR.

You absolutely made an error. You launched based only one a weather
forecast (which we all know are inherently inaccurate) and with no good
plan B. What if there had been no VFR weather within your fuel range?
These are exactly the bad pilot decisions that we are talking about.


While I didn't state it in my original post, this forecast was just before
wheels up. I got a full briefing one hour before departure.

Conditions were VFR for the first hour of my flight, VFR overcast for the
remainder of the flight. (ceilings were to be VFR, and I elected over the
top)

So, when going that kind of distance, I don't have a choice but to go on
forecast. So, where is my error? Conditions were VFR.

You continued on once you encountered weather worse than forecast. This
is one of the leading causes of VFR flight fatalities. Keep in mind
that a flight plan is just that, a plan. I rarely execute a flight
exactly as I planned it. Most flights are very dynamic. Weather
changes. The airplane changes. The pilot may change (some days I just
don't feel 100%). You have to constantly evaluate and adjust to these
changes. Simply flying on and saying "bummer the forecast isn't
correct" is bad piloting.


Does the above make me a bad pilot for getting caught VFR on top. I made a
launch decision based on the best information at hand. If you make a
judgment on the surface, one would think how could a pilot get stuck on
top. Things happen. To make a blanket statement there is no excuse for
most pilot errors is wrong.

Not having a plan B (and even a plan C if the conditions are marginal)
is a sign of a bad pilot.


What's there to plan if I was to expecting to encounter VFR conditions
other then headwind conditions? It was severe clear on departure and the
forecast was for scattered clouds on arrival.

You have alternates in mind that are still VFR and use them if needed.
Flying on top of a solid overcast into weather that is by your own
admission worse than forecast (and you have no way of knowing how much
worse it may get) without an instrument rating, isn't a very wise thing
to do.


Matt

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 00:41:03 GMT, Matt Whiting wrote:

You continued on once you encountered weather worse than forecast. This
is one of the leading causes of VFR flight fatalities. Keep in mind
that a flight plan is just that, a plan. I rarely execute a flight
exactly as I planned it. Most flights are very dynamic. Weather
changes. The airplane changes. The pilot may change (some days I just
don't feel 100%). You have to constantly evaluate and adjust to these
changes. Simply flying on and saying "bummer the forecast isn't
correct" is bad piloting.

I again still respectfully disagree. I am VMC on top. How would I know
that the weather is worsening BELOW the overcast??? I am plodding along,
dumb and happy, enjoying the view a couple thousand feet above the
overcast. Yes, I could have been checking ATIS enroute, but I was still
very new to the XC process on this particular trip. I now use that tool
even now when I am IFR rated.

It was 50 miles out when I contacted center since overcast did not break
up. It was then I discovered that things went south. And I reacted
accordingly, as stated in my original post, fess up to center and find
another airport reporting VFR conditions. In fact, center suggested an
airport 100 miles away, but due to fuel considerations, I asked for the
closest airport so I didn't go into my self imposed one hour reserve (I was
already 3 1/2 hours in the air). My plane holds 58 gallons and burns 10
GPH.

You have alternates in mind that are still VFR and use them if needed.
Flying on top of a solid overcast into weather that is by your own
admission worse than forecast (and you have no way of knowing how much
worse it may get) without an instrument rating, isn't a very wise thing
to do.

Yes, I agree now (where I learned from my own experiences) that VFR over
the top is inheritantly risky without a IFR rating or WITHOUT an alternate.
It was center that got me what I needed for my alternate, so I used every
available tool out there.

I think the key point I am trying to make, is by looking at the surface of
my situation I described, I followed the VFR rules to a tee when the wheels
went up. But somebody not in my situation would say, how in the world can
someone get stuck over the top.

I would not consider the situation I encountered a bad piloting decision
with the information I had in hand from startup to 50 miles out.

If I would have pressed on to my destination without regard to the weather,
that would have been a bad piloting decision. I did not do that.

Allen

"John Gaquin" wrote in message
...

"Dudley Henriques" wrote in message

I've always been convinced that it's the pilots who "think" about what
they're doing.... who have the best chance at a higher level of flight
safety.

I agree. Almost 40 years ago now, a long passed fellow named George Day
started my commercial certificate training with a very short flight
wherein he asked me to demonstrate a left bank.....right bank....pitch
up...... pitch down........ok, let's go back and land.

That's good, he said after we shut down. Now, everything else you need to
know and do to fly professionally is mental. Thinking is what seperates
the professionals from the amateurs. Get the right attitude to start, and
keep it right, and you'll be fine. He then handed me a book called "Song
of the Sky", by Guy Murchie, and told me to come back next week. [the
book dates from the early fifties, and may be overly sentimentalized for
today's tastes, but is still worth the read, in my view, if you can find
it.]

I have subsequently flown 22 years professionally without a catastrophic
failure of anything, without ever having to declare an emergency. I am
convinced that George, although a world-class curmudgeon, had it right
about thinking and professionalism. His advice, along with a very healthy
allotment of good luck, got me through.

John Gaquin

I think those of us who had a George Day somewhere in our past are
fortunate.
My George Day was named Jim Shotwell. :-)
Dudley Henriques