"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.