ASOG Article of the Month - May 2020
ASOG Author: Roderic Hutton; Image: Commons.wikimedia.org & unspash.com
As an ASO or anyone who participates in the Aerial Remote Sensing business, enhancing your airmanship and technical knowledge is an important part of your professional development. Roderic Hutton highlights a great way to do this by participating in pilot training.
First thing first
This article is Not about how you should learn to fly an airplane because it’s fun. I personally find it very enjoyable, as do many others, but there are already plenty of books, websites, and YouTube channels devoted to aviation as an avocation. It’s entirely possible that you have spent so much time in an airplane that the last thing you want to do with your free time is fly even more, and that is completely understandable.
But even if you have no desire to spend one extra hour of your life flying for “fun,” undergoing even a small amount of pilot training can significantly enhance your professional knowledge and value to your team, which is the focus of this article.
Why will pilot training enhance your value?
Short answer: Because you’ll be able to help your crew stay safe and legal.
Long answer: Consider a hypothetical scenario...
You’re a private pilot, and work as a sensor operator onboard a dual-piloted King Air, flying daily out of a quiet, towered airport. It’s the second-long flight of the day and everyone is feeling drained, but the show must go on. While conducting preflight checks at your station, you listen to the taxi clearance from the tower and note that its the same instructions you get for every flight. Based upon experience at this airport, you predict that the tower will issue takeoff clearance as soon as the aircraft is ready to go.
Later, as the aircraft approaches the end of the taxiway, the copilot’s tablet computer comes unstuck from the window and falls to the floor. As he picks it up, the tower issues the instruction to “line up and wait” on the active runway. The pilot repeats the instruction and taxis onto the runway, but instead of bringing the aircraft to a full stop on the runway centerline as he is supposed to, he begins advancing the throttles for an immediate takeoff.
Luckily you were paying attention, and make a quick, sharply worded command to the pilot over the intercom. The pilot recognizes the error, brings the throttles back, immediately applies the brakes, and nobody is the wiser.
You have just saved the pilots from a serious infraction, but more importantly, your crew and the pilot of a Cessna 172 crossing the runway on the intersecting taxiway are all going home to their families tonight.
Three Factors
In this story, there are three main factors leading to a potential accident. Fatigue diminished everyone’s alertness, distraction compromised the co-pilot, and anticipation of a clearance trumped the pilot’s ability to recognize the actual instruction. Its these simple lapses of awareness that good pilots fear, because they can happen to anyone, and carry grave consequences. Events such as catastrophic engine failures in commercial operations are extremely rare. The same cannot be said for miscommunication over the radio, which has the potential to be equally deadly.
If this seems implausible, consider that a similar miscommunication about takeoff clearance resulted in the deadliest aviation accident in history, when two 747’s collided on the runway in Tenerife resulting in 583 fatalities. If it could happen to the three-person KLM flight crew with a combined experience of 38,000 flight hours, it could happen to you.
In the Defense Against Mistakes
In our fictional story, an experienced sensor operator with no pilot training could have saved the day, but a trained pilot is more likely to catch this kind of mistake, and countless similar ones that have ended careers and lives in the past.
In aviation it is understood that making mistakes is part of the human condition. Every pilot has made, and will continue to make mistakes, no matter how much training and experience he has. One way to minimize the frequency and magnitude of mistakes is to present every situation to multiple observers and decision-makers. Pilot training makes you that second or third decision maker in the line of defense against mistakes. Leveraging the combined situational awareness of a team is the goal of Crew Resource Management, or CRM. This topic merits its own article, but for readers who are not familiar with CRM, it is a methodology for using all available resources to make operations as safe as possible. You should always consider yourself a resource in the furtherance of safety.
Pilots who practice CRM will value extra sets of eyes and ears. The more informed those eyes and ears, the more valuable. In earning a primary-level license like a Private Pilot certificate, you will be required to learn the basic laws of aviation that apply to all civil operations. You will learn about weather hazards, how to use navigation systems, and how to communicate with all echelons of air traffic control.
Just as importantly, you will encounter unfamiliar situations and make mistakes. Perhaps the sensor operator from the story made the same mistake as the pilot during his training and would have taken off without a clearance if not for quick action from his flight instructor. These kinds of experiences have the potential to make a lasting imprint on people and make them extra attentive to detail in all similar future situations.
Where do I Start!
By this point, I hope your thinking is along the lines of “Ok, you’ve convinced me, where do I start?!” First, know that you have a lot of going for you. Chances are you are already an experienced, technically oriented aviation professional, and basic airmanship skills as well as the technical knowledge will probably come easily.
Common subject areas that new students struggle with include situational awareness and radio communication. You probably already possess developed skills in one or both of these disciplines and are way ahead of the curve.
Your next step is to research flight schools, get your medical certificate, and knock out the written test. There is a lot to unpack in these three tasks, so in a future installment I will go into depth with all of them, including choosing a school, preparation for training, funding your training, and more. Stay tuned!
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