 Hello everyone and welcome. Today's program here at Sun and Fun is given by people who are already household names and household friends, Martha and John King. They've done extraordinary things and have been honored internationally over and over for their work. Today's program, practical risk management, is something they are particularly well-qualified. Martha and John do something that we aviators need to constantly do in and that is they're constantly learning. They began their business in their bedroom years ago and now it's an 18,000 square foot facility in San Diego, California. Martha and John today continue to learn from their experiences, continue to fly and continue to share their wisdom with us. Please welcome Martha and John King. Hello fellow pilots. In case there's any confusion about this, I'm John King. And I'm Martha King and we are standing up. How many people in here are pilots? Well, what a surprise. You know, one of the highest compliments I can pay to someone is to observe that they're not normal and you folks aren't even close. And the reason I say that is as soon as you know someone is a pilot, you know a tremendous amount about them. Because you know that they've done something that during the period when we're learning to fly we all say to ourselves, you know, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do this. So you've been through this, you're right leg shakes, you sweat all the way down to your belt and beyond. You have to take a practical test and be evaluated. You have to take a knowledge test, you study over a long period of time. And so when you get a room full of pilots, you get a room full of people that you know have persisted through all of this. And we're goal-oriented people. You have to be hardwired, goal-oriented to make all of this happen. So I have to tell you it's a wonderful pleasure for Marth and I in honor to be standing here talking to you folks here today. John and I have spent, as Kathleen said, a lifetime in aviation and we have a real passion about airplanes and about pilots, people who fly. And we feel very privileged to be a part of your lives when you're learning to fly, when at that point in your lives it's probably the most important thing going on for you. And because we have a passion about people who fly, what we'd like to do this morning is to share with you some specific risk management tools that John and I have developed for our own use. Tools that hopefully will help you have fun, stress-free trips and make sure that your passengers will fly with you again. So right here in this room this morning we are going to reveal first of all the most important consideration in flying and secondly the most feared emergency in all of aviation. You know in aviation, generally aviation particularly for a number of years we've been telling what I call the big lie. And a big lie is one that if you tell it long enough and frequently enough everyone begins to believe it, including yourself. And a big lie in aviation is the most dangerous part of the trip was the drive to the airport. We drove out of an airport the other day and saw this sign as we left the airport and said be careful you're now entering the most dangerous part of your trip. That would be nice if that were true but that is not true because if you look at that on a per mile basis you're seven times more likely to be involved in a fatality per mile in a general aviation airplane than you are in a car. And you are 49 times more likely to be involved in a general aviation fatality than you would be in an airliner. In fact, general aviation airplanes fatality rate per miles on a par with motorcycles. So that's all probably something that we kind of know but the point is if we go around telling the big lie and we deny it I think the chances are we won't manage the risk as well as we should because if you deny the risk you're probably not going to do a good job of managing the risk. So it seems to us that the first step in managing the risk is to admit the risk and then you start identifying the risk and then you can manage them. Now the problem with risks in aviation is that they are sneaky. Very often when someone comes to grief in an airplane at just the instant before impact they are the most surprised people in the world because they did not see it coming. Because think about it do people go out and fly in conditions they know will kill them? No. They things change and they get caught by surprise. And people who manage risk professionally tell us that there are two circumstances that make it hard for people to manage risk and that's when you don't know the probability of it happening and you don't know the consequences of it. And people who don't know these things don't do a good job of managing risk. For instance if you want to play Russian roulette you could load one shell in a six shooter, stick it to your head and you know the chances are one out of six and you say well I'm either going to accept one out of six or I'm not going to accept one out of six and most of us would say I don't like the one out of six odds I'm not going to do that. But in aviation you go out and do something risky and you don't have a clue what the odds are. And you don't even know how serious it might become if something goes wrong. So the problem in aviation is we don't know exactly the risk we're facing and we're told when people don't know that they don't do a good job of managing the risk. But the truth is regardless of what the risks are the way it's working out for you is Dr. Phil would say how is it working out for you? And the way it's working out for us is not that good. If these risks are left unmanaged they are unacceptable. Now what I want to do is ask you a question and if the question is true for you what I would like you to do is hold your hand up, keep it up and look around the room. And then I'm going to ask you two questions one at a time here's the first question. If it's true for you hold your hand up keep it up and we'll look around the room together. How many people in here know someone personally that's been killed in an automobile? Put up your hand and hold it up if you will. And it comes out to probably almost half the room. Okay. Now while we're at it let me ask the second question and same deal. Hold your hand up, look around and keep it up. How many people in here know someone personally that's been killed in an airplane? And if you look at that there's more people in here that know someone personally that's been killed in a small airplane than in a car. Well everyone drives. Pilots are two-tenths of one percent of the population. We have three hundred million people in the United States, six hundred thousand pilots and we are two-tenths of one percent of the population. So think about about half the people in this room know someone who's been killed in a small airplane and that's two-tenths of one percent of the population. So our thought is if we leave these risks unmanaged they're not acceptable and as Dr. Phil would say how's it working out for you? Well it isn't working out all that well we can do better. The problem is that the way that we were taught risk management and general aviation and the way it's normally practiced is flawed and the reason I say it's flawed is this. If you look at the accident statistics they'll tell us that eighty-five percent of our accidents are caused by a failure in risk management not by physical malfunctions or problems with the aircraft. Eighty-five percent of our accidents are caused by a failure in risk management so of course what does most of our flight training focus on? Physical skill at flying the aircraft. Now clearly we have to have a certain level of physical skill but that's not adequate for what we're trying to accomplish. The problem is that we are not as an industry training people in good risk management practices. We do a pretty good job in flight training of exercising good risk management because if you take a look at the accident statistics for student training they're not too bad but when that student pilot gets their private certificate and goes out on their own the accident rate jumps by almost fifty percent. It goes from about five point eight accidents per hundred thousand hours in student training to eight point five five is for new private pilots. What that says to me is that flight instructors are managing the risk pretty well in what we would think would be a somewhat dangerous activity working with student pilots who don't have yet either the physical skills or the risk management training but that somehow they're not able or have not had the right training to be able to pass on their risk management abilities to their students and that's something as an industry that we need to work on. The way in general that risk management is taught and has been taught over the years is by telling stories, passing along rules, making up sayings, sayings for instance like the only time you can have too much fuel in an airplane is when you're on fire. The two most useless things in aviation are the what above you, altitude above you and the what behind you, the runway behind you. It's a lot better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than where in the air wishing that you were on the ground and these are great sayings. They're fun, they do teach us things but they're not enough. The problem is that they don't comprise a system and an adequate pattern of thinking. Now the way pilots as a rule become experienced is they go out and they get their pilot's license and they go out and try stuff and so you go out and expose yourself to risk either accidentally or on purpose in any event you do something and then you check afterwards and say well how did that come out and if you scared yourself you say I'm not going to do that anymore but if it didn't scare you you say well you know maybe that was okay and you put it in the acceptable category and you say well I could do that again and you may have just been lucky. It was just one trial and sometimes it takes more than one trial to find out how bad it could turn out. So you may have just been lucky but on the other hand if the risk is acceptable you keep on doing it and the more times you get away with it the more acceptable it becomes. So you just do stuff and evaluate it. Now if you do scare yourself you say to yourself whoa I'm not going to do that anymore and what you do is add that to the long list of things that you're not going to do anymore and a real experienced pilot has a real long list of things that they've tried and they said I'm not going to do that anymore. Now this is learning by experience but the problem is experience is a hard teacher because she gives you the test first and the lesson comes afterwards and many pilots and their passengers don't survive to get the lesson. So this is clearly not the way we should do this. So Martha and I are going to talk about an alternative to that but first of all I'd like to tell you and by the way the problem with doing it this way doesn't help you with something you haven't tried yet. You don't have it and either one of these categories are acceptable or unacceptable and we don't have a procedure to think about things that we haven't tried yet and haven't even anticipated yet. So the problem is it's reactive not proactive. What you're doing is trying something and reacting to it and seeing how it worked out and it's a risky process in doing it. So we need to be proactive about our risk management. Now we're going to give you some rules on risk management but first of all Martha and I have a story that changed everything about our flying. What we did is we had an accident and that's quotes how we became experienced because we got added to our long list of things we weren't going to do anymore. But it also changed our whole thinking about flying and from that moment on we just changed everything about our flying and how we managed the risk and you might say from that moment on we became born again pilots because we just changed everything about the way we did things in an airplane. So I want to tell you that story and then we'll talk about some lessons that we learned from that and how we go on from there. Now when Martha and I had our accident we were teaching two-day ground schools for living and what we did is we lived in San Diego, California and we went out to places like Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Fargo, North Dakota and Spokane, Washington. Every weekend we'd go out and teach a two-day ground school class and of course we're not going to go around talking about flying and ride the airlines so we flew our own airplane and during this time period at this moment we had a Cessna 210 with a Ray J turbocharger on it so it was a aftermarket turbo charge 210 and we would go out we'll say to Fargo, North Dakota on a Friday and get in the in the city Friday evening go over to the hotel and set up the classroom be all ready to go teach the class on Saturday and Sunday. On Monday morning we'd help the FAA give the knowledge test, in those days the FAA had to come and give the test and then Monday afternoon we'd head back to San Diego and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday we'd do all the things you have to do to run a small business you know I answer phone calls set up the next class and so on and so this was our routine we were getting a lot of flying because every weekend we'd go on about a thousand mile cross country trip in our airplane and back again so we were getting a lot of flying and this particular trip was out to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and so we took off and headed towards Sioux Falls and we had to make a fuel stop in La Janta, Colorado and to our credit when we were in La Janta, Colorado we got another weather briefing from a flight service station and was a very thorough weather briefing and what we learned is that the weather at Sioux Falls at about the time of our arrival which is right about sunset was supposed to be about three miles visibility in a thousand foot ceiling not really terrific clearly marginal VFR just barely VFR but we're instrument rated and there's no big deal for us we're doing a lot of flying we're very current and so we take off from La Janta, Colorado we get airborne we go above a cloud deck and we level off at about 11,500 feet and we cancel IFR and we're going VFR and we're on top of the clouds VFR and we're flying along heading over towards Sioux Falls we look over there and son of a gun the generator quit working on that airplane oh my goodness you know what we really ought to do is land and get that generator fixed but you know we got a late start it took us longer to fuel stop if we do that we're going to land after dark and it'll really be late and we're going to arrive in Sioux Falls really tired really late we have to set up the classroom here's what we'll do let's just turn off everything electrical and we're pretty good at holding a heading we'll just dead reckon for about three hours until we think we're in a vicinity of Sioux Falls South Dakota and then when we think we're in a vicinity of Sioux Falls South Dakota we'll turn on the electrical system call approach control and get approach to land at Sioux Falls so we do this we turn off everything electrical we take our time we hold our heading and we fly until we think we're in a vicinity of Sioux Falls we okay there it is we turn on the electrical system and what did we get absolutely nothing the battery was flat out completely dead oh holy mackerel here we are on top of an overcast no electrical system at all okay so here's what we'll do we'll use our pilots emergency authority to descend through the overcast because we do have a pilot induced emergency now and so we're going to descend through the overcast it's supposed to be a thousand foot ceiling and three miles visibility we'll find an uncontrolled airport that we had identified on the outspirts of Sioux Falls and get our airplane repaired and then we'll go teach the class while they're fixing the airplane everything will be all taken care of now there's only one real big hitch with that plan there are lots of antennas around Sioux Falls to go up to a thousand feet above ground level so here's what we'll do we don't want to descend into these antennas we'll take a turn to the north and and take a heading until we think we're about 40 miles north of Sioux Falls then we'll get ourselves down through the overcast and go back to Sioux Falls and find that uncontrolled airport so we go till we think we're about 40 miles north tops of the clouds are about 10,000 feet so we start down let ourselves into the clouds and just the instant we get in the clouds whap ice all over the airplane now let me ask you a question if you're in icing conditions and you do not have an electrical system what else do you not have? Pito heat so the airspeed indicator goes 90, 80, 70, 60 and you think this airplane is slowing up big time until it goes below zero and you know the suckers not backing up so now we have no airspeed indication and we said well you know we better put the landing gear down because we don't know what our airspeed is and it's a kind of help us keep control of the speed of the aircraft now we had been flying by dead reckoning for about three and a half hours now so we did not know exactly where we were and we did not know exactly how high the terrain was where we were and we had not had an altimeter setting for over three and a half hours so we didn't not know exactly what the barometric pressure was but I can tell you this we descended through that overcast picking up ice until we thought we were within 100 feet of the ground and never saw the ground oh my goodness what are we going to do and we put the power in climbed back through that overcast and picked up our second load of ice now we are on top of this overcast and I am scared to death I am shaking a couple times we reached over to try and pick up the microphone to find out what the weather was and realize no it's not gonna work you know Martha and I have a funny deal our deal is she flies one leg and I fly the next leg if I try and trust the controls when it's her turn to fly she breaks my arm I would have given anything for it to have been Martha's turn to fly I was just scared to death so Martha starts talking to me and she says John we've got to go back down and I said Martha I don't want to go back down we go back down there we're gonna hit something we'll hit a TV antenna a silo a tree who knows what we're gonna hit but we're gonna it's gonna end by our hitting something and at one point I said I've got it I've got it let's just find another airplane and we'll follow it to an airport she says John that's not gonna work and she says well we got to go back down I said Martha I don't want to and while we're having this conversation the Sun slowly sets below the horizon so Martha says to me well John would you rather do it now or in the dark I hate it when she thinks that way so we start down back through that overcast to pick up our third load of ice and once again we get down to the point we're with we're within we think we are 100 feet of the ground and do not see the ground and you can almost feel the things that must be going by you down there and eat antennas might be sticking up and I said Martha we got to go back up she says no John we have no choice we've done that we've got to go back down I can tell you at this point Martha's really getting on my nerves so we continue on down and we finally broke out just above the ground and trees are flashing by and we can see some cars and it's raining we can see some cars on a road over here country road with their lights on and I said that's it I'm gonna land on that road and Martha says we know no no there's power lines on that road we can't lay in there and I couldn't see the power lines and I said I don't care where we are we're landing right now and I just reached over and pulled the throttle off and it happened to be we were right over a cornfield and now what was going on there is that they had a freezing rain ice storm going on and they had about 18 inches of snow on the ground and about an inch and a half thick crust of ice on top of that snow so as soon as we we as soon as we pulled off the power it just became time to flare and the main wheels touched and we rolled on that inch and a half crust of ice for about 75 feet and then I began my all-time record short field landing because what happened it fell through that ice just stopped right there just went right up on its nose now if you're familiar with the Cessna 210 the landing gear retracts rearward and to make space for the landing gear the baggage department compartment is up on a shelf behind the pilots and so we had all of our baggage back there behind us and of course we were not intelligent enough to tie it down and secure it in any way so when we came to this abrupt stop all of our luggage came forward we had we had our personal luggage we had coursebooks for the class we had plotters and computers for about a hundred people we had tools and a toolbox and wrenches and rags and all of that stuff and so this next conversation takes place with our faces pressed up against the panel of the aircraft and Martha says to me John I'm okay I'm okay I hit my nose on the panel of the aircraft but I'm okay and and so I looked up and I saw there was a great big hole in the windshield of the aircraft and I said well the heck you hit your nose on a panel your head went through the windshield she's no no no I just hit my nose on the panel of the aircraft I'm okay and I reached over and I felt her back and it was blood all down her back and so I said to her you know you got something more serious than just hitting the your nose on the panel of the aircraft but at that moment you could hear the fuel running in the aircraft you actually here's things sizzling on the engine so I said to Martha you know why don't we carry on the rest of this conversation outside the aircraft but I said to her you know I've got all this luggage pressing me up against the panel of the aircraft and I can't reach the door handle could you reach your door handle and we'll go out your side and she says to me well I got all this luggage pressing me up against the panel the aircraft I can't reach the door handle either so it took me about 15 minutes to rearrange all this luggage so we could get out of the aircraft to where I could reach the door handle which was behind me and I opened the door and I get out in front of the airplane and out in front of the airplane is this long stream of junk wrenches rags tools all strung out in front of the aircraft and I thought I'll be darned somebody crashed here before we did and what had happened is the toolkit we had in the aircraft had come forward and beat Martha about the head and shoulders and gone like a shot out the front of the aircraft so that was all our stuff out in front of the aircraft and then I got on the right hand side of the aircraft and opened Martha's door and at that moment I realized for the first time in my life how incredibly stupid allegedly bright people can be because what had happened is that toolbox and hit her about the head and shoulders and sprayed Martha's blood over every inch of that aircraft I mean there was blood on the headliner on the front panel on the sidewalls of the aircraft every inch of that aircraft which is splattered with Martha's blood and I thought to myself you idiot you absolute idiot how dare you take such a tremendous risk with the most precious thing in the world all over the issue that you didn't want to stop and get that generator repaired and of course the first thing they did when they got the airplane out they took it apart put it on a truck and took it into a hangar and the very first thing they checked is to see what was wrong with the electrical system of the aircraft and what they discovered is a single wire had become detached from our generator and all we would have had to have done is land and have them reattach that single wire and we'd have been on our way safely because we didn't want to take the time to land and reattach that single wire we put everything in the world that was precious to us but risk and from that moment on we became born again pilots and changed everything about the way we fly as John says that was our own airplane we were very familiar with it proficient with it flying skill was not an issue in that accident the problem was risk management lack of we had none we were exercising none people call us actually after hey you did a pretty good job of that because our flying skill was great our risk management was lousy as a result of that accident and some other incidents that had happened before that some of which we're going to talk about here this morning but some of which were not because this is the FAA building we developed as I said earlier some risk management tools that we'd like to share with you and what we need to do is pilots is to conduct risk surveillance before and during a flight to actually look for risk the same way a mechanic looks for defects during an annual you take an airplane into a shop for an annual you probably fly it in to get to your favorite shop you deliver an airplane to the shop that as far as you know is working perfectly fine maybe one or two very minor things that you want them to look at but overall nothing wrong with it very flyable and so on so what's the first thing the mechanic does they pull out a checklist and they start surveilling that your aircraft looking for things that could be a problem we need to do the same thing as far as risk management is concerned so when you're doing your flight planning and before you take off you can use the paved checklist to pave your way to a safe flight and what the paved checklist does is it takes the risk factors of an upcoming flight and puts them into four risk factor categories the pilot the aircraft the environment or environment and external pressures and what you do is you look at the risk factors as they are in each one of those categories evaluate them and figure out how you're going to manage or mitigate them so for instance let's take a look at the risk factors for the pilot what you're thinking about here is am I current in this airplane am I current for instruments if I'm going to fly instruments and I up to trained current and regular to make this trip and another thing you want to think about is what is your physical condition as a pilot and the FA uses the I'm safe checklist do I have an illness am I taking some medication it would be a problem am I under particular stress how long has been since I've had alcohol how am I for fatigue and food you know a lot of people will work all day late in the evening after they've worked all day well without even having dinner set off on a cross-country trip well you're you're giving yourself a double problem your fatigue you haven't had any food what's your blood sugar are going to be like at the end of that trip so an emotion if you're mad at the world flying an airplane is probably not the way to work that out so you go through the I'm safe safe checklist you think about your own currency and whether you're ready for this flight and so those are the risk factors involved with the pilot the next thing we want to talk about is the risk factors involved with the aircraft and here we're saying is the aircraft capable of what you're asking it to do if you're flying at night time do all the lights work on it you're flying under instruments is the aircraft capable of flying the kind of instrument trip you wanted to fly is it capable of carrying the loads and so on and while you're thinking about loads you want to think about density altitude you know I think every pilot if you fly long enough eventually truly for the first time in their lives understands the concept of density altitude for me I fully understood the concept of density altitude after I flew on June 26 1974 around three in the afternoon at loon pine California and what that's where I learned about the concept of density altitude and it was back when Martha and I first started flying we had little Cherokee 140 and it had two seats in the front and two seats you could snap into the back if you didn't have luggage and it wasn't really a good four-place airplane they didn't want you to think of it as a four-place airplane so they called it a two plus two meaning you could have two pilots up front and snap in some seats for two in the back so we had another couple with us we're going from San Diego and for the first time in our lives we're going to go fly to Death Valley California so we're heading off in this what we think of as a four-place airplane with the other couple with us and as we're going along the trip towards Death Valley all the sudden the thought occurs to me you know what Death Valley is famous for being a remote place what if they don't have fuel there would we be able to go somewhere else I began to realize no we needed to have fuel at Death Valley or someplace before and I thought well we better not take that risk so on a very impromptu basis going up east of the Sierras and what they call the Owens Valley we picked the airport called Lone Pine and Lone Pines at about a 4,000 feet elevation and that is desert up there and we landed at Lone Pine with all four of us in the airplane and it was really hot I mean it was over a hundred degrees it was really hot and so we pull up to the pumps in this old codger comes out very slowly walking up to the airplane and as he got within airshot I said to him fill it up and he gave me a long slow look and he says you mean just fill it to those tabs there don't you sir and I said to him did I stutter I said fill it up and he says okay and so he fills up the airplane while we're in going to the bathroom and getting some drinks and we come out to the airplane and we get ready for a takeoff now you should know you're doing something wrong if when you get ready for a takeoff it draws a crowd I mean we had people all lined up in front of that hang or that building because they knew there was going to be one heck of a show and we didn't have a clue so we loaded up everybody into that airplane we went out to the end of the runway we put the throttle forward and the wheels just slowly started rolling we went the entire length of that runway and when we got to the other end I rotated because it seemed to be the thing to do and so help me that airplane staggered off the runway with a red stall warning light on and we flew with that light on around trees for the next five miles until we got that airplane to climb away I said to Martha I wonder how our passengers are doing I turned around and look back all you could see was four big silver dollars staring at us that couple never did fly with us again but on that afternoon on June 26th at three in the afternoon 1974 and lo and pie in California I for the first time in my life fully understood the concept of density altitude so when you're thinking about the risks associated with flying this airplane under these conditions one of the things you want to think about is density altitude the V in pay stands for the environment when you're doing your preflight planning you want to make sure you're aware of what environment you're going to be operating in and familiar with whatever you're going to need to do about it environment includes things like the airspace and the terrain most importantly of course we think about it as the weather our problem on this trip in the 210 was not that we didn't get a weather briefing we did the problem was among other things that we did not write the weather briefing down and take it with us in the aircraft and you know when you really get under stress in an airplane your IQ goes to negative numbers you can't remember your own name nonetheless what the weather was in some other place so these days when we fly we generally get our weather briefing on do that and print it out we may get a lot more than we really need for that particular trip but if we have a problem we've got a bunch of printed weather that we can look at and say okay where is some place that we could get to if we have electrical problem when we're IFR and if we're going to be flying IFR we have picked out some place okay if our destination is going to be fairly low or really marginal where else could we go if we have a problem that has decent ceiling and visibility that we could let down safely without an electrical system if we absolutely had to another thing to think about when you're thinking about the environment is it daytime or nighttime you know about 10% of GA flying takes place at daytime or nighttime about 50% of the accidents so nighttime is a tremendous risk factor that needs to be managed now you would think it shouldn't be such a big deal because the rules of aerodynamics are exactly the same at nighttime in fact the air can be smoother and the airplane flies better at nighttime but it makes a huge difference that you cannot see as well now Martha and I learned the importance of making sure you're ready for a nighttime trip very early on our flying our second airplane was a Comanche 250 and that Comanche 250 is the airplane that we flew to get around the country in a big sort of way and we had it set up so we could fly daytime and nighttime instruments and we were very proud of our ability to fly at nighttime and to get a lot of utility out of the aircraft and we had lights all over the aircraft it was very convenient to fly the airplane well it was during this era of our flying career that we took a trip to Hawaii and unfortunately we could not take our Comanche with us to Hawaii so we rented a little original Grumman what name of Grumman that original American Yankee and if you remember the original American Yankee was a cute little airplane the canopy slid backwards and you could fly even with the canopy open for a little bit really fun sporty airplane and we took it all the way down to the big island of Hawaii Island hopping on the way down and we got there much later than we thought we were going to because we had to go look and fly over everything on the way and so it was time to go back to the island of Oahu and Martha and I had promised Martha's mother that we would be back there that evening to attend a party she was going to have and we had to be there on pain of death and so we said well we we need to get back to Oahu but then we realized hold it wait a minute you know what it's going to happen it's going to get dark while we're flying in between the big island of Hawaii and Maui and so we said no sweat we fly at night all the time we live in Southern California we fly at night over the ocean we fly at night over the desert this is no sweat so we took off we headed out over the ocean headed towards Maui and sure enough just as predicted it started getting dark and it got darker and darker and darker now I don't know whether you've ever flown out over the ocean at nighttime but I can tell you this it gets darker than the inside of a cow it is really black and on as it began to get blacker and blacker only then did we realize the lights did not work in that we could not see anything I couldn't see whether we were up or down what I couldn't read the compass couldn't see the fuel couldn't see the radios didn't know what direction we're going and I was beginning to have real difficulty controlling the aircraft because I couldn't see the instruments and I've always considered myself a pretty good instrument pilot but I can tell you it's a whole heck of a lot easier when you can actually see the instruments so I said to Martha I said boy Martha we are in deep trouble here we can't tell whether it's up or down we can't see the compass we don't know where they're going there's mountains over there on the island of Maui and that's what we're headed towards I says we are in real trouble do something so Martha starts looking around for some kind of light and there was no light over the pilots because the canopy slid back and so way at the back of the back seat or the baggage compartment of that aircraft Martha found a light and she turned it on and says how is that and I said not good enough I still can't see the instruments so she got a white chart and held it up against that light and it reflected enough light on the panel of the aircraft that we could see and got where we were going and so we landed at Maui and to our credit we left the airplane there and went back that night on an airliner and so we learned that the important thing that we had overlooked is we were going to fly this airplane at night and had not even pre-flighted the lights in that aircraft to see if they work properly and amazingly enough whether or not you can see inside the aircraft properly is is a life-or-death matter at night time and so we learned from that lesson then is if you're gonna fly the airplane at night pre-flight the airplane for a night trip so that is one of your big risk factors associated with the environment you're flying in and depending on where you're flying treat that night flight really is an instrument flight because if you're out over the ocean or in the southwest part of the country out over the desert it really is an instrument flight the E&P stands for external pressures now what external pressures are is that they're not part of the flight itself but they're pressures that act on you and distort your judgment about the other risk factors that may exist on a flight they put pressure on you things like going to a family wedding a family reunion your high school reunion particularly important business meeting and one of the key things to proper risk management in general aviation is proactively managing those exterior those external pressures when you're planning the flight in the first place one of the things we like to do to try and minimize those pressures on us is we lie to people about when we're going to get to our destination we try to not have them meet us there because that puts pressure on and once you're in the airplane in flight it's hard to reach them and so we try to not have them meet us will rent either rent a car or call them after we land if they are going to meet us we can't talk them out of it then we'll tell them that we're going to be there about an hour after we really intend to so in case we have a problem mechanical fuel problem whatever we have time to land get it fixed and or call them and not have that kind of pressure on us if we're going for an afternoon flight in a helicopter 172 whatever we always throw in a little overnight bag that's got stuff for John's contacts any medicine that we need anything like that toothbrushes and so on just in case we get out somewhere don't like the weather have a mechanical problem we don't feel pressured to get home because how am I going to brush my teeth what am I going to do about my contacts so think about the how you're going to manage those pressures at the beginning of the trip the external pressures are the one risk factor that makes you ignore all of the others and and one way to know whether or not you're influenced by these external pressures if ever you feel like you're in a hurry and you need to hurry up to keep moving you got to realize that you're under these external pressures and that risk factors making you ignore all the other risk factors so you want to manage start really paying attention if you feel like you're in a rush or you're in a hurry that's the time to say hold it I am being pressured by this external pressure to go on another thing that causes external pressure is that we talked about earlier in the morning when we started talking about this we are all pilots you became a pilot because you're a goal-oriented person you're hardwired to finish what you start that's how you became a pilot and so that very hardwired nature that says we are going to complete what we start out to do is a risk factor in an airplane it's one of those external pressures that makes you continue or complete your trip when you shouldn't complete your trip so one of the things you need to actively think about is why am I pressing on here what is making me do that and one could be that you just set a goal you said we're going to go home tonight and have dinner and that goal is not worth dying for but you make it worth dying for if you don't realize what am I doing why am I continuing into these worsening weather conditions so the external pressures are the most important risk factor in flying and you can avoid those external pressures by doing something as simple as making sure you don't have someone waiting for you at the airport the pay of checklist works when you're planning the trip and is a part of the pre-flight before you go but once you get in the air what do you do then well you can use the care risk management attention scan to manage the risk then and here's what care stands for consequences alternatives reality and again external pressures because they're so important and here's how the care attention scan works we're used to controlling an aircraft where you're looking at the attitude indicator and you spoke out to the altimeter back to the attitude indicator out to the heading indicator back to the attitude indicator and what you look at and how often depends on what phase of flight you're in with the care risk management attention scan physical control of the airplane is always the center of it and you spoke out as you need to to think about the consequences the alternatives the reality and the external pressures and you keep going through this as you go along in the flight to help manage risk so one of the things that happens as soon as you get in an airplane all of these things you talked about in the pave checklist the risk factors all start changing because flying is dynamic it's flying an airplane or in changing weather over changing terrain while the day gets later and the pilot gets more fatigued so all of the things you thought about do start changing as you get in the air so what you want to do is think about the changes that are taking place when you're flying this airplane and think about the consequences of those changes so the C stands for consequences you want to think through the consequences of those changes now let me give you an example of how this might work let's assume you take off an airplane you got a GPS you get airborne your level often cruise you look down at your GPS to see what your ground speed is and it's 20 knots slower than you thought it was going to be then you planned on now first of all let's think through the first level of consequences the first level of consequences says it's 20 knots slower the trip is going to take longer I'm going to be tired or the airplane is going to be lower in fuel I'll arrive later in the day and in the day is getting later and later and I might even arrive after dark so these are all the first level consequences of discovering that you're 20 knots slower than you thought you were going to be but we're suggesting you not only think at the first level of consequences but think and through different levels another level is why is the ground speed 20 knots slower than I thought it was going to be what would be likely the reason the wind the wind is different than it was forecast to be well the wind determines the location of pressure patterns in front so if the wind is different than it was forecast to be the weather is likely to be different than it was forecast to be including the weather at your destination and as luck would have it probably worse so now if you think about it you're now going to arrive later in the day with a pilot who's more fatigued lower on fuel in probably worsening weather now as you go through this and think through the consequences of this it really doesn't take much to think I need to do something different now when you first took off you had a big circle of alternatives you could fly in any direction the length of your entire trip plus your trip to your alternate if you had one plus your reserve after that so when you start this trip you have a huge circle of alternatives in any direction but as you fly along your circle of alternatives alternatives get smaller and smaller and smaller until when you arrive at your destination your circle of alternatives is only the distance to an alternate airport if you had one and your reserve so it shrunk down so as this trip keeps going along your circle of alternatives gets smaller and smaller and smaller and you need to start thinking more and more about what is my current alternative the most important consideration in all of aviation is having an alternative course of action in case things don't work out you always have to know where you're going to go well if you now have figured out that the weather might be different you're going to arrive later it becomes a no-brainer decision to land the aircraft and re-expand that circle of alternatives halfway through the trip and now you've got a whole new circle of alternatives that is again huge so what you want to do is think through the consequences think through several levels of the consequences and consider your alternatives and consider the fact that you can land and re-expand that circle of alternatives at any time as John says the real issue on the alternatives is your fuel which is really just you know how much time have you been flying how much time do you have to go more important to us really than the distance true or false general aviation fuel gauges are absolutely reliable and accurate no takers all right let me ask you this question and there would be some in of you in here who know this for sure what is the one and only time by FAA regulation that our fuel gauges are required to read accurately when they are empty isn't that handy not very I would not think so so when you're thinking about alternatives make sure that you're aware of how long you've been flying how much time you have to go because that's what really determines your fuel but when you think about alternatives that's not just for fuel or weather because it could be it's not all that unusual that you show up at your airport you've got one runway at your destination airport and somebody just landed gear up landed with a tire that went flat and all of a sudden that runway is closed and you're not going to be able to land at that airport how far away is a suitable alternative for you and have you kept enough fuel reserve to be able to get there they are in care stands for reality and reality means deal with things as they are not the way you planned them to be when we flew the trip in the 210 we planned to fly that trip with a perfectly good mechanically sound airplane when we had the electrical system failure we just we looked at it we said yeah we made a few minor changes but basically we kept on trucking just as we had planned to go how many of you in here know the biggest cause of cross-country fatalities in VFR flying you know what that is continued VFR flight into worsening weather conditions do you think that people deliberately take off and fly and whether that they know will kill them of course they don't the problem is they planned a trip under certain forecast weather they take off either the weather changes or they find that it wasn't really as forecast and what happens they keep on going just as if nothing had changed and what that leads us to is when things change change your plan because pilots are hardwired to complete what they set out to do they are in denial when things change and so why do they not do that because of the E in the care checklist once again it's external pressures you know most people who run out of fuel and crash do so within just a few miles of their destination airport because pilots are become in denial they say to themselves oh they're bouncing on empty but we got plenty of fuel to make it why because of the external pressures we are hardwired to make it to our destination we set out saying we're going to get to that destination so we keep going to get to that destination so pilots are hardwired to complete what they do and that is one of the risk factors involved in flying it makes us tremendous achievers but it can work against us in aviation so as you fly a trip let's assume that you are a little slower than you thought you were going to be you're behind schedule the longer you fly in that trip the greater these external pressures become you become more and more hardwired to continue because you're late you become more and more hardwired to continue because you're very close to your goal and so as you go along in a trip you have to think more and more about these external pressures because they say well pilots continued VFR and worsening weather conditions what the NTSB doesn't tell you what the FAA doesn't tell you is why why did they do that and they did it because we are hardwired to complete what we do because we didn't properly manage the external pressures to continue the flight the most important thing we can get out of this so don't let the external pass external pressures make you take a risk that you shouldn't now if you're about to do something in an airplane and you want to ask yourself is what I'm about to do wise let me give you a standard that you can apply towards what you're about to do and you know instantly whether it's the right thing to do ask yourself what I do what I'm about to do if I had a hundred paying passengers on board and if the answer is well no I'd never do that with a hundred paying passengers on board then why in the world would you even consider it with yourself and your people you care the most about your family and friends on board so apply that standard if you wouldn't do it with a hundred paying passengers on board don't even consider it with the people you care the most about now we made you some promises at the beginning first of all to cover the most important consideration in flying and that is to always make sure that you have what available to you alternatives available whatever it takes never fly yourself out of alternatives and remember to pave your way to a safe flight the p stands for what pilots the a for what aircraft the v for what the environment environment and the e for what external for external pressures and once you're in flight you can use the care risk management attention scan to manage the risk during the flight the c stands for what consequences the a for what alternatives the r for what reality reality deal with it and the e for what external pressures again because they're so important and folks that wraps up we're not done Martha you're getting on my nerves again well we only covered one of our promises we made them to she's right I hate it when she's right she's always right we haven't talked about the most feared emergency in all of aviation anybody in here know what the most fear of emergency is a lot of people say aircraft fire other people say a ramp check but that's not it if you're a rental pilot here is the most feared emergency in all of aviation it's a runaway hops meter folks keep the pointy and forward the dirty side down and by all means please stay out of the trees thanks a lot of thank you for being here