 When our next presenter sent me their biography to start working on the introduction, I suddenly realized it was going to take an hour just to introduce them. They've done so many things in their life. They've taken their love for flying and they've developed a business to help others enjoy that passion. Over the last 35 years, they've developed an 18,000 square foot facility creating computer based and online training programs, helping pilots enjoy the love of flying. They're the first couple to hold every category and class pilot certificate and flight instructor certificate. They share PIC duties by alternating PIC on each leg of their flight in their Falcon 10. Both are on the Charles and Ann Lindbergh Foundation Board. Directors and John is the chairman of the board. The professional pilot magazine named them the Aviation Educators of the Year. The National Transportation Association awarded John their excellence in pilot training. And Martha is one of the top 100 distinguished aviation heroes honored by the First Flight Centennial Commission at Kitty Hawk. In 2005, Martha was awarded the Cliff Anderson Award for achievement from the National Aeronautics Association and stands with other recipients such as Jimmy Doolittle, Roscoe Turner, General LeMay, Frank Borman, Scott Crossfield, Ann Morrow Lindbergh and Ernest Gann. Recently, they completed a round-the-world flight in their Falcon Jet observing aviation in various countries. Almost every pilot in this country is familiar with their training courses that prepare them for the knowledge and the practical tests. They also have a very common sense approach to flight safety in their everyday operation in their airplanes. Today, their topic is practical risk management. Let's welcome the most enthusiastic flying couple I know, John and Martha King. Well, thank you very much. You did a good job at that, all right. Thank you. Well, 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. You know, pilots are not normal people. Just take a look around this room. Think of your friends who fly. You aren't normal. We're not normal. And that's because you're very special people. So, you know, Martha and I have spent a lifetime in aviation and we've been hooked on it big time. We've always had a little bit more airplane than we can afford. And people will tell me, John, you're lucky that Martha will fly with you. And I always say, Lucky, what are you talking about Lucky? It costs twice as much. She wants to fly half the time. And she's got an opinion about everything. You know, John likes to think that our relationship exemplifies that old saying that behind every successful man stands a great woman. You got it right, Martha. That's exactly the way I feel about it. What he doesn't realize is the truth is in front of every great woman stands some guy without a clue who's blocking her view. For 43 years I've been putting up with this. It's just the way it's gone the whole time. Well, we have just absolutely loved our flying. As I said, we've always had a little bit more airplane than we can afford. For instance, we had a Cessna 340 and then we moved up to an old citation. And the citation was the old, very original business jet. And it was really, really compared to today's airplanes slow. And it was so slow that controllers called it a slowtation. Or they would, if they were in a bit of an annoyed mood, they'd call it a mutation. And sometimes they'd call it a crustation or a frustration. You know, that old citation of 500 was just about the slowest jet that was ever built. Did you know it had a special bird strike problem? It got run down from the rear. So after about 10 years of flying, actually we flew that airplane for about 14 years and during all of these slowtation jokes, we got rid of that airplane and went out and got an old Falcon 10. And an old Falcon 10, in contrast, for many years was the fastest general aviation jet ever built. In fact, it was 150 knots faster than that old citation. And so as you might guess, the insurance company had grave misgivings about this mom and pop combination flying this hot jet. So they said, look, we don't care how you get your type rating, but we want to make sure that you guys go out and get simulator training. So we did, and we spent two weeks of simulator training. And I have to tell you, it was just about the hardest two weeks we ever spent in our lives. I mean, beads is what were coming off of us. But when we got done, we figured we must have done pretty well because the instructor got us aside. He says, John, Martha, I've got wonderful news for you. And I said, oh, that's fantastic. What's that? He says, well, you'll never have to worry about a mid-air collision in this airplane. And I said, that's marvelous. Why not? He says, you are so far behind this airplane, you won't even be involved. He says, you're going to come walking up to the crash site some 15 minutes later. So we've always tried to keep ourselves, and one of the reasons we've gotten so many licenses and ratings is we always like to be in the learning process because that's where most of our customers are. And if you haven't been evaluated for a while, if you haven't taken a check ride for a while, or taken a knowledge test for a while, you kind of forget what it's like. And so we've always tried to put ourselves in a situation where we've been doing those kinds of things so that we're in that same mode where you realize that no one really likes to be evaluated. No one likes to go through check rides. And unfortunately, we've done a lot of them, but that's the reason we've done them. Ever since we got our pilot's ratings back in 1969, we've been using an airplane for serious cross-country transportation for our business and also just for the fun of it. And over the years, we've developed some tools that we use that we'd like to share with you this morning for risk management. Tools that we use, and we hope that you'll use also to help you have trips that are more fun and stress-free and make sure that your passengers will fly with you again. Because we've had a few of those who won't fly with us again. We'll tell you why. So, we want to talk about this morning the most important consideration in flying and also the most feared emergency in all of aviation. Now, since the barnstorming days, we in aviation have been telling what Martha and I call the big lie. And the big lie is a lie that if you've told it often enough and long enough, eventually even you get to believe it. And we've been telling the big lie in aviation. A big lie in aviation is the most dangerous part of the trip is the drive to the airport. And, you know, barnstorming days they told, oh, it's everybody that would come up to this airplane held together practically with bailing wire and say, is it safe? It's perfectly safe. Well, it's intellectually dishonest to characterize aviation as altogether safe activity. It's not a safe activity. It's a risky activity. In fact, although it may be true and is true for the airlines that it's safer than driving, it's not true for general aviation. Unfortunately, if you take our accident rate per mile, our actual fatality rate, fatality, thank you very much. Martha straightens me out from time to time. Our fatality rate per mile, we have a seven-time greater fatality rate per mile than automobiles do in general aviation. Now, we're 49 times worse than the airlines. You do very, very well. But the general aviation fatality rate per mile is on a par with motorcycles. So the fact is there are risks involved in aviation. And one of the problems with the risks in aviation is that they're sneaky and insidious. You know, when someone comes to grief in an airplane generally at that last minute, just before they realize they're going to crash, they're the most surprised people in the world because they did not see it coming. And so one of the things that risk managers tell us is when the risks are hard to evaluate, we don't do a good job of it. You know, the problem with flying is you go out and take off low ceilings, no visibility, and you really don't know how much risk you're taking. You really don't know whether today you're going to get away with it or not get away with it. It's very hard to judge. And so when the risks are hard to judge, it's hard to judge the probability of something going wrong and consequences. When it's that way, we don't do a very good job of evaluating risks. And that's just a nature of risk management, that people just don't do a good job of evaluating risks when they're hard to judge. So we in aviation, because of that, just because of human nature, haven't done a good job of that. But I can tell you this, if we leave the risks in aviation unmanaged, they are unacceptable. And I can illustrate that with a question I'd like to ask you. And if this question is true for you, I'd like for you to hold your hand up and leave it up and look around the room. And the question I want to ask you is how many people in here know someone personally who's been killed in a generally aviation airplane? If you know someone who personally has been killed in a generally aviation airplane, hold your hand up, look around, you'll find that more than half of us in here know someone personally who's been killed in a generally aviation airplane. And my point is, if you look at the amount of time that we spend flying versus the amount of time that we spend driving, you realize that we really have a horrible accident rate in general aviation. Now, do you want to go out and tell your mother-in-law that? No, let's not do that. Let's not make an issue of press release and tell the press that. But if we don't admit it to ourselves, we're probably not going to do a good job of managing the risk. So we think that the first step in managing risk is to admit that there are risks. And then you start going systematically ways to identify those risks and strategy to manage them. One of our problems in the general aviation industry is that when we all went through flight training, the way that we were taught risk management and the way we practice it generally today was flawed and still is flawed. The problem is, in general aviation, 85% of our accidents are caused by a failure in risk management. But of course, what does our flight training focus on? It focuses on physical maneuvering, physical skill with the aircraft. When students leave flight training, the accident rate jumps by almost 50%. In other words, during student training the accident rate per 100,000 hours is about 5.8 accidents per 100,000 hours. For new private pilots, it jumps up to about 8.55. Now, what that tells us is that during flight training, flight instructors are doing a pretty good job of risk management and of supervising their students and making sure that the flight instructor, through their supervision, is exercising good risk management and controlling it. So the accident rate is pretty low, considering that you're starting with someone who has no idea how to manipulate the controls of an airplane and moving on to getting them ready for their private license. But apparently, in general, instructors are not able to pass on to their students. The instructors own risk management techniques and philosophies so that the new private student can use that as they go on with their unsupervised flying. How risk management has been taught in the past and generally is still taught today is by telling stories, passing along rules, making up sayings. Making up sayings like, the only time you can have too much fuel is when you're on fire. The two most useless things for when you're in an airplane are the runway what? Behind you and the altitude where? Above you. It's a lot better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than where? In the air wishing you were on the ground. These are all great sayings. They all have a lot of truth, a lot of validity to them, but they're not enough. The problem is that pilots is how pilots become experienced pilots once they get their private license. You know, the way that we became, quote, experienced pilots when we got our private pilot license is we went out and did stuff and you'll try different things and then you evaluate the result. Well, how did that work out? And if you try something and you don't scare yourself, you put it in the acceptable category but you may have just been lucky. But you didn't scare yourself, you said it was acceptable and the more times you get away with it, the more acceptable it becomes. But on the other hand, you do scare yourself when you try something. You go, oh, man, I'm not going to do that again. And you add it to the list of things that you have decided that you're never going to do again in an airplane. Now, and what happens is if you do this long enough and you don't run out of luck, eventually you have a real long list of things that you've said you're not going to do again and you become what they call an experienced pilot because you've got a long list of these things that you've tried and you've managed to survive. Well, the problem is experience is a hard teacher because she gives a test first and the lesson comes after it. And many times the pilot and their passengers never survive the test to get the lesson. So in our opinion, this is a bad way to go about it because, first of all, it doesn't prepare you for something you haven't tried yet or haven't thought about yet and so you're not prepared for other things in the future and so you're not prepared for unanticipated things, things you haven't tried or thought of. So what we think we ought to do about risk management is be systematically proactive instead of reactive. When people talk about aeronautical decision making it always implies to me you get yourself in a bad situation and then you make a decision to get out of it. And we think that even talking about aeronautical decision making is not as helpful as systematic risk management. So, Martha and I, by the way, had an accident in an airplane that we want to tell you about and it's kind of in a sense how we, quote, became experienced pilots because after that accident we had a real wake-up call and you might say, well, in fact, we changed everything from that point on. You might say we became born-again pilots. So I want to tell you about that accident, what we got from it and why that made us want to work very, very hard on risk management so we could survive the rest of our flying years. Now, back when we had this accident we had a Cessna 210 and had a turbocharger on it and we were at that time teaching two-day ground schools for a living. And what we would do, we lived in San Diego and we taught our ground schools in places like Fargo and Spokane and Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Billings, Montana. And what we would do is we would leave from San Diego, California on Friday and fly out all day Friday to where we were going to teach the ground school. We'd take our books and charts and so on with us. And then on Friday evening we would get in, set up the hotel room, make sure everything was working okay and then on Saturday and Sunday we'd teach the two-day ground school course and on Monday we would help the FAA give the written exam and on Monday afternoon we'd fly back to San Diego. And we got back to San Diego, we'd do all the things you do when you run a small business. We'd set up the other classes and answer our phone calls and do mail and all of those things. And then, so we'd spend Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at home. Friday we'd go out to another city and start it all over again. So we were going back and forth, flying all day Friday and all day Monday back and forth to these two-day ground schools and we were getting plenty of flying in at that time. We were getting a lot of flying in at that time. So on the accident trip, on this particular trip we were leaving from San Diego, California going to go to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And we stopped at Lajunta, Colorado for fuel. And to our credit, when we landed at Lajunta we got a very complete weather briefing. And what we found out is the weather at Sioux Falls when we would arrive right about dark the weather was going to be three miles visibility, forecast to be in a thousand-foot ceiling. Well, marginal VFR, but no problem. We were flying IFR. In fact, what we did is we got up on top of the clouds and canceled IFR. And we had a turbocharged aeroplanes. We were flying at 11,500 feet, a little higher to get a little more speed and canceled IFR and flying along on top of the clouds. And after a little bit into the trip we looked over there and said, son of a gun, look at that. The generator isn't charging. We went, oh man, as it is now we got a late start. We're going to land at right about sunset or dark in Sioux Falls. And if we land and get that generator fixed it's going to take who knows how long to get it fixed. And we're going to arrive really late. We have to set up the classroom. And so on here is what let's do. Let's just turn off everything electrical. And we're pretty good at holding a heading. We'll dead reckon until we think we're within the vicinity of Sioux Falls. It'll be about three hours. And then we'll turn on the generator, call up approach control and get an approach into Sioux Falls and land at Sioux Falls and we'll get the generator fixed when we're at Sioux Falls. So we do this. We fly for about three hours. We think it's time. We turn on the electrical system. And what do we get? Absolutely nothing. The battery was stone cold dead. Oh, holy mackerel. It's time for plan B. So, all right. We really do now have a pilot induced emergency. So we will use our pilot's emergency authority to let ourselves down through the overcast and we'll find this uncontrolled airport on the outskirts of Sioux Falls. We'll just land there and get the generator fixed and we'll continue business as normal. Now, the only problem was that if you're familiar with the Sioux Falls area, they have lots of very tall TV antennas there. So we said this may not be a good idea in the Sioux Falls area. Let's turn left and head north and dead reckon until we think we're about 40 miles north of Sioux Falls. So we turn north. Got about what we thought was 40 miles north of Sioux Falls. We decided, okay, now's the time. We're going to let ourselves down into that overcast. The top of the overcast is about 10,000 feet. We let ourselves down into that overcast and all of a sudden whap ice all over the wings of the aircraft. Now, when you do not have an electrical system and you have icing conditions, what else do you not have? The airspeed indicator. So the airspeed indicator of P02 by ice is over and the speed indicator goes 90, 80, 70, 60, 50. And it keeps slowing down. You think the airplane is slowing down big time until it goes below zero and you know it's not backing up on you. So we continue down. Now we had been flying by dead reckoning for about three hours now. So we didn't know exactly where we were. So therefore we didn't know the height of the terrain where we were and we didn't have a current reported altimeter setting. But we continued down until we thought we were 100 feet above the ground and never saw the ground. Oh my goodness. We pushed the power in, started back up through the clouds and picked up our second load of ice. And now we are on top and I am absolutely terrified. I am scared to death. Martha and I have a funny rule and our rule is one of us flies one leg and the other flies the next leg. And if I try and touch the controls when she's flying she breaks my arm. I would have given anything for it to have been Martha's turn to fly the airplane. I am absolutely panicked and I said, Martha, we are in real trouble here. I said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We'll find another airplane and we'll follow it to an airport. She said, John, that's not going to work. We had gotten this weather briefing and we had actually talked about there was some place somewhere where there was about a 5,000 foot ceiling and five miles visibility. But to save our souls we couldn't remember where it was. And in my panic state, two or three times I'd pick up the microphone to call for the weather and realize, no, the radio's not going to work, put the microphone back down. And so Martha keeps saying to me, John, we have to go back down. And I said to her, Martha, I don't want to go back down. Because we go back down there we're going to hit something. We're going to hit a TV antenna. We're going to hit a barn. We're going to hit a tree. Who knows what we're going to hit. But this isn't going to come out well. We were down within 100 feet of the ground and never saw anything. Now while we're having this conversation the sun slowly sets below the horizon. And 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 into the clouds to pick up our third load of ice. And as we go down, the windshield is all iced over. There's ice on the wings. We just are a flying block of ice. And once again, we got down to where we thought we were within 100 feet above the ground and still did not see the ground. And I'm saying to Martha, we got to go back up. She says, John, we've gone back up. There's no place to go. We've got to go down. So we continue on down. And finally, I spot a road with some cars on it. And they got their lights on. And I said, Martha, it was a little country road, one of these with the hump in the middle. I said, we're going to go land on that road. She says, no, no, no, there's power lines there. Now at this point I have to tell you, Martha's really getting on my nerves. So I just sidestepped over and trees are going by. Things are going incredibly fast. We've got ice on the windshield, ice on the wings. And I said, that's it. I don't care where we are, we're landing right now. Just reached over and pulled off the throttle and that airplane settled down and just flared just for an instant and it's on the ground. And what was going on there is they had about 18 inches of snow on the ground and about an inch and a half crust of ice because they had a freezing rain ice storm going on. And so it literally was a block of ice and I had no idea what our speed was when we touched down, but we had very little margin left because just we flared and it touched. It just simply had no flare to it at all anymore. So we went along on top of that crust of ice for about 75 feet and then the airplane, we had the landing gear down because we wanted to keep our speed under control going down. Had the landing gear down and then it fell through that crust of ice and at that moment I began my all-time record short-field landing because the airplane just stopped immediately and went up over its nose. Now if you're familiar with the Cessna 210 the landing gear retracts rearward and in order to make room for the landing gear there's a shelf on the back and the luggage is kind of elevated a little bit on the shelf. Now again, remember we were not yet born again pilots so we weren't too bright and so we had all of that luggage behind us which was our books that we were going to teach the class with computers, plotters, our own personal suitcase, a tool box with wrenches, rags, oil can't open, all of that was on that shelf. So this next conversation takes place with our heads pressed up against the panel of the aircraft and with luggage jammed in all behind us and Martha says to me, I'm okay. She says, I hit my nose on the panel of the aircraft but I'm okay. I've got a bloody nose but I'm okay and I look up and I see this hole in the windshield of the aircraft and I said, to heck you hit your nose on the panel of the aircraft your head went through the windshield. She says, no, no, no, I just hit my nose on the panel of the aircraft I've got a bloody nose but I'm okay and I reached over and I felled her back and there was blood all down her back and I said, well, you know, you've got something a lot more serious than just a bloody nose but at this point you could hear things trickling in the airplane and things sizzling on the engine so I said to her, but why don't we carry on the rest of this conversation outside the aircraft? And she said, and I said to her, look, I've got this luggage pressing me up against the panel of the aircraft I said, I can't reach my door handle can you reach your door handle and we'll go out your side and she says, well, I've got luggage pressing me up against the panel, I can't reach my door handle either so it took me about 15 minutes to rearrange all this luggage to the point where I could open the door handle and so I opened the door and I went around to the aircraft and out in front of the aircraft was this long string of trash, rags, oil cans, oil can open, there's wrenches all out in front of the aircraft and I thought I'll be darned somebody crashed here before we did and I got over to the right side of the aircraft opened the door and in that instant for the first time in my life I realized how incredibly dumb allegedly bright people can be because what had happened is that toolbox had gone from back and beat Martha about the head of the shoulders and gone out that windshield like a shot and it hit Martha in the back of the head and there was blood splattered over every inch of that airplane in the headboard all over the side panels everything was just sprayed with Martha's blood and I looked at that and I thought you idiot you absolute idiot how dare you take such a risk with the most precious thing in the world and of course the insurance company called a truck to come in they took the airplane apart they put it on that truck and they took it to the hangar and the very first thing they did when they got into that hangar is check to see what was wrong with the generator and a single wire had become detached from the generator all they would have had to have done is replace that one single wire, reattach it and we would have been on our way safely because we did not want to reattach that single wire and take the time to do that we put everything on hold we put every single thing we cared deeply about at risk and we did become born again pilots and that's how we became experienced pilots now like John says this was our own airplane and we were getting a lot of flying time in it what caused that accident had nothing to do with our physical skill in fact he pulled off a pretty good short field landing the problem was our total lack of good risk management on that flight so as a result of that accident and some other incidents 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've developed as I said earlier some tools that we use and we hope you'll use to manage the risks in flying and one of them is that we as pilots need to be proactive looking for risk conduct risk surveillance you have an airplane it needs an annual you take it into the shop maybe you flew it in from another airport as far as you're concerned it's usually working fine maybe a minor squawk but nothing significant but as soon as the mechanic gets that airplane in the shop what do they do? they pull out a checklist and they start surveilling the aircraft for things that are potential problems things that could break or could be a problem if they're not attended to if they're not mitigated now so what we as pilots need to do is to conduct the same kind of surveillance for risk just like a mechanic looks for defects during an annual before takeoff we've developed in conjunction with the FAA a risk management checklist called the PAVE checklist that lets you pave your way to a safe flight this is when you're doing your original flight planning or your pre-flight shortly before takeoff to help you evaluate and manage whatever risk might exist and the P stands for pilot the A for aircraft the V for environment the environment a little bit tortured but we always have to have our acronyms and the E for external pressures and what you do is you take a look at the risks in a particular flight and you put them into these different categories and you think about them and say how am I going to mitigate this how am I going to handle this and make sure that I'm aware of the issues involved now the risks for the pilot or start with things like well are you current in the airplane you're qualified for this airplane are you going to fly on instruments are you really ready and proficient for an instrument trip and so on and the other thing is what's the physical condition of the pilot we use the I'm safe checklist it goes have you had an illness are you taking medication are you under extraordinary stress right now which is a risk factor that you want to manage under the influence of alcohol and it's not just eight hours of bottle of throttle sometimes if you've really had too much you can feel bad for a couple days afterwards well you wouldn't want to fly during that period and then fatigue and food you want to think about a lot of times people will work all day then get in the airplane for an evening cross country flight and they don't have dinner and so here you are fatigued and hungry is this going to help you do a good job of risk management and finally the E and I'm safe is for emotion I've had at the world it's not a good time for you to be making decisions about your flying and it's not a good time to work it out by trying to fly an airplane so you do the I'm safe checklist the next item is the aircraft and is the aircraft capable of what you're doing asking it to do can it handle the load you're asking it to handle does it have the range that you want can it fly at the altitude you need because you might be flying in the mountains so when you're thinking about altitudes of course one of the things you want to think about is density altitude you know I think everyone if you've flown long enough eventually has a time a place and a date where for the first time in our lives they truly understand the concept of density altitude and for me that was about three in the afternoon on July 26th 1970 in Lone Pine California and during that time in our flying lives Arthur and I had a Cherokee 140 and they called it a 2 plus 2 because they did not want you to think of it as a full four a full four place airplane so it had two seats in front of course and then in the back it had a bench that you could either put luggage on or if you didn't have passengers you could snap in some seats and so they called it a 2 plus 2 because once again they didn't want you to think of it as a four place airplane but we always thought of it as a four place airplane so we had another couple with us and we're going to from San Diego California for the first time in our lives the Death Valley California and we're really excited about seeing the famous Death Valley and we're headed on our way and we're flying along the Owens Valley and all of a sudden this brilliant idea occurs to me wait a minute Death Valley is famous for being remote if they don't sell fuel there we won't have enough fuel to go anywhere else and I don't know whether they sell fuel there or not so maybe we better land somewhere and get fuel on the way to Death Valley so on a very impromptu basis we chose Lone Pine California at about 4000 feet elevation in the Owens Valley and we went down there and landed in this little Cherokee 140 and it was hotter than hell it was hot it was very very hot it must have been about 110 degrees here we are at a 4000 feet elevation and this old man saunters very slowly out of the FBO building and walks up towards this and he's got close to us I said to him fill it up and he gave me a long slow look and he said 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 goes okay so he proceeds to fill up the airplane we go in go to the bathroom get some sodas we come out to the airplane and get ready for the takeoff now you should know you're doing something wrong when you get ready for a takeoff and it draws a crown I mean we had people in front of that building because there was going to be one hell of a show and we didn't have a clue so we packed all four people in that airplane closed the doors, taxied out to the end of the runway and I happened to be the one flying the airplane and we got to the end of the runway we put the throttle forward and those wheels just slowly started turning and we went to the whole length of that runway and when we got to the other end I rotated because it seemed to be the thing to do that airplane staggered into the air it had a little red stall warning light with a stall warning light on and so helped me we flew around trees for five miles until we could get the speed to get that airplane to climb out when we finally got the airplane on its way and we're on heading I look back to see how our passengers were doing all I could see was four big silver dollars staring up at us that couple never did fly with us again but on that afternoon on July 26th 1970 at 3 in the afternoon in Lone Pine, California I truly understood the concept of density altitude for the first time in my life the V in PAVE stands for environment what environment are you operating in what's the airspace like what's the terrain like what do you need to do about routes and of course the environment includes the weather one of the big problems that we had on this 210 flight was we had gotten a good weather briefing in La Janta before we took off for Sioux Falls but we didn't write it down so when we got had a problem and wanted an area of halfway decent weather that we could did reckon to and let down through the clouds to a decent ceiling decent visibility we couldn't remember where it was and that's one of the really neat things about getting your weather briefings on the computer with the FAA duet system because you can print it out you can take it with you it may be more weather than you normally use but if you ever have a problem it's fabulous to have all of it there and that's what John and I do now this idea by the way of having an ace in a hole some place if you're IFR where you know you can go to and you can get down through the clouds just by getting down say a 5,000 foot 5 mile ceiling is an important thing to do on every flight we had actually talked about it but couldn't remember where it was well if you got your weather with you you're going to know what your ace in a hole is at all times another thing to think about if you think about the environment is day versus night time about 10% of our flying at night time but have almost 50% of our accidents at night time so the risk factors are very much greater at night time than they are during the daytime and one of the things you need to do is make sure you pre-flight your airplane for a night time trip so if you're going to fly at night time or the lights working and so on we have a horrible story that we won't take the time to tell now where we got ourselves out over the ocean at night time because we didn't check to see if the lights were working and we couldn't see where we were going we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble we just taken a few seconds to make sure all the lights were working before we flew it at night and that we had a flashlight or two with us that would have been helpful also we had a lot of discussions about it afterwards you know we do these things and we have these long discussions about it so if we'd figure it out ahead of time we could have eliminated a lot of words flying back and forth the E in PAVE stands for external pressures what external pressures are is there things that are not directly related to the flight itself but they have to do with why you're making the flight you're going to a business meeting you're going to a wedding you're going to a family reunion you've got a holiday trip to a vacation spot whatever it may be but the point of the external pressures is that they are constantly on your mind and they are even if it's in the back of your mind putting pressure on you to keep flying, to make the trip to keep on going and make you ignore all of the other risk factors that may exist so what do you do about risk factors well first of all, don't let the external pressures make you ignore the risks in those other categories of the pilot, the aircraft and the environment so the first thing is make sure that you've figured out ahead of time how to handle it for instance if we're going somewhere and someone wants to meet us we try to not have them meet us we'll say well we'll rent a car and we'll come see you that gives us more flexibility so somebody's not standing out on a ramp waiting for us worried about us whether or because we needed to get more fuel if they insist on meeting us we'll lie to them about what time we're going to get there we'll tell them that we're going to be there an hour later than we actually expect to arrive and again that gives us flexibility so that we can land and get fuel if we need to, land to check the weather if we need to we don't have the external pressure of thinking they're standing on the ramp waiting for us whether cell phone numbers of people one of the things we also do because we go back and forth across the border a fair amount is we have a satellite phone in the airplane so we can call people from the airplane if we have to to tell them that we're going to be delayed it's going to take us longer to get there now if we're doing this business of lying to the people if we get there an hour earlier we just clean the windshield, we refuel the aircraft we load in our flight plan for the next trip and we relax and by that time they show up we're all ready for the next trip and we're very relaxed about the whole thing another thing that Martha and I do is if we're going to go even get $100 hamburger we always take an overnight bag with us and the reason is if the weather gets a little marginal we have any kind of mechanical problem which is hey we got our bag with us let's go in a hotel, we'll spend the night and we'll worry about it in the morning and that way we don't feel pressure to get back now one of the ways that you can find out these external pressures are pushing you and making you worry about ignore all the other risk factors is do you feel that you're late any time you feel that you're late and need to hurry up you're at risk for ignoring all the other risks you're going to press on in spite of of the fact that you've got all of these risks so you'll press on in bad weather they pressed on in bad weather they pressed on with a mechanical problem why did they do that they did that one because they had not managed the external pressures so they felt that they were it was very important for them to continue and then there's a second thing we need to talk about on external pressures and it's hardwired into us pilots are an extraordinary group of people you learn to fly because you persist to accomplish a goal pilots are by nature self-selected to be hardwired achievers we are achievers we are hardwired finishers we finish what we start and so in flying that very persistence that is so wonderful goal in life very good attribute in life becomes a risk factor in flying you just hate to give up on a goal and that is a risk factor that we all need to manage those are all part of the external pressures manage your own goal orientation we have goal oriented behavior manage the fact that you don't want to get yourself in a bind where you feel like you're under or under pressure or really need to complete this trip at this time so the paved checklist is something you can use during your pre-flight planning and your pre-flight to anticipate the risks of the flight but what about once you're in the air while you're airborne you can use the care attention scan to manage risk and care stands for consequences alternatives reality and again external pressures now we're all used to the concept of the six pack instrument scan where generally you're going to be focused on the attitude indicator and you spoke out to the airspeed and back to the attitude indicator out to the altimeter back to the attitude indicator out to different flight instruments depending on what phase of flight you're in and what's going on that same concept applies with the care attention scan what you do is focus on aircraft control as the center and that's what you always keep coming back to but you spoke out to think about the consequences of what's happening now to think about what alternatives you have to think about the reality of what's going on and to think about external pressures and what are they doing to you as far as ignoring other risks now the C in care stands for consequences now before you started your flight you identified the risks in the paved checklist the pilot, the aircraft, the environment external pressures the instant you get airborne every one of those things changes as you go along the pilot becomes more and more fatigued the aircraft gets less and less fuel in it you're flying an airplane over changing terrain the environment is changing because you're getting later and later in the day it might even be getting dark and the closer you get to your destination the harder it is to turn around the harder it is to stop and so even the external pressures intensify as you go along the closer you get to your destination the more and more you might realize you're getting behind late and the more pressure you feel so all of these things change so the C stands for think through the things that are changing when you're flying because flying is a process of change and think about the consequences of those things now let me give you an example and when you think about the consequences you want to think through more than just the superficial level you want to go down a few levels in it let's assume you plan to trip you get airborne and you look at your A.S. ground speed and you think son of a gun I'm about 20 knots slower than I thought I was going to be okay now let's think about the consequences of that first of all you're going to arrive late at your destination more fatigued lower on fuel and late it might be darker than you thought and so all of those are the first level of consequences just because your ground speed is slower than you thought it was going to be let me ask you another question if your ground speed is slower than what you thought it was going to be why is that the case what caused your ground speed to be slower probably the wind is different than you thought it was going to be now the wind drives the weather it determines the location of pressure patterns in fronts so if the wind is different than you thought it was going to be the weather is likely to be different so now here you are with an airplane lower on fuel a pilot more fatigued later in the day and all of these things plus the risk that the weather is going to be different than you thought it was going to be and as luck would have it probably worse well now when you first started flying on that trip you had a circle of alternatives that was equal to the length of your trip plus whatever reserve you had and you could go to any airport in that entire radius all the way around as you fly along you're using up your fuel and the circle of alternatives just keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller so when you're at your destination your circle of alternatives is only equal to the amount of reserve fuel in any direction you've got a little tiny circle so you always want to have the second part of this always want to have an alternative course of action in mind and possibly several alternatives in mind well if you have identified the things that are changing and that there are a problem it becomes a no brainer to land and re-expand that circle of alternatives so now that you can arrive at your destination with a huge circle of alternatives so the C stands for consequences and the A stands for alternatives the most important rule in all of flying is always have an alternative course of action in mind in case the flight cannot be completed as planned and hopefully have several alternative courses of action in mind now as John said one of the big things that controls what your alternatives are is how much fuel you've got left in the aircraft because fuel equates really just to time how long are you going to be able to stay up in the air? Let me ask you a question this is a sucker question how many people in here believe that general aviation fuel gauges are absolutely reliable and accurate no takers ok let me ask you a different question who in here remembers when by FAA regulation is the only time that our fuel gauges have to be accurate when the tanks are empty? Isn't that handy? So you need to make sure that you have an accurate way to know how much fuel and therefore how much flying time you've got left and your alternatives are not just for fuel or weather because think about it you could go into an airport be headed for an airport it's got a single runway somebody lands gear up somebody has a prop strike on the runway only one runway, that runway is closed you're going to have to go somewhere else normally not a very big problem certainly not here in Florida with all the airports you've got but if you're in a somewhat more remote area like out in the inner mountain west or out in western Kansas western Nebraska you've got a situation where there's a lot of fog and you don't have as many alternatives as you otherwise would have the airport being closed because there's a disabled airplane on the runway could make a big difference so always have alternatives and the R in care stands for reality reality simply means deal with things as they really are not the way you plan them to be John and I flew that 210 flight from La Jona to Sioux Falls we planned to fly it with a perfectly good mechanically working airplane that wasn't the reality but what happened when we had the generator failure we just kept on going as if nothing had happened we were ignoring reality we need to make sure that we deal with things as they really are not just the way we plan them to be now there is one thing that is the biggest cause of VFR fatalities in aviation anybody know what it is continued flying VFR in worsening weather conditions now let me ask you a question do people deliberately take off and fly in weather that they know will kill them no the weather changes but what pilots have a tendency to do keep on flying as if nothing had happened so what is our problem in general aviation the problem is when things change we go into denial we get into denial why are we in denial because we are goal oriented people talk about get homeitis I don't think get homeitis explains it I think goal oriented behavior explains it we just hate to give up on a goal no matter what it is so we keep on going particularly if we're late if we have someone waiting for us we'll risk our very lives and the lives of the people with us in the airplane to not be late for those people waiting for us so the answer is when things change change your plan do not let the external pressures make you go on when you shouldn't and the E in care again stands for external pressures which are pushing you as John says to keep on going and to ignore those other risk factors don't let those external pressures make you ignore the risks in those other categories now if you're getting ready to do something in an airplane and you're wondering is what I'm about to do wise let me give you a standard that you can apply against what you're going to do and you will know instantly whether or not it's something you should do and the standard is don't take risk with just your family or friends that you wouldn't take if you had a hundred paying passengers on board behind you so if you're about to do something ask yourself well if I had a hundred people back there would I do that and if the answers will know I'd never do this with a hundred paying people on board then why in the world would you consider it for yourself and the people you care the most about so the answer is if you wouldn't do this with a hundred or a hundred fifty or two hundred people on board well don't do with the most precious things in the world yourself and the people you care the most about now we said we were going to talk about the most important consideration in aviation and flying and that's to always have what available to you alternatives no matter what happens never let yourself fly out of alternatives and pave your way during your flight planning to a safe flight the p stands for what the pilot the a for what the aircraft the v for what the environment and the e for what external pressures think about the risk put them in these categories figure out how to take care of them how to mitigate them once you're in route you can use care to manage the risk as you fly along the care attention scan the c stands for what consequences the a for what alternatives the r for what reality deal with things as they really are and the e again for external pressures well martha folks that pretty much wraps up john we haven't finished we also said we'd talk about the most feared emergency in all of aviation martha you're getting on my nerves again she's right i hate it when she's right let's talk about the most feared emergency in all aviation and i hear know what the most feared emergency in all aviation is everybody says an airplane fire other people say a ramp check but that's not it if you're a rental pilot the most feared emergency in all of aviation is a runaway hob's meter folks keep the pointy in forward the dirty side down and by all means please stay out of the trees thanks a lot thank you very much we are so don't don't cut my nose right thank you very much yeah yeah well yeah if you guys got time for you yeah well yes sir there you go hi my name is denis amanderis and i just want to tell you all that on january 28th this year i had an engine failure on piper 6x i had a crash land in wiggins mississippi and thanks to their course and always fly the plane as he constantly kept saying i um did all my emergency procedures crash landed the plane was total but i walked away from that aircraft slowest airspeed did everything that the course told us the emergency service bulletin on march 7th which grounded all of the aircraft that had the bad servo was because of my crash and i think we saved the result was that it was world wide they had an 80 miles and precision air mode and everything came up to the plate and have fixed it found the problem and i'm just glad that