If there was a time before I loved flying, it was so long ago that I don’t remember. I do remember that my first sharply focused memory — maybe my very first memory of any kind — was an Eastern Air­lines B-727 “WhisperJet” trip when I was just three years old. The WhisperJet was more modern than the elegant Lockheed Electra in the final scene of Casablanca but, just as in the film, darkness and mist were gathering as my family walked across the ramp after landing (no jet bridges back then). I remember clutching my beloved doll (Bridgette) in the crook of my elbow, repeatedly turning my head to gaze back in awe at the marvelous magical machine that had just transported us to another world.

My first airplane experience was as much a turning point for me as the closing airplane scene was for the characters in Casablanca. That early childhood experience sparked a lifelong love for aviation, and made it an integral part of my life for decades before the time, opportunity, and money came together to permit flight training. While my resume lists all kinds of things I did before becoming a pilot, I sometimes wonder who I really was and what I did before, to the point of thinking that the pre-pilot life belonged to someone else. In many ways, it did. Learning to fly profoundly changed my sense of self, which is why the intro on the blog page I use as an online portfolio states that “being a pilot is key to how I define myself.”

We’ve Got a Job to Do

If those thoughts resonate with you, then I hope you will understand and share the fervent com­mitment to making headway against all the usual suspects behind GA accidents and incidents. We’ve “interrogated” a number of the prime suspects in this issue, hoping that if we better understand what happens and why, we’ll gain insight on more effec­tive resistance. If our community is to survive and thrive, we need to learn how to prevent both the usual and the not-so-usual suspects from causing harm to its members.

In this connection, I recently had the privilege of participating in an instructor Airman Certification Standards (ACS) workshop with a group of similarly passionate aviators. We did our share of enthusiastic hand-waving, “there I was” hangar flying during breaks and lunch. But we spent the working sessions diving into the challenges we all see and brainstorming what we might do to address them — and also to encourage more people to join the aviation community.

Both the workshop participants and the govern­ment/community members of the ACS Working Group are firmly committed to the ACS as one way to improve GA safety. Consistent with one of the core concepts in the FAA’s compliance philosophy, we believe that most airmen — both pilots and mechan­ics — want to operate safely. We know what’s at stake, so we do our best to follow the rules. As the GA accident and incident tally demonstrates, though, it’s not enough to just follow the rules.

There is no way to make rules that cover every possible situation, so we need to proactively identify hazards and mitigate risk. The trouble is that many of us were never taught to think or act in those terms. Flight training involved some ground discussion, in-flight performance of what wags sometimes call the “FAA ballet” of standard maneuvers, and a quick post-flight debriefing.

That’s where the ACS comes in, and where it has serious game-changing potential. By making risk management an integral part of each task in the evaluation (testing) standard, we encourage better training in that critical skill. In turn, we hope that instilling the habit of risk management into the very DNA of new pilots and mechanics will increasingly keep the usual suspects at bay — and keep us all safe in the sky we call home.  (FAA Safety Briefing– JulAug 2018)