Ten tips for safer flying

The following article is slightly abridged and comes from Clued Up magazine, the CAA's free annual publication for pilots.

Ten ways to make your flying safer

(photo by egm757lover)

1) A flight with an instructor
These are various reasons why you may need to take a flight with an instructor. It might be for licensing reasons, for insurance, because you want to build a new skill or just because you feel a little rusty at the start of the year.

However if you're not thinking of flying with an instructor on the near future you might want to think again. Whether you exercise your skills or not, they can get blunted over time, and new ideas and even new regulations come along and leave you behind. Bad habits can form without you knowing and a flight with an instructor can identify and tackle these.

But make sure it's not a jolly. Tell the instructor exactly what you want from the flight, discuss with him how you might be able to use your airborne time for the best benefit and so that you can try out the things you feel need brushing up on.


2) Become more qualified
Expending on number 1: why not do some differences training or work towards a rating? Flying a new type, or leaning new skills - aerobatics, tail dragging, strip flying and so on - can improve your general awareness of flying as well as adding extra skills. Night flying can teach new skills which can be transferred to day flying.

More challenging would be to train for an IMC rating. The skills learned can be of immediate use to VFR flying.

3) Maintenance - get to know your aircraft.
If you are an owner you will, or course, have read the POH (Pilot's Operating Handbook) cover to cover, but how much else do you know of your aircraft?

Even if you're not mechanically minded, watching an engineer working on your aircraft can add tremendously to your knowledge of the your plane and how it works. More often than not you'll get some free hints on what to look for in the walkaround, as well as a few pointers on things to look for on your particular type. it's not always easy to see ow this might help you in a crisis, but sometimes it does. This could be one of the best safety investments you ever make.

4) Get yourself a weather subscription - and an AIS login
Weather is a factor in a surprisingly large number of accidents. Whether it results in a tragic controlled flight into terrain caused by unexpected visibility or a simple bent nosewheel because by windshear, the weather is often the cause.

So it pays to make sure that you are well up on your Met. There are a number of organisations offering Met courses for aviators, which will not only help you make a personal forecast of the weather and an assessment of the current situation, but will make you able to understand the effects of weather on your flight.

But you will, of course, need to get the weather from an official source before you go flying, so make sure that you sign up to one of the web-based services which are available, and make sure you make full use of them!

5) Evaluate yourself medically
It's thankfully rare for a pilot to be incapacitated while at the controls. but medical or human factors considerations can often lurk behind the other, more obvious causes of an accident. beware of them.

Are you on medication or have you drunk alcohol recently? The effects of alcohol are well known, but with medications it's not always clear. If there is any doubt either don't take the medicine or don't fly.

Obviously recreational drugs are incompatible with flying - despite some anti-heroic attempts to prove otherwise.

While you're in the air you still need to be aware of your body. The thinner air at altitude and the change in pressure as you climb or descend - and the way that they affect your nasal passages - may indeed be the first indications that you are going down with something.

Mental and emotional stress can also affect your flying and decision making - this can be a difficult call to make, as many pilots use flying as a means of relaxation, and it's not easy to tell whether the stress alleviation element will be enough to justify flying.

Also make sure you know the signs of hypoxia, hyperventilation, carbon monoxide poisoning (do you have an in-date detector in the cockpit?) and the rest, and have a plan about what to do of you realise you're suffering from them.

Finally think about injuries - mainly those you are recovering from. Broken limbs, twisted ankles and pulled muscles can all be put to the test in the flying environment and suffering pain and discomfort as a result is not a good thing.

6) Listen to your clearances
Runway incursions are a major issue worldwide, and have caused some of the worst acdidents in aviation industry (including what is generally considered to be THE worst accident, when two 747's collided on the runway in Tenerife, killing 583 people) So make sure tat you listen carefully to clearances. Don't just hear what you expect to hear: write it down, read it back and refer to it if you're in doubt.

It's not just runway clearances which need this care: every mis-heard, half-remembered or misunderstood clearance is a potential accident. So if in doubt, ask again. (In addition always check any runway or departure clearances you have been given yourself visually. I was cleared to take-off on a solo flight during my initial PPL training in the States and immediately told to hold short as a Piper was on short finals for landing on the same runway. it was a simple controller slip but it could have caused damage to two planes and fatalities to two pilots - Gary)

7) Go to a CAA Safety Evening
There was a statistic which said that nobody who had been to a CAA safety evening had suffered a fatal accident. Although that can no longer be claimed, the Safety Evenings are highly recommended as a way to improve your safety thinking. Cynics say it's because only safe pilots go to Safety Evenings. So make yourself a safe pilot and attend one. And don't just listen, participate. Ask questions, and use the whole evening to share experiences, techniques and advice with others.

8) Go on a ditching course
The UK is an island, so if you want to go anywhere else you'll have to go over water. In addition many flights over UK airspace cross water - the Bristol Channel, the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Northern Ireland - even the Isle of Wight - all involve cross water flights. And, however unlikely, a cross water flight does involve the possibility of ditching.

Ditching is one of those thing that is so difficult to prepare for because there are so many factors involved, ad so few case histories to learn from. but there are things you can do to improve your chances of survival if you do have to make a controlled landing on water.

The most critical factor is to extend your survival time as much as possible. Wearing (and knowing how to use) a life jacket is vital. Knowing how to escape from the cabin is another. make sure you brief your passenger - even if there aren't any (because you'll also be reminding yourself of the actions to take in the case of an emergency and I bet you haven't thought about that recently)

All of these things and more will be explained in a ditching course at one of the many centres around the UK.

9) Check your height
Controlled flight into terrain can spoil your day. But experience suggests that FIT is rarely the sole cause of an accident - it's usually the result of other factors. Tiredness and lack of concentration, spatial disorientation, flight into poor weather, lack of communication, wrong pressure settings and poor planning can all contribute. Airliners have Ground Proximity Warning Systems and some light aircraft feature GPS units which can provide your height above terrain and warn you of approaching danger (make sure the data is up to date); if you don't have these, it's down to you.

Being aware of your surroundings, whether you're in VFR, marginal VFR or IFR is essential. Use all the tools at your disposal: your eyes, your ears, your altimeter (If you have two have you done a simple cross check?), your map with safe altitudes and so on. None of these is 100% reliable in every single circumstance, but together they increase your safety factor many times over.

10) Do your weight and balance checks
How long is it since you did a proper check? Not just "two people and full fuel should be OK because it was last time", but a real number-based exercise? Interesting academic research currently being done seems to show that changes in fractions of inches in the centre of gravity can make a big difference on the safety statistics on particular types - so make sure that you know that you are within safe limits and can clear the obstacles at the end of the runway!

11) Enjoy your flying
(Did we say 10 things? Well, we couldn't leave this one out...) A safe pilot is a happy pilot, so enjoy your flying and there'll be no excuse for not being safe.