THE ILLUSIVE SILVER BULLET

Having had the privilege and honor of being involved in the aviation industry for the past 44 years in multiple capacities, I have witnessed many phenomenal developments. Some were good, others not so good and some have been downright dangerous. The one thing I can say without hesitation is that there is no magical silver bullet to counteract bad decision making, poor judgment, arrogance and complacency.  I have had some very close friends die not because they didn’t have great training and education, or the best equipment money could buy or weren’t excellent pilots. Moreover, it was because they made a bad decision at the most inopportune and critical moment and paid the ultimate price for it. In most cases I don’t even think many of them knew that they had made a bad decision until it was too late. They more than likely had made that same bad decision hundreds times before; it just so happened that at that fateful moment it finally caught up with them.

One question many of us are often asked, is “Is flying dangerous”? My response has always been; “flying is only as dangerous as you allow it to be”. One point that became glaringly evident when working in the Helicopter Air Ambulance world real quickly is that just waking up in the morning or walking down the street can be hazardous to one’s health. Its how you approach each individual situation that is important. Yes, there are risks in what we do, but if you take the time to identify, understand and mitigate those risks your ability to deal with unforeseen circumstances will be greatly enhanced. I would always tell my students that you always have to build options into every flight you take. In doing so, if something does go wrong you already have an alternative course of action in your back pocket ready to react within at a moment’s notice. If on the other hand you put yourself into a situation where the only option available to you when something does go wrong is to die, no amount of bells, whistles and magic silver bullets are going to save your butt. It’s kind of like flying around at 300 feet AGL at max Vne in an aircraft at max gross weight without doing a performance planning chart. While it may have seemed cool at the time, what on earth did you think was going to happen when you lost an engine.

There are many things discussed after an accident in regard to cause and effect. References are made to things like the accident chain, causation factors, the trigger mechanism, CRM, AMRAM, crew-rest, weather…, the list is endless.  But it still comes down to why did someone make a bad decision in the first place? I doubt very much; a pilot wakes up one day and decides that they are going to go out and crash their aircraft on purpose. I do believe however that we are all human and that we all inevitably make mistakes throughout our carriers no matter how diligent we are. So, what is the difference between those pilots that make mistakes and live to fly another day and those that don’t? A quote from one of aviation's earliest pioneers, Wilbur Wright, still holds true to this day: "In flying, I have learned that carelessness and overconfidence are usually far more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks." There will always be risks in life, the key to staying safe and living to fly another day is to guard against becoming overconfident and taking the time to understand and mitigate the risks that we face each and every day.

Equipment and procedures such as night vision goggles, IFR instrumentation, terrain awareness systems, twin engine helicopters, weather radar, two pilot cockpits and operational control are all viable tools in their own right. Each and every one has its place in our industry, but they are all still just tools. A great work of art is generally created with a multitude of different tools, but it will always be the craftsman and artist behind the tools who determines whether it’s a work of art or just another piece of crap. The same thing can be said in aviation, the individual behind the controls of the aircraft, their attitude, philosophy and decision-making process will always reign supreme in determining the safe outcome of each and every flight. The ultimate equalizer for human error is and always will be our attitude and not the tools or magic silver bullets that we take for granted to bail us out when we make the wrong decision and get ourselves in over our head.

One factor that has been pointed to and blamed, for more accidents in our industry than any other, is ‘Pilot Error’. I would divide pilot error into two distinct categories, bad habits and complacency.  These two cardinal sins of aviation go hand-in-hand in setting up most pilots, crews and programs for ultimate failure. Not recognizing that critical point in time when your comfort zone has outgrown your safety zone is that point when pilots and programs become complacent and flying truly become dangerous. Bad habits are easy to form, hard to identify and even harder to break.

As a former military instructor pilot, I would say that forming and maintaining good habits in new pilots is probably one of the most valuable lessons we can teach when developing safe pilots for the future. This is why it is so important that from the very moment we start flying, and every subsequent flight we take thereafter; we do it the right way each and every time. In doing so we are setting the building blocks for positive habit transfer for good habits. In essence doing something the right way each and every time no matter how many times we have done it before, even when no one else is watching us, but us. At the end of the day, when things do go south, and they always do at the worst possible moment, and the stress level goes from zero to full throttle in seconds, individuals will always react to a situation with the habit they have developed the most. If a bad habit has been reinforced more often than the correct one, this will more than likely be the course of action that the pilot will find themselves taking in a stressful situation with limited time and without think twice about it.

In regard to complacency there has been much written over the years about this dangerous and insidious problem. However, just like a weed, it continues to crop up right in are own back yard no matter how careful we are. In the words of one of my first instructor’s many years ago, “If you do something wrong and you scare yourself to death, that’s a good thing; you have just learned a valuable lesson. If on the other hand you get away with it and there were no negative repercussions, a bad habit has just been reinforced and you have taken your first step on the destructive path of complacency”.  Guarding against complacency is probably one of the biggest challenges we will ever face in our day to day flying careers and there is no one way to prevent it. Setting predetermined boundaries for ourselves to operate within prior to takeoff allows for the all-important safety fudge factor to be applied. In allowing for these mistakes to potentially occur by building various options and countermeasures into each flight, we can then use these errors as lessons learned to build upon in our future, i.e. we took the time to develop a sound plan beforehand and because of that we survived our own stupidity to live another day. Having a predetermined personal safety zone prior to takeoff that we stay within in conjunction with a good safety philosophy, builds in options for every flight, hence helping us to safeguard ourselves from our worst enemy, ourselves.

Safety is not a test that we only take during a check ride or talk about during an inspection or accreditation and then forget about until next year. True safety is an ever-evolving attitude and philosophy that we as individuals and programs strive to maintain and reinforce 24/7, not just when it suits our needs or when someone else is watching. Safety is not something that is to be used just when it’s convenient, it must be something that we are dedicated to doing from the top down and the bottom up, each and every minute of every day. As pilots we must be willing to say “NO” when it is necessary and as leaders, we must be wiling back up our pilots “NO” decision when called upon. The silver bullet that will save our life in a critical situation is not going to be the overpriced bells and whistles we install in our aircraft. Rather it will come down to a combination of the good habits that we strive to develop throughout our career, our predetermined safety boundaries and a good healthy respect for the unexpected and being prepared for it.