This week Bobby and Wally take a deep dive into one of the most overlooked aspects of general aviation flying. From weight and balance, to diversions, to the dreaded go/no-go, there's so many decisions we are responsible for as pilots. Put your captain's hat on because this episode is all about decision making!
As student pilots we learn so much in training, but it all changes when we get our private pilot certificate. Sure everything looks the same and the airplane handles exactly as it did when we were students. But now it's on us to make the decisions. We are the pilot in command now. It's an awesome responsibility and we should never take it lightly. This week on Behind The Prop-- decision making!
Clear prop! Number two following twin traffic on 3 mile final. JB using runway 25 on a 4-mile final.
This is Behind the Prop with United Flight Systems owner and licensed pilot, Bobby Doss. and it's co-host: major airline captain Designated Pilot Examiner, Wally Mulhearn. Now let's go behind the prop!
What’s up Wally? Hey Bobby, How are you? I'm good, how are you? I'm fantastic. Last week I thought it was an amazing sit-down conversation with Paul Craig, the author of The Killing Zone. We’ve had this on out show list for a long time, what a better time to do it than to talk about decision making. Really nice to get to know Paul a little bit, you know when you read the book you look at this, and you well at least I do. This is some academically gifted type person, which he is but at the end of the day he’s just another pilot just like you and I. And it was really nice to be able to actually get to know him a little bit. And his reason for writing the book.
Well, you probably saw is you follow us on social media at all, but Paul was sitting looked like in his study, wearing a Behind the Prop hat which was a pretty cool little gift to see him wearing that. When we came on the Zoom call, Wally and I were both holding up a copy of The Killing Zone, acting as though we were reading it. But the one thing that I think I took away from the book and I think I took away from the conversation is that it really is all about decision making. Like he said and like I guess I’ve thought in the past but it’s hard to articulate, is we don’t know all the times that really good decisions are made. We don’t hear those stories, and personally we hear about the stories where multiple decisions were made that ended up creating that decision chain that caused problems for someone and no one unfortunately is free from making these bad decisions. I can honestly say that I struggled with a recent dispatch, that I in hindsight says, I shouldn’t have done it. Right? And I still let a student pilot go on a cross country, everything was legal, we could have this conversation all day that everything looked good. There was something that didn’t feel right, and it was a little bit of external pressure. Both, from him and for me, that I think ultimately lead to a bad decision. There was no result that happened that we’re going to hear about so no one will ever know that unless I fess up to the fact that hey some of this external pressure got me to make a bad decision. And that’s what we want to talk about today. Yeah, fortunately for all of us there are enough safety measures built into aviation that by in large that for something bad to happen multiple things have to go wrong. Usually, there are backups within the system itself, but you know the one thing that I try to impart on applicants when we finish a checkride is that smart people make bad decisions. I make them, we all make them and to you know the one thing we can study is we have accidents, we can look at accident reports and we can it’s really easy to sometimes look at what happened in a certain situation and say well I would’ve never done that because this is the way I would’ve done that. Well I think when you have that attitude you’re in trouble, because I think we can all do it. I’m usually you know if someone and I get that feeling for someone I can usually in a scenario convince them that maybe they would maybe try to push the envelope a little bit. You know the one thing in our training Paul talked about this last week on the podcast, one thing in our training typically that one thing we don’t have is external pressures. Sure, we want to get the flight done but if we don’t get the flight done that’s okay. We still go home and you know have dinner with our family but in the real world, a lot of times flights are because you’re taking someone from point A to point B. for whatever event a family reunion Paul kept refereeing to last week, AND you know you do factor that in, should I turnaround and go back or gee if I turn back I wont get to attend the family reunion and so that’s something that we don’t you know in our typical flight training syllabus rides we don’t, we can’t really build that into it so I think its something that as flight instructors we should make people think about. You know, say okay were going to go on this cross country and the reason were going to the airport of intended landing, is to go to you know uncle bobs funeral and factor that into it. Okay, the weather is maybe not perfect well do we continue to go to make it to the funeral or we turnback. And that’s probably not something they’re going to postpone, so you’re making a decision your weather make a significant event or miss a significant event. One we’ve talked about off line before that would I think create a tremendous amount of external pressures is if I was going to propose to my wife and I paid a photographer and they were lets call it Brenham from here right. It’s a forty-minute thirty-minute flight. But I have to make the decision, am going to make that, that’s probably a really big deal. Right. Something that I might push the envelope for. Might scud run, I might swerve some clouds. You know I don’t know what I would do but that’s the pressure that I don’t think we get to feel. But if you’re a pilot, seventy-five hours in and you decide to make that trip that’s going to be a hard decision. Right. And it sounds like what were trying to do is help people make the most conservative decision. That’s really not what we’re trying to do, because we’re are trying to accomplish a mission by flying this airplane from one place to another. You know one thing I will talk about on checkrides is that weight and balance scenarios, where I give the applicant a scenario where they’re twenty pounds overweight and by in large I would say eighty percent of the applicants say well, we can’t go and I say well is there anything we can do to make us go. And they say well we can take off that you’ve got a forty-pound bag, we can take twenty pounds out of your forty-pound bag and you can bring twenty pounds. And I go well what I have in my bag is really important and I really need to take that to where were going, is there anything else we could do. Well their landing at the destination with maybe three and a half hours’ worth of fuel, maybe their landing with thirty-five gallons worth of fuel. And I say well jeez, could we take off three and a half gallons and land worth thirty-one and a half gallons of fuel. Were still landing with more than three hours of fuel and that’s usually way down their list. Well, yeah yeah I'm comfortable with landing with just a little over three hours’ worth of fuel rather than three and a half hours of fuel. And my philosophy on that one, I could be wrong. I’d love to hear what y’all think that are listening, but I think sometimes that fuel coming out is way down the list is because people haven’t ever taken fuel out of a plane, right? They don’t know how to take fuel out of a plane and if they don’t work or go to a flight school that has some full-service support and can ask someone to ask to help take fuel out for them. They don’t know how to do that but they are becoming pilots, single engine land pilots. In most cases they can fly anybody’s plane, what are they going to do, what are you going to do if your listening right now if you had that same dilemma and needed to take off fuel and you’ve never taken off fuel before. Yeah, it’s a real scenario to have your CFI while your flight training teaches you how to take fuel out. It doesn’t it might not be that sexy that were doing a day where were talking about fuel and putting fuel in and taking fuel out but those are things that as pilots we have to do. Yeah, I heard a corporate pilot recently say how mind going shopping for cokes and buying bags of ice you know. Pilots do all things as it relates to the operations of aircraft.
I had a checkride with a young man a couple weeks ago, and one of his endorsements was out of town and I said to him well what are you going to do, and he started to pack up his bags and walk out of the room. And I said wait a minute, wait a minute. I said, lets try and use some problem-solving techniques here. Is there anything we can do to get that endorsement from your CFI, I mean can we make a phone call, can we get an email, can we do something and you know after a while he went, well yeah I guess I could do that. And I wanted him to be a little more proactive and try to problem solve, try to figure out how we can complete this mission. You know one scenario that ill pose to our listeners is lets say we are on a two-hundred-mile cross country flight and lets say were in a basically a knot airplane, so about a two-hour flight. And weather is absolutely not a factor today, weather is fine, winds are fine.. there’s unlimited ceiling and visibly and up and about halfway into our flight we determined that our number one communication radio is not working now. We have a number two comm and is working just fine, what are you going to do, and there are choices. A. continue B. turn around and go back to the airport you took off from C. divert to an airport that ten miles away and D. make an off-airport landing. Real quick, if you’re thinking about D do not come and rent from my flight school. D is wrong, D is wrong. A, B, and C are all maybes. But, which was the right one Wally? Well, it just depends, it just depends. But, I would say when I if I posed this on check rides the majority of people say they’re going to divert and I said, well what if the other radio fails. Well, that’s a possibility but its also a possibility that I might be in a car accident on the way home today but that’s not going to stop me from going home. There is a certain level of risk that we take when we strap that airplane to our back and rake it in the air. You know if someone says well, I probably going to divert because maybe the problem is bigger than just a radio failure. Maybe I’ve got an electrical problem, well that’s that’s great thinking okay. I can live with that, but it’s just something to think about you know when interact with the pilot. Their usually in super conservative mode and they think that’s what I want to hear, oh boy I want to put the airplane on the ground and figure out whats wrong with it. Maybe, the airport you diverting to, you know you haven’t checked the NOTAMS, maybe at four hundred feet you look down there’s big x’s on the runway. So maybe it’s a closed airport, so maybe the safest course of action would have been to continue on to you destination. Well, and I think we all have cellphones nowadays and there are procedures that we learned that if we lost both radios, what are we going to do, I don’t know that that becomes necessarily an unsafe situation right. But, it becomes a stressful situation. Yeah, what role, you’re on this testing side so sometimes I do compartmentalize you in that bucket but you're also a CFI. What role do you think CFI's play in teaching the decision-making process?
I- the a huge role. It's a huge role. And I think the CFIs have to give the student the liberty to make a decision and they have to; You know to an extent be able to let the student Play out that decision. other words if we're flying from airport to airport be and We give them a situation where you want him to divert. You want him to go to airport. See but the student instead chooses to go to airport d. I think you need to let him go to airport D. and If airport d was a poor decision That's the slippery slope whereas as the CFI got to say. Hey it's there's a lot better reasons to go to airport. See but I think let them letting them go to airport de teaches not a lot more. I my oldest daughter I did some i was not her recommending instructor when she got her private pilot certificate but we flew together quite a bit and I asked her about Her different flight instructors the what she got from The different flight instructors that she had had and she had several different flight instructors. Just to sort of strange circumstances while she was working on her private pilot but she mentioned that the one thing about flying with me she said you let me make mistakes and she said so I learned a couple of things with you. She says hey I learned not to make the mistake. But I learned if I did make the mistake how to get out of it.
right. I think that's what makes me so worried about myself becoming CFI is I won't I won't let those people to make those mistakes right. I will want to fix fixer. But I do. I do know that I have flown with CFIs there. Were extremely calm and resilient in their teaching and would let me make those mistakes right Never to get on the anywhere near a safety concern for either us or the aircraft. But they wouldn't they would let me make mistakes. And obviously like she said, I learned most from those situations right. What we've talked about it. I think we've mentioned it on the show, but really and truly I don't think. I became a pilot until I came to the flight school and said we're going to fly or not fly, right? like and that was somewhere in the instrument timeframe early commercial days no matter what the clouds were no matter what the winds were, I felt like I was making that decision Before I got here. and I never really felt like I was the pilot a really good pilot as I came to the fly. School would be excited about being here and ask my structure to fly. I think it becomes important for students to have those opportunities as early as possible. Meaning I get private pilot’s license. The student which is now a private pilot certificate is real. What are they need to do? They need to go fly. They need to experience some decisions.
Yeah I after A student pilot gets their private pilot certificate. After we've shaken hands and done all the pictures and everything. I will usually sit down with the with the pile at I'll say what now? and at least around here where I do Most of my check rides So many of them say all I'm starting my instrument training tomorrow and I cringe a little bit. Because I feel like they just need to get out and fly you know You know once you learn how to ride the bicycle without the training wheels, You need to go out and ride it. and pretty soon when you get a little confident at your riding with no hands and you're doing wheelies. You doing all the things that as parents you cringe at seeing kids do that. But that's part of life. I think that you just need to get out. And you need to create mission-oriented scenarios yourself and it's not like you really have to dig into a book to figure this out it may be simple as The hundred-dollar hamburger flying up You know the place that sixty miles away with your two buddies going up there for lunch. Is it mission oriented? Yeah it is you're hungry. You want to go have lunch You want to complete the flight but You know you had the ability to make the decision and Poitou windows twelve gusting eighteen. And it's a direct crosswind. Maybe that's not the best thing to do today. But maybe it's within your capability. I don't know, but that that's your decision to make.
I remember scenario that that, again I don't I don't think people believe it until they have to experience it. I said over and over. I would never let external pressures bother me, Wally. I'm sure we've all heard students say that you know not me. It won't get me but I had a pretty good friend of mine that I worked with That wanted to take his wife to dinner in Galveston. He had aspirations of being a pilot. I was a newly minted pilot. And we were going to go. We picked the day way in advance. We were I think in the spring time of year for my memory serves me correctly and here I get up that day Ceilings are about eighteen hundred feet. and to get to Galveston from where we sit today, You probably never really fly above twenty-five hundred feet and then you probably get twenty-five hundred for short period of time. So but I couldn't get above eighteen. Would I go I; I probably couldn't get above thirteen at if there was eighteen. So I talk all the guy said hey man. The weather's another get. I don't think we're going to go. He's like oh man. Come on. I really want to take her. It's a special night. I got to get I got to get down there and I think that's weird. I'm kind of shocked that he actually pushed back a little bit.
But he's not a pilot; I’m the pilot. I said okay. I'll watch it so immediately Talked myself out of it and say we'll give it a few more minutes. Every bad thing comes from multiple decisions are bad so gets to be about one o'clock. He sends me a text I said weather up to twelve twenty-one hundred So we're looking better. let's make a go No go decision at three o'clock. when the ATIS was coming up because they were going to drive about an hour to get to here Then we're going to take off. Get to dinner around six thirty fly back at night in the dark. So time goes by and three o'clock comes in the eighties comes out and it's twenty-six hundred feet and I was like I had made my decision telling everyone out there. I made my decision Three thousand was my go No go what do you think I did when I heard twenty-six hundred feet you probably said I think let's till four. Let's wait till four. I waited till four. So I told him. Look you're risking it. But I think it's improving forecast says it's going to continue to improve if it's above three at four Pm we'll go so he says all right I’m coming I’m sure you know now. Said he's an expert weatherman. He's like. I'm sure they're going to lift. We're going to be fine. We'll be good. And I’m like how does he know that so. Four o'clock is comes around thirty-two hundred feet make the decision ago and we go and we went to Galveston. I had a great dinner. We flew home again. Another story where you don't hear about the bad decisions that were made but in reality. I was nowhere near as informed about whether as I end today I. I was taking a very small snapshot of time into account and the fact that the trend was improving. What normally happens at night near water. I care where we were going water and here. I am making a decision in the springtime about this is going to lift and stay Lifted while we're going to fly back at night and the dark could have been so much worse but it is those external stress pressures the small people that are trying to influence you to make a decision and it slowly builds. Which brings up to me personal minimums. I don't think back then I really had a hard fast rule. I don't think I was I don't think I have set a limit on clouds crosswinds; You know fuel. I don't think a list. But today I think because of all the missions I’ve flown with my family and had to take fuel out of planes had to put baggage in had to take fuel out had to leave a kid home One time to get the mission accomplished in an aircraft. I've had a drive to Austin more times than not because that was the safe way to get the mission accomplished. personal minimums became a really big deal for me. And I think it was partially me to make my wife feel comfortable. But if you don't have personal minimums written down that you can turn to. If you don't know really what crosswinds you're capable of landing in on a regular basis and stay proficient at that level. Not because you got away with it once it eighteen. Are you now always going to be proficient at eighteen right. Got to keep those personal minimums up. You got to keep your If you’re instrument rated your instrument proficiency in currency up. more proficiency than currency here people. It's all about decision making no question.
Yeah you know for a student pilot. Although you do have some solo flights you know by large. Your instructor is right there. You know before you do a solo cross country. The instructor has to endorse you for it. And obviously they're doing their job correctly. Which most of them are I believe. You know they're going over the weather with you and they're looking at forecasts and all that kind of stuff. And the person who jumps right into their instrument training the day after their private pilot Check ride you know, They're going to have an instructor with them Most of the time when they're doing the instrument training. so I just I just feel like you really truly are not making that decision on your own. And it is It is a skill set that can be developed and Needs to be to work on it. You need to work on making those decisions I know I. I used to ask my girls when they would come back from flying I remember being scared in an airplane myself As a student pilot and You know the pulse going up and Coming in and landing and realize oh gee that was it was a little bit scary. I used to ask my daughters all the time when they'd come in from flying. I said have you scared yourself in an airplane yet and for the longest time they would just look at me. They'd say no no no. but Finally some things happened with both of them and they said oh.
Gee dad that was I was scared This happened and this is what I did. And This is this is how it worked out. And I mean we discussed it but it did my heart well to hear that they had been scared in an airplane because everybody will at some point.
No doubt and I’ve I’ve had that experience. And I think each one of those scary moments probably make you a better pilot. And the they’re hopefully not the ones we ever hear about As we talked about doing missions and being getting that experience on those when you when you take a student for a private pilot check ride Wally. What do you think, And I know You don't know this right off. what do you think. The number of airports a private pilot student has visited really is on average.
I would guess five to seven airports and out of those. We'll say fifty fifty controlled not control. Probably something like that. That's probably accurate. That's not very much experience. No and as Paul said last week you know his first sign off. He was thrilled and he asked the same question. You ask about what now and they. I'm taking my family to Disneyland Disneyworld. And if you read the book or listen the book they had prepaid hotels. Non-refundable prepaid tickets non-refundable lots of pressure to get to Disneyworld with your family. Can you imagine that being your first cross country flight. Yeah imagine the pressure of that right. I mean you need to see other airports. You need those hundred-dollar hamburger missions. You need to try those things. The last thing that I have on my list that I want to talk about my instructors did me right Very right is real instrument conditions. When I was lucky enough to take my check ride with you. Ali I believe I had somewhere to the tune of about eight hours of actual instrument flight time in the soup. Moisture on the windshield as I used to call it Before I took my check ride similar to the private airports. What's what is. What do you think the average is or what he normally reflecting on as you doing that. Logbook audit for instrument How much actual time is in those logbooks?
This is this is very informal. This is not There's no written data to back this up at all. But I would say. The average instrument applicant may have forty-eight hours of instrument. Time and I would say the average is probably less than an hour of actual. Where and I would say a good forty to fifty percent of the applicants have zero actual time and it is a little bit of a head scratcher. Where were you think jeez I am I'm going to issue you a certificate That's going to say instrument rating on it; you’re Legal ago flying clouds and you've never done it. yep and instructors too. I mean there are some instructors that I don't think had a lot of instrument time when they got out of their cfi training and earn their double. I I’ve heard some horror stories. But I mean if you get the opportunity whether you're private private student or an instrument student And that's a it's a low. It's a fifteen-hundred-foot day calm winds and a thousand-foot deck above your airport. Find a double I has some experience and has the confidence to go fly. And they're proficient and go shoot some approaches. You're going to come out of the you're going to come out of the bottoms with eight hundred feet to spare before minimums right sure. There's no better way to do that Then on a calm day most if you are ready for your check ride most calm days. Have a little bit of cloud clever Because the wind's not blowing out of the moisture's just right. so go shoot Go shoot some approaches in actual you'll be a much better pilot for it and when it does come to be the first time you're in the cockpit alone you're not going to feel the anxiety and stress that she might have felt. Had it been the first time you ever flew actual and you're all alone right that makes for tough decisions absolutely well. We haven't done the research and all the work That Paul Craig the has done. But we've seen a lot together and separately. We hope we help you make some decisions the turn out on the right side of good for you. As always thanks for listening and stay behind the prop.
Thanks for checking out the Behind The Prop podcast. be sure to click subscribe and check us out online at BehindTheProp.com behind the prop is recorded in Houston, Texas. Show creator and host is Bobby Doss. Co-host is Wally Mulhearn. This shoe is for entertainment purposes Only. and not meant to replace actual flight instruction. Thanks for listening and remember: fly safe!