David Learmount
Student pilots are taught risk management almost from the start. The first risk they learn to handle is engine failure.
When something goes wrong in the air, pilots have two tasks that run in parallel: dealing with the mishap and continuing to fly the aircraft safely. Dealing with the problem can sometimes wait, but the flying your aircraft is always critical. Hence the order of priorities you will keep in your head throughout your career: aviate, navigate, communicate.
Take the engine failure case in a single-engine basic trainer. Early such training exercises are not about preventing engine failure or restarting the machine, they are about managing an aircraft that has become a glider.
Crucial to success is managing a safe airspeed, controlling the angle of descent, and identifying a forced landing site within gliding range. If there is still height – and therefore time – remaining when these are under control, engine re-start can be attempted, but safe flight path management remains the priority.
Studying other people’s accidents by reading the reports – or reliable synopses of them – is good practise for all pilots at all levels. It enables you to imagine yourself in the commander’s seat when things are going wrong and working out what you would do – or what you hope you would do.
Airline fatal accidents are mercifully rare these days. But, sad to say, many serious accidents in the last couple of decades could have been entirely prevented – or at least made less harmful – by the crew. Many such accidents happened because the crew became distracted by a technical problem that would not, itself, have been the cause of disaster, but which diverted the crew’s attention from flying (aviate), leading to their loss of control over the aircraft.
Under the same stress, would you have lost control? When you learn what happened - and how it happened - in real accidents, you become more prepared, mentally, to cope.
It’s impossible and unnecessary to read them all. A selective glance from time to time at the incidents listed on the Aviation Safety Network (run by the respected Flight Safety Foundation), will enable you to choose some reports to read that may have lessons for you.
Meanwhile here, on the Airline Pilot Club blog, I will provide you, from time to time, with stories about accidents that really happened, so you are less likely to have one yourself.
