The senior FO I flew with yesterday had a great acronym for what’s important to protect, and in what order, when flying: A Arse. T Ticket. P Paycheck. Keep me safe, keep me legal, and keep me employed. Sounds about right! And actually kinda follows our official flight standards priority philosophy of: 1 Safe. 2 Legal. 3 SOP. .
Tag: safety
Always Have a Backup
So this happened today. My airline ID, FAA pilot certificate, FAA medical certificate, FCC licence, vaccination records for accident site access and more — hanging by a string. Without that secondary tie, I could have lost them all. Easy aviation lesson: Always have a backup. A secondary HF frequency, enough fuel for an alternative airport, a spare battery, another option. …
Gene Kranz on Spacemanship
“An engineer can explain how a system should work (in theory) but an operator has to know what the engineer knows and then has to know how the systems tie together to get the mission accomplished. If the systems break down the operator must make rapid decisions on fixing or working around the problem to keep the mission moving.” Gene …
Reasonable Rational Individuals
“Most accidents originate in actions committed by reasonable, rational individuals who were acting to achieve an assigned task in what they perceived to be a responsible and professional manner. They have probably committed these same unsafe acts before without negative consequences because the existing conditions at the time did not favour an interaction of the flawed decisions or deficiences present …
The Impossible Climb
I was lucky enough to get an advance review copy of a new book coming out in March 2019: The Impossible Climb: A Personal History of Alex Honnolds’s Free Solo of El Capitan and a Climbing Life, by Mark Synnott. It’s pretty dang awesome. Highly recomended. Alex Honnold, the world’s greatest climber, went 3000 feet up shear mountain face, alone …
My Book Says . . .
Shoutout to all new safety clipboard holders! Hope Santa bought you a shiny new hat, and a deep appreciation of how work really gets done in dynamic tightly-coupled high-risk professions.
The Air Is
“The air is an extremely dangerous, jealous and exacting mistress. Once under the spell most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age. Even those masters and princes of aerial fighting, the survivors of fifty mortal duels in the high air who have come scatheless through the War and all its perils, have returned again and …
Life Itself
“Accuracy means something to me. It’s vital to my sense of values. I’ve learned not to trust people who are inaccurate. Every aviator knows that if mechanics are inaccurate, aircraft crash. If pilots are inaccurate, they get lost — sometimes killed. In my profession life itself depends on accuracy.” Charles A. Lindbergh, in his 1953 Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography The Spirit …
Love Me and Know Me
High risk, high reward, being passionate is a safety attitude, all expressed much better by Richard Bach, from his classic 1974 book A Gift of Wings.
Doing Something Uncomfortable
An aerobatic glider instructor I respect a lot counsels pilots wearing parachutes to do one tandem parachute ride. To eliminate a lot of unknowns. To be safer pilots. To experience the fall, the rush, the wind, the brain overload — so that if you ever need to bail out you will not freeze; rather you will orientate and have the headspace to pull …