AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - 90
P&E
PROFICIENCY
to know if your landings have improved over
time more than your judgment, so it is no
wonder that pilots choose to focus on things
they can grasp and measure.
Psychological concepts such as personality, attitude, and self-awareness are hard
enough to grasp on the ground, let alone in
the air, so our best approach to hazardous
attitudes is to revisit what the information
was intended to do and why it is important. The most measurable gauge of any
new development will be to see how well it
accomplishes the original goal.
Hazardous attitudes were made part
of the aviation lexicon the same way we
identified not using checklists and captains
silencing junior officers: We figured out
they were crashing airplanes. Attitude is
only one part of the decision-making study,
with the point that factors such as attitude
have a major impact on judgment-especially when they remain unconscious,
and especially when under stress. The
five identified attitudes consistently led
to poorer decisions that could accumulate into accidents, and the pilots involved
never saw it happening. Attitude training
was intended to give us the tools to save us
from ourselves. So many procedures were
developed because of the requirements of
the aircraft and the flight environment;
this may be one of the few times in aviation where the optimal procedure is not
standardized, but customized.
Each pilot has different desires in flying, brings different skills to the table,
and develops differently over their flying
career. Even in one individual, the complex interaction of attitude (which can
change) with personality (which probably won't) is likely to vary with time
and experience. But the one thing that
remains consistent is that attitude manifests in behavior. It is the why behind the
what-something the original study got
dead right. So, each of us can gain deeper
insight into our own flying: We don't have
to start with probing who we are, or what
lurks in the unconscious; we just have to
look at what we do and start to consider
why. Attitude will either make you a better
pilot or it will stop you from advancing,
and what it takes to move from one to the
other may be completely unique to you.
90 | AOPA PILOT April 2019
If the last time you thought about hazardous attitudes was prepping for an exam,
then any amount of time spent reflecting
on what kind of pilot you are will be beneficial, even the time you have taken to read
this. What, for example, would be a good
attitude in flying? We have seen how bad
attitudes lead to wrong decisions, and we
focus a lot on a culture of safety, but we
haven't yet identified if there is a consistent
attitude among the best pilots that we could
all learn from. Could we overcome hazardous attitudes altogether by identifying an
attitude, set of beliefs, or approach that is
optimal for flight?
Here is an idea to get started: Go back to
the origin of attitude training-the learning
zone-and develop your own ways to incorporate it into your flying. For example:
* Make it part of your debrief, or even
briefing. Instructors say that the best learning happens on the drive home, when the
pilot thinks back over the flight in a relaxed
setting and integrates his or her experiences. Think about the good decisions you
made, the decisions you were less comfortable with, and ask yourself what reasons
you had for each.
* Enrich your hangar flying. Assess other
pilots' stories or NTSB reports in terms of
motivation, and look for attitudes revealing
themselves in behavior. Is there anyone at
the airport you aren't comfortable letting
your family fly with? Why? It probably runs
deeper than their flying technique.
* Get a coach. Everyone gets some kind of
recurrent training-a flight review at minimum. The best pilots get more frequent
sessions with a CFI, or even the perspective
of another trusted aviator riding along. Ask
for a candid assessment-do they see something that you don't, patterns or habits that
you are overlooking? And be prepared for an
answer you don't like; improving isn't easy.
If attitude is important enough to teach
in the first place, it is important enough to
improve. And the advisory circular that gave
us aeronautical decision making made us
better instructors and better pilots. Let's
keep advancing it.
AOPA
VALÉRIE THIBODAUX is an art crime
researcher, private pilot, and advanced
ground instructor living in Oregon.
http://aopa.org/assuredpartners
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019
Contents
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - Intro
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - Cover1
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - Cover2
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - Contents
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - 2
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - 3
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - 4
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - 5
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - 6
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - 7
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AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - Cover3
AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - Cover4
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