When planning a flight, how much time do you typically spend assessing the mission’s potential risk?
I can almost hear the mumbles of “not much,” starting with my own response. While pilots often are quick to acknowledge that difficult situations can arise when flying, we tend to avoid considering the broad range of elements that influence risk, or how to manage them.
One pilot who is determined to make general aviation safer, though, has come up with a possible solution to some common flight-planning problems.
A passion for flight safety
Trevor Smith, a retired Air Force pilot who traded his F-15E Strike Eagle for an Airbus A350 airliner, developed Flight Risk Assessment, an online tool that helps pilots decide whether a planned flight is a go or no-go based on several factors including weather, pilot experience, fatigue, and mission complexity.
Smith, who is well-known as Hoover, creator of the Pilot Debrief YouTube channel, unveiled the tool during a recent video. The idea, however, dates back several years to an assignment as wing chief of safety while serving at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina.
“I had built a spreadsheet for analyzing factors that contribute to aviation accidents,” Smith said. He spent years revising, refining his work and wondering how he might share it with other pilots. “Eventually, technology caught up with us, and designing an interactive tool like this became easier. I could not have done this without AI.”
The Aviation Consumer tried out Flight Risk Assessment using familiar flights that we have taken repeatedly, such as Essex County Airport in New Jersey (KCDW) to Lebanon Municipal Airport in New Hampshire (KLEB), and Finger Lakes Regional in Geneva, New York (0G7) to Northeast Kingdom International Airport in Newport, Vermont (KEFK).
Recognizing the Risks
The app is not unduly time-consuming, so there really is no excuse for missing an opportunity to see risk factors more clearly. Pilots spend a minute or so filling out a form that includes information in several categories from mission and airport details to weather and human factors.
In some cases you have to fill in numbers, such as how many hours you have flown in the past two weeks (often zero in my case), while you can simply click to add other factors such as perceived time pressure, a short runway, or flying to an unfamiliar airport.
The app gives a numerical score and shows relatively how much risk each element brings to the proposed flight. Generally, a higher score means greater risk. While this is not a score based on a 100-point scale, it can be used to compare risk levels of different flights and to make adjustments to bring your score down for a particular flight.
Vital Reminders
What I like most about the app is the way it reminds me about potential risk factors that I might otherwise forget. It also has raised my awareness of how risky some of my typical flights can be. Flights between home and airports near our sons’ college campuses, for example, often mix rapidly changing weather with high terrain, short runways, and long stretches with few airports nearby.
I recently looked forward to picking up one of my sons at school in Geneva, New York, and flying home to Vermont for the holidays via Dean Memorial Airport (5B9) in Haverhill, New Hampshire. Running the flight plan through the assessment tool, though, revealed risks I had not considered previously.
While weather for the flights seemed reasonable, the tool pointed out a few factors that gave me pause. Dean Memorial, my new home airport, was still unfamiliar, with high terrain nearby and a 2,500-foot runway, which, while not terribly short, gave up 600 feet to my previous field.
Finally, because our flight home would have to wait until my son’s last exam was over, around 3:30 p.m. or so, I knew we would arrive at Dean after dark, which would be a first for me. I decided there were too many risk factors and drove instead, trading about three hours of flying for 12 on the road.
It felt like the right decision–and gave us plenty of time to catch up with a full review of his first semester. Mission accomplished.