Aeronautical Decision Making and You

As a private pilot, I’m in a community of individuals who are very focused on safety. We pride ourselves on careful planning, use of checklists, and our ability to abandon a plan if conditions begin to change. This involves a very disciplined process called Aeronautical Decision Making (ADM).

However, as the world witnessed with the tragic deaths of Kobe Bryant and eight others aboard a Sikorsky S-76B helicopter January 26, 2020, even with all of our striving for safety above all else, accidents still happen. The best we can do as pilots is try to understand what went wrong and study ways to try to prevent it.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is tasked by congress with investigating all aircraft accidents. When they’re done, the issue a statement of probable cause indicating why they think the accident occurred. In over ninety percent of the cases, a decision made by the pilot either caused the accident or directly contributed to the accident happening when it needn’t have. Here aret a few examples of probable cause taken from the NTSB aviation accident database:

• Contributing to the accident was the pilots' decision to conduct the flight with known mechanical deficiencies.

• The pilots decision to perform an aerobatic maneuver at a low altitude from which he was unable to recover.

• The pilots decision to land and failure to maintain control of the airplane during landing in gusty wind conditions.

• The non-instrument-rated pilot's decision to depart into known instrument meteorological conditions, which resulted in his spatial disorientation and overcontrol of the airplane and the subsequent in-flight structural failure.

Reading this, it’s tempting to rationalize the information by believing some variant of, “well, those were just bad pilots. I’d never make that kind of mistake, so my passengers and I are safe.”

The problem with this rationalization is that it’s simply not true. The vast majority of pilots will tell you that they’re extremely safety-concious, and yet pilot decisions contribute in some way to almost all accidents. How can this be?

We know well that when placed under certain kinds of stresses, all of us will make poor decisions, and it’s no less true for pilots. When we’re stressed, fatigued, sick, or emotional, we are at increased risk for poor decision-making. And while you often cannot prevent those things from occurring, you can come up with a plan for what to do should you notice them.

While your poor decisions might not make you the subject of an NTSB investigation, they can certainly cause undue strain on your relationships at work and at home, and have a measurable impact on your quality of life. Take a look at the times you’ve made poor decisions (it’s ok, we’ve all made them), and examine your life leading up to them: I’ll bet in most of the cases you’ll find factors that compromised your decision-making abilities.

My clients learn techniques for recognizing and improving decision-making performance under stress. I’d be more than happy to help you learn them too.

Stay safe.