Richard L. Collins - Tips to Fly By: Thousands of PIC hours worth of tips and tricks of the trade

To be smooth, a flight needs a generous dose of planning and thought.

Virtually everyone who flies also drives a car, and most of us learned to drive before we started flying. Both cars and airplanes are machines used for transportation and recreation, and there is an inevitable tendency to transfer some habits from the car to the airplaneespecially the bad habits. In both cases, the problem begins before the start of the trip.

Before driving, a persons prime interest is finding the car keys. With those in hand, most drivers walk straight to the car, open the door, get in, start the engine, and drive away. If theres any preflight, it likely consists of a glance at the gas gauge. People routinely drive after drinking, after taking medication, and while suffering from any of a wide range of ailments.

Pilots have been known to launch airplanes in much the same manner. Worry not over personal fitness, look the machine over from a distance while walking across the ramp, hop aboard, start up, glance at the gauges, and fly away. There might even be a chart under the seat from the last flight.

Such flights usually work out, but they fail often enough to contribute to the long list of needless general aviation accidents. To get off to a good start and progress smoothly, a flight needs a generous dose of planning and thought. It is true that many things often neglected in flight planning are not critical to every flight, but they can be important to an occasional flight. It is also true that wrong decisions are primary factors in over 50 percent of fatal general-aviation accidents. The bad decisions are often made on the ground, and those made in flight are sometimes influenced by something that was or was not done on the ground before takeoff.

Preflight Planning

Preflight planning suggests a pilot poring over charts, E-6B at hand, electronic calculator nearby, and the pilots operating handbook waiting to provide precise information on the capabilities of the airplane. This is an exaggeration, perhaps, but it may explain why pilots shy away from preflight activity. It can seem complicated, and after you fly for a while, the value of thorough preflight planning becomes less apparent. The winds-aloft forecasts used in those careful calculations are usually inaccurate, making wastepaper out of a flight plan. And more often than not, we fly airplanes well within performance and fuel endurance capabilities, so the limits given in the pilots operating handbook may seem unimportant.

Considering how general aviation pilots drift away from careful planning after leaving the training process, its no wonder the accident rate is bad. We become complacent, take too many things for granted, and fly without a complete understanding of the airplanes systems and performance. The air carriers have a far better safety record, and meticulous preflight planning has a lot to do with it.

This chapter, on the things done on the ground, will not be an exhortation always to go through the tedious planning often associated with preflight deliberations. It is common knowledge that few pilots continue to work wind problems on a computer after training, for example, so there would be little point in insisting on this before every flight. It would certainly be best to make every useful calculation and computation before each flight, but failing that, a pilot does need a preflight system that insures that the essential checks will be made.

The key to a successful preflight is to consider everything . Leave no stone unturned. Make your own personal list and go through it before each flight, much as you run the airplanes checklist. Proper use of any such list comes in recognizing the item that needs special consideration, or work, and giving it the attention it requires.

A very simple list:

The Pilot

The pilot, the first item on the list, is very important. A lot of pilots kid themselves about their own fitness to fly, and while only a small percentage of accidents are related to a specific physical or mental disorder, a large percentage are influenced by how the pilot feels.

A basic problem is alcohol, with about 6 percent of the fatal accidents in general aviation caused by inebriated pilots. Accidents where the pilot had consumed a small amount of alcohol or was suffering from a hangover probably account for a big slice of the pie. Alcohol in any quantity is a no-go item. Even the FAAs eight-hour bottle-to-throttle rule is inadequate if the bottle was a large one.