Leopard Aviation’s flight school in Arizona prepares students for all aspects of commercial piloting.

Risk management is an essential aspect of safe aircraft operations. Like many potential pilots, you might focus more on the glamorous parts of flying a plane. However, you must constantly attend to risk assessment and mitigation throughout the flight. Leopard Aviation outlines what you should know about risk management in aviation below.

The Anatomy of Risk Management

Professional pilots use aviation risk management to identify, monitor, and avoid current or potential hazards. From the beginning to the end of your flight, you must perform:

1. Risk identification: Upon noticing a potential risk, write it down alongside the details surrounding it. Record details about who is involved, the nature of the risk in question, where you noticed it, and how it could affect your flight.
2. Aviation risk assessment: Next, an aviation risk analysis determines the likelihood for the hazard to turn into an even worse situation. 
3. Risk definition: Which risks pose the greatest threat to your flight? List them in order, starting with the worst. Record your plans to handle these situations should they arise.
4. Aircraft risk mitigation and implementation: Delegate risk management tasks among yourself and other crew members as needed. This step sets the stage by ensuring pertinent parties know what to look for and how to respond.
5. Risk monitoring: Remain aware of the listed risks, adapting your mitigation plans as needed throughout the flight. You can prevent them from becoming major safety concerns with attentive, consistent monitoring.

You might feel overwhelmed about this protocol since safety management systems (SMS) in aviation vary depending on the pilot or company. However, mastering the steps and integrating risk assessment tools at your disposal protects you, your crew, the passengers, and all other elements involved in the flight.

Why Is Risk Management in Aviation Essential?

Risk management in aviation ensures you know precisely what is happening and how to handle it at any moment. Part of flying safely involves intimately understanding the inside and outside flight environments. Risks can take the form of:

• Passengers
• Weather patterns
• Faulty machinery
• Other aircraft

A quiet but strange noise could indicate malfunctioning equipment. The clouds on the horizon might harbor violent lightning and thunder. A passenger could suffer from a sudden but dangerous panic attack.

When facing these unpredictable and sometimes frightening circumstances, you must apply your resources accordingly. Knowing where to place them and creating a plan of action protects your career, the people onboard, and the aircraft.  

How To Execute an Effective Risk Management Strategy

While the above-listed risk mitigation steps provide an overview of what you must do before each flight, they don’t give flight students an in-depth look at how to execute a risk management strategy. The tools, systems, and protocols may vary.

However, you can learn more about what to expect and how to develop your strategy by:

• Being as specific and detailed as possible: Document anything that catches your eye during the aviation hazard identification stage. Ensure your records reflect every detail about the situation that stands out to you.
• Predicting risk severity: Hazard impacts range from negligible to severe. Find out what your company or overseeing party expects from you and what you think is safest when strategizing your next move.
• Reviewing procedures and protocols: Airlines and entities that hire pilots individually typically have procedures that dictate how a pilot should respond. Read through these practices carefully to inform your response.
• Gauging potential resources: The crew, protocols, and safety equipment onboard are all examples of resources you can use to circumvent problems. Consider how you would use them to make the flight safer if a risk unfolds into a full-blown hazard.

Nurturing Risk Management Traits

Pilots who demonstrate exceptional flight safety management hone three essential traits: situational awareness, problem acknowledgment, and sound judgment. You must develop and sharpen these to craft and implement effective and potentially life-saving mitigation strategies.

Situational awareness means staying alert from the time you enter the plane until after exiting the aircraft. Being aware of your situation means you quickly pick up on the seemingly insignificant things since they could snowball into something more insidious at a crucial moment during the flight.

Once you pick up on abnormalities, you acknowledge the problem while crafting potential solutions. Acknowledgment means never dismissing even the smallest concerns. You readily note and describe them, listing the worst possible outcomes that could arise because of the issue.

Finally, you must judge how to respond to the problem based on the worst possible outcome. Should you ground the plane at the nearest airport, or could your crew mitigate the issue while staying the course? Most pilots develop good judgment through years of experience.

However, you can sharpen your judgment skills by listening to experienced mentors, reading books by respected pilots, and mentally rehearsing potential scenarios.

Put Risk Management Into Practice at Leopard Aviation in Arizona

Start your career in aviation at Leopard Aviation in Arizona. Instructors will help you put basic risk management in aviation into practice. Call 480-372-9815 to begin your piloting journey.