EAA Triple Five Flier Volume 40 Number 11

Please…Slow Down! 2016 Rose Marie Kern Everyone today is in a hurry, a cultural phenomenon enabled by the technology we use. Example, watch the TV series Star Trek from the 60s, or even the first Star Trek Movie from 1979… then watch the latest version of Star Trek Beyond. The pace is faster, the pictures, scenes and plot lines leap from place to place. The problem arises when the faster momentum carries a pilot too quickly through his preflight briefings or checklists. Skimming over the highlights can lead to missing essential details that don’t jump out at you. Flight Service specialists I’ve spoken to recently have expressed frustration because they are trying to give a pilot essential information only to have the pilot hang up quickly or say they don’t need it. By essential information I am talking about things like TFR’s and Thunderstorms. If a pilot only wants to file a flight plan with flight service, the specialist is required to ask if the pilot has/needs to know about Adverse Conditions along his route. Listening to audio tapes of preflight briefings, where the flight service specialist was giving a standard weather briefing at a reasonable rate of speed, I can tell that sometimes it is obvious no one is really listening. There is talking going on in the background on the pilot’s end, or you hear the specialist finish the briefing only to have the pilot ask him questions about information that was clearly already relayed. I’ve read the accident reports in magazines and on the NTSB website , and one thing that is interesting is the high percentage of pilots who don’t bother to get a briefing by Flight Service, or through one of the Aviation weather websites before they fly. The winds are light and variable and the sky has just a few fluffy clouds on a sunny summer morning so a pilot figures it is a good day to get his currency. He jumps in the aircraft and takes to the sky for a couple hours, but when he lands the winds have started blowing so hard he flips on landing. If he had bothered to look at the weather forecasts he might have seen that there was a front coming in or that the NWS was predicting thunderstorms with strong downdrafts in the early afternoon. There are many aviation weather and flight plan filing options out there these days. Pilots learn about weather in general way back in flight school, but when it comes to self briefing many of them only look at adverse conditions, current conditions, and winds. I personally guess that maybe one in five actually checks the synopsis to see how systems are moving – or if they do, understand what that movement means to the atmosphere. 5

EAA Triple Five Flier Volume 40 Number 11 | Page 5