The next hour

Few years back I read Richard L. Collins book “the next hour”. The book discussed the most important hour in any pilot logbook, which is the next hour.

Collins said that “Pilots don’t crash airplanes because they want to, therefore they call them accidents”, but even experienced pilot do. He suggested that understanding and managing the risk inherent in flying is the best way to stay out of an accident. Collins said that he keeps a his log book current and when he passed his 10,000hrs of flying, and pilots were responding to his number of flying hours with something like : “Gee that’s a lot”, Collins reply was always “Yes, but only the next hour counts”.

Few weeks back I started reading Paul A. Craig book “The Killing Zone”. The author considers the book as a survival guide for pilots identifies the pitfalls waiting inside the killing zone. The book identifies the killing zone as the period between 50 to 350 flight hours when the new pilots leave their instructors behind and fly as pilots in command.

Both books are written to increase the pilot awareness to the risk and potential accidents that lies ahead. The books are different in their focus on two different pilots categories, seasoned and nonseasoned pilots. However both books overlap in few common grounds, which can be summarized in the following:

Pilot experience is very important in building the decision-making skills of the pilot, though while the pilot is building decision making skills he starts to build some complacency toward the risk items. Often experienced VFR pilots run into adverse weather condition, MVFR and IFR (for non-IFR rated pilot) because of the overconfidence he has in his experience.

Just understanding the risk doesn’t make us safer or better pilot. We need to know or learn how to manage those risks. When accident happened we can assume that the pilot subject of the accident took some kind of risk or mismanaged a risk that a safe pilot wouldn’t have taken or would have managed differently.

The pilot thought process matters more than his experience, because with organized thought process the pilot, irrespective to his experience, is more prepared for the different situation he may face while he is flying and he can, most of the time, overcome the situation by selecting the safest option or process to follow.

Pressing on at all cost didn’t and doesn’t work. Pilots have to be constantly prepared to take “no” for an answer to the question of flying into terrain or obstacles, to stay in VFR condition. Pilot should abort bad landing if they don’t feel that the approach is right rather than end up in the trees or short of the runway.

I hope that we all embrace the proper thought process, be risk avoider, especially unnecessary risk, and think about our next flying hour as the most important hour in our logbook. We need to land safely and log the hour and think about next one.