Real time risk assessment: it could save your life

Flying Safety, Oct, 2003 by James Peterson

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How many cliches should a pilot have to endure? Stick around long enough and you'll hear them all--from "Safety is paramount" and "Slow down to speed up" to "Don't do anything dumb, dangerous, or different." Although they are sometimes flawed (after all, the mission is really paramount), there's a good reason we still hear them year after year. Grudgingly, we must accept the fact that these advisory cliches can prevent mishaps--no matter how trite they may sound. Also, they eventually point toward a key ally in mishap prevention--risk reduction.

Of course, this risk management business can be carried too far. Imagine my surprise during the opening brief of a NATO exercise when the commanding two-star general declared, "Most importantly, we will take no risks." I whispered, "Are we going to fly?"

The Air Force has spent a great deal of time and money over the past several years promoting risk management as a means to preventing mishaps. Since we cannot keep statistics on accidents that were avoided, it is impossible to quantify the impact of such a campaign. My pitch in this article is to convince pilots and aircrew that one key component, Real Time Risk Assessment (RTRA), must be a conscious part of every mission they fly.

"Conscious?" you ask. Well, it is a certainty we all subconsciously do things to avoid risk during missions--for example, glancing at engine instruments, clearing for traffic, listening to radio chatter, and monitoring our wingmen--all of which lead to risk reduction. By seeing potential dangers or oddities early, we can easily adapt and make changes to eliminate serious consequences.

The conscious things we do to reduce risks (performing checklists, making radio calls, requesting flight following, etc.) go mostly unnoticed as risk reducing agents because they are so common--and sometimes required. However, there is another side to that conscious risk reduction that we must incorporate. This is where RTRA enters the picture.

What is RTRA? Simply put, it is a constant evaluation of the changing risks being encountered as a mission proceeds. Of course, risk is dynamic. It changes as conditions change. We've all seen the preflight risk evaluations with point values assigned to various categories. These evaluations only provide a snapshot view, but they can be used to help aircrew and supervisors evaluate expected risks. Once those expected risks change, that evaluation is no longer valid. This is an extremely important point.

RTRA takes risk assessment beyond the snapshot view, making it more useful during a mission. This is because you're experiencing real things--deteriorating weather, poor communications, unresponsive wingmen, poor ATC control, AAA or SAM fire--and you must make immediate risk management decisions based on these factors. Remember the cliche... "Flexibility is the key to airpower." RTRA is that flexibility.

Does RTRA matter? Consider this: From 1993 to 2003 roughly half of 393 Class A mishaps were directly caused by human factors (these are mishaps attributed to operations--I did not look into logistical human factors causes). Even more startling, mid-air collision and controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) mishaps accounted for 69% (231 of 336) of the Class A fatalities over the same period. You may want to read that sentence again--and let it sink in.

So, yes, RTRA matters. Human factors mishaps are easily the most preventable mishaps. Why? If you look at enough of these, it becomes clear that a different course of action, or a single verbal input by someone along the chain of events leading to the mishap could have easily prevented it. In most human factors mishaps, it boils down to a failure to recognize and avoid (or lessen) a situation of increased risk.

So, how about all these mishaps we may have prevented? Here are some personal examples. On my recent fini-flight in Germany, I received a call from squadron operations as I was taxiing out. They told me my scheduled range had just closed due to a fire hazard. On my fini-flight?! Are you kidding me? They offered me the alternative of using a range I had not briefed, had not been to in over a year (the one time I'd ever been there), where the weather was good enough for low altitude bombing only, and with a slot time I should've already been airborne to meet.

Tempting? C'mon...who wouldn't want to drop bombs on perhaps their final flight in the A-10? My RTRA debate, however, was quick--nope, sounds kind of dumb to me. Despite the "encouragement" of my wingmen, it was my job as the flight lead to think for all of us.

On the other side of who thinks for whom, there was a readiness exercise sortie where I was number three in a four-ship. The newly certified four-ship flight lead was desperately fighting bad weather trying to get an effective mission for the exercise tally. Unfortunately, the cloud heights were clearly not acceptable. Does a training exercise change our weather minimums? After my first not-so-subtle prompt went unheeded, I was forced to play my instructor pilot/squadron supervisor card and simply make him abort the mission.