"Icebound" wrote in message
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"Dudley Henriques" wrote in message
link.net...
Hi Gene;
I've discovered through my career that I do most of my flight safety
"thinking" in between flights where I have a tendency toward self
evaluation on what I did and what I could have done to make the flight
better.


Sports psychologists will tell you that 80 percent of most activity is
mental and 20 percent physical. So practicing mentally is suggested,
indeed demanded, for high-performance athletes. There is every reason
that it should be practiced by pilots.

Your potential for superior performance is not just based on your skill at
the activity, but your mental attitude... in many very different
categories. So when I see this thread on "good pilots", what does that
really mean? He may be very skilful at extricating an aircraft from an
unusual attitude at 400 AGL, but he doesn't keep a very good visual
lookout. He may be able to flight-plan accurately to the second, but he
skips through the pre-flight. He is real skilful at finding a runway in
200-1/2, so he takes chances and flies VFR into IMC.

Or alternately, he knows every reg in the book, every word of the safety
seminar, but he still skids his turn-to-final, always lands in a crosswind
with side-force on the gear, and becomes a panicked passenger when the
engine fails.

I believe that very few of us are "good pilots". If the required
*mental* and physical skills of piloting were classified and scored
honestly, most of us would score well is some categories and poorly in
others; some *exceedingly* well in some and *very* poorly in others.

Some of us would be mediocre in all.

Only a very few would score highly in all categories, all of the time.
The NTSB is full of multi-thousand commercial "good pilots" who did a
stupid thing, such as this example of empty-tank selection for takeoff:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?e...09X01183&key=1

As a pilot, I can only pledge to try to improve those categories at which
I score poorly. Will I reach a "good-pilot" level of proficiency in them
all? I doubt it. It won't stop me from trying. Will I become a statistic
before reaching proficiency in every physical and mental category? Maybe.
Maybe I know enough about my shortcomings so that I avoid the situations
which I am apt to handle poorly. And maybe I pay special attention to
those mental skills which I know to be weak.

And maybe that is enough to cheat the statistician just a little bit, and
that is all that I can ask of myself.

From my first post;

"The truth is that at any given moment in time, a pilot can be either a good
pilot or a bad one. The trick is to constantly be leaning heavily on the
good" side. "

......and that, as you have so correctly stated, is all we can do, and it's
in doing this to the best of our ability that keeps us in the game :-)

Dudley Henriques