A New Standard in Aviation Education
I had the privilege of presenting AOPA Air Safety Institute Safety Seminars for eight years. The new spring seminar “NONTOWERED CASE STUDIES: WHAT WENT WRONG?” is going to be yet another excellent product given around the country by ASI’s outstanding presenters. This seminar schedule will begin in early January 2017, so I encourage you to go to AOPA’s website and find a seminar near you – you won’t regret it. Here is what AOPA has to say about this seminar:
It doesn’t matter what source you reference, the data is still the same. Statistical analysis of pilot-related aircraft accident causes point to the same six areas of operation; fuel management, weather, takeoff and climb, maneuvering, descent and approach, and landing. If you grouped all of these accidents together they would make up approximately 70% of all accidents. Over the last ten years, the statistic of pilot-related accidents has remained near 70% of the total accidents. The irony is that most, if not all, of these accidents were preventable at some point. So the question is why? Are instructors missing something in the training process? Do we focus so much on maneuver accomplishment that we fail to emphasize the other related areas to the maneuver? Are we really striving to get to the correlational level of learning? Do we need to re-focus on what should be required for a pilot certification? Is it a lack of education or a focus on the wrong material? Could it be the inability to accurately assess personality types and educate students based on those observations? It seems like all of these areas may have something to do with this statistically high cause of aircraft accidents. But it all comes back to the individual and the way they choose to view, and respond to, every situation.