My Book

2011-07-01T16:08:00.000-04:00

Gerry Younger

2011-03-17T16:27:00.002-04:00

Guelph's Gerry Younger, 75, whose love affair with flying began as an air cadet in a gliding program in England some 60 years ago.

Gerry eventually became interested in competitive aerobatics and has won the Canadian championship eight times. Planes cost more money than he had at the time so he built one from scratch at the Guelph Airpark,to get the performance he needed.

A highlight of his career was qualifying for the World aerobatics championship in Kiev in 1976. He met Dick Chapman who was a foreman for Wardair and Dick spoke to Max Ward who agreed to fly him and his aircraft to Frankfurt Germany! He and four Wardair mechanics and Dick stripped down his plane for shipment to Germany where they reassembled it to fly to Russia.The Russian pilot was assigned to take the Americans, British, and European pilots to Russia and Gerry told the tale of being taken on a round about way to an airport quite far from where the competition was being held! This was so the his group couldn't get much practice for the show! However, the Americans won the competition, and Gerry did very well! Gerry then flew back to Frankfurt where the same crew brought he and the Pitts Special bact to Toronto!

He has also done the air show circuit and was a solo act at Toronto's Canadian National Exhibition for four years.
"It's a scary place to do it because you lose sight of the horizon over the lake," said Gerry.
For about 15 years he ran an aerobatic training school here and was a training instructor at other clubs. Now a freelance instructor, he flies for fun a few times a week and has no plans to retire.

Look Ma No Hands

2011-03-11T15:50:00.003-05:00

Risk Reduction

2010-08-13T20:12:00.017-04:00

Top Ten Aviation Risk Reduction Steps

Manage risk wisely by developing a set of policies to implement when results are too threatening.

By Dave Higdon

How’s this for an aviation truism? "The best pilots possess the superior judgment to avoid situations requiring their superior skills to survive." While arguably more true than a whole wealth of aeronautical truisms, it doesn’t provide much guidance in our quest to become one of those wiser and more-capable aviators. Which raises an obvious question: How does one develop such profound judgment?

Aviation Risk Reduction Steps

Old, no-longer-bold, aviators (another truism) generally know the answer: by

surviving unwanted experiences. Which reminds us that experience is hands-down the best teacher, something we hear repeatedly. We’re not saying that experience is the safest teacher; obviously, the learning pilot faces elevated risks in the course of gaining the experience from which wisdom grows.

A safer approach, of course, is absorbing tribal knowledge from those sobering hangar-flying tales of others’ experiences we hear and read. Another approach is to sample risky situations from safely within the confines of a full-motion cockpit simulator capable of providing exposure to palm-sweating situations without the, you know, danger. In the end, however, we have to emerge from the sim, leave the comfort of our fellow hangar flyers, and actually put on an airplane and fly it.

Regardless of our degree of skill and experience, the trick to safely nudging the envelope comes in knowing as much about what we don’t know as what we think we know and weighing those factors wisely before we venture forth. And the process of weighing those elements before making the call is a process known as "risk management."

Risk Management Basics

First off, what exactly is risk? Borrowing a widely used formula, we can describe risk as the product of a known threat weighed against the probability of that threat occurring. Another way to express it would be something like Risk = Probability x Consequences.

Our risk-managed learning process begins the first time we venture out alone. Our maiden solo is just the first of such envelope-expanding experiences we’ll face.

What’s the threat in a first solo? The student crashing, of course, or freezing at the controls, or running the plane off the runway, or.... Since it’s our CFIs who urge us into that first solo flight, we can reasonably infer that the CFI has made that risk assessment for us, and gave us the nod when the instructor gauges as low the probability of a bad result.

But the confidence shown by our CFI, who did the heavy lifting in risk-management for our first solo, is the first of a very few times in which we can acceptably cede judgment to another. By the time we embark on our CFI-approved solo cross-country, we’re at the point where all further in-flight decision making is all ours.

Murphy’s Law

Let’s presume you’re a fresh private pilot and you’re about to nudge your experience by launching a long flight for which conditions are forecast to be mostly good. And you really want to make this trip.

The first step in managing the unexpected, according to Kathleen Sutcliffe, an authority in performance management who presented her views at the 2007 Bombardier Safety Standdown, is to expect failure. And manage accordingly. It sounds simple in its philosophy; it’s the execution, though, that divides those who do well from those who don’t.

What if you get en route and the weather heads below VFR minima? The hazard stays the same—an accident—but the probability has gone up. Your risk increases. Can you assure yourself an out? And what outcome can you expect in the event of these bad turns?

Just check the statistics on continuing VFR flight into IMC conditions. You’ll see that they are bad—quite bad. So it’s reasonable to believe that launching VFR into marginal weather is highly risky because of the high probability for conditions to deteriorate around the VMC-only pilot.

Applying our simple formula from above, we easily see the risk of a bad outcome—a crash—increases when multiplied by the greater potential for a situation to go from marginal to bad. In this situation, examining the options in the event of weather taking a turn for the worse is a first step in managing risk.

A Canadian in Aviation

My Book

Gerry Younger

Look Ma No Hands

Risk Reduction