Did you ever hear the saying, “He knows just enough to be dangerous?”  If you’re like me, you know that’s wrong, because the more you know about flying the better you are.  Right?  Well, I’m alive to tell you even the most highly motivated people need to remember that experience without a sense of danger can make you the next candidate for an accident.  Even an experienced flier can be dangerous!

 
First, a story, which like all good safety stories begins with…There I was, Blue Three in a three-ship of FB-111’s on a standard night formation profile out of Plattsburgh AFB NY, with a formation takeoff to air refueling and proceeding single-ship through low level and return to the patter.  All six fliers were highly experienced instructors.  We were all hard liners on briefing and formation discipline, so flight lead’s review of squadron standards specifically included the actual numbers that made up the standards.  It was a normal pre-flight, which meant Blue Two was maintenance delayed.  Since he was the one who needed formation flying, we decided to delay the flight for him.  Always motivated to get the most out of every flight, we took off as a two-ship on a local area clearance directly into the pattern to log some night approaches.  It wasn’t much longer until #2 cancelled for the evening.  Lead was climbing out from his low approach, and just before we reported initial he called for a standard rejoin.

“Heat 23, cleared right wing.”

“Two,” came the crisp reply from us.”

We assumed standard speeds would be used when no speed was given.  A little alarm bell was going off in my head, though, and I had long ago learned to trust those alarms.  “What speed did he give?”

“He didn’t, but he briefed climb out at 350.  I’m holding 400, but give me a good one mile call and I’ll slow to 380.  Passing through 1500 AGL now.”  My pilot, ace instructor that he was, sure knew the night rejoin limits.

I called “one mile, assume 380” and transitioned to visual.  I had my hand on the mike switch and was just about to call traffic off lead’s nose when my pilot went to idle power and abruptly dumped the nose.  Although it was pitch black, I could distinctly make out the tail number printed on the gear door (194—the first FB-111 I ever flew); and I very clearly heard the roar of lead’s engines as we streaked just underneath him.  Except for the quick reactions of my pilot, we nearly became 4 very experienced, very dead instructors!

“I’ve got it,” my pilot said as the windscreen now filled with the dark reflections of Lake Champlain.  His next call to lead displayed the best composure I could imagine.  “Lead, Two.  We’ll stay in cell awhile.”  You can believe there was a spirited post-flight debrief back at the squadron.

It’s not just one thing that leads to any mishap situation, but a string of events.  This time, however, it was a string of altered perceptions that almost did us in.  Lead distinctly remembered his rejoin call being “Heat 23, cleared right wing, 250.”  He wanted to give us a power advantage and he was already approaching 250 on his climb out, so he decided to maintain 250.  Although this was a deviation from what was briefed, it was within standards and normal limits, and he was sure he notified us of the change.

The problem is we remembered the briefing’s emphasis on standards and discipline too well.  We were comfortable in our sleek and deadly ‘Vark and just as distinctly “heard” what we expected to hear in lead’s standard radio call.  Being hard core instructors and strict about radio discipline, we chirped our acknowledgement of his call, comfortable in what we were already doing.  Having just departed the dogleg for initial, we had to slow down to reach what we believed was 30 knots above lead.  Actually, we had 130 knots of overtake at night!

And what about the crossing traffic—a trivial distraction in the story?  Actually, it was lead’s wing tip light.  Our closure was so fast and the night so black that his wing tip light was “separating” from his tail light in a visual illusion I’d never experienced.  His tail light was dead still in our windscreen, neither moving nor growing until almost too late.

Accident figures clearly show experienced fliers are involved in accidents even as they gain experience.  The Air Force Safety Agency’s Data Analysis Branch studied pilot flying experience in Class A mishaps between 1 January 1981 and 21 May 1992 and found that operations-related mishaps involved surprisingly high pilot experience levels, yielding a USAF average of 1762.8 hours of total time and 623.5 hours in the aircraft per mishap pilot.  While they are careful to point out that 60.67 percent of operations-related incidents happen to pilots with less than 500 hours in the mishap aircraft type, that still leaves almost 40 percent with more than 500 hours.  By specialty, the watershed marks for total/aircraft hours were 1712/638 for attack, 2046/704 for bomber, 3019/1408 for cargo, 1622/532 for fighter, 2332/21 for glider, 2264/915 for helicopter, 1100/294 for trainer and 1208/69 for observation.  Somewhere around these points even the most conscientious people may become conditioned by their experience to believe they’re insulated from the mistakes other “less knowledgeable and less experienced” people make.  Don’t confuse this with complacency; it happens to even the best fliers despite great efforts to stay sharp.

At this level of experience mistakes often occur because of altered perceptions and earned comfort rather than complacency or ignorance.  Our experience gets us to the point where we’re comfortable doing dangerous things.  Let’s face it—night rejoins, touching another plane (a.k.a. refueling), and intentionally contacting the ground (a.k.a. landing) are just a few of the dangerous things we soon take for granted as we gain more experience and exposure to them.

What’s this got to do with you?  Here comes the proactive part—what you can do about it.  You can do more to overcome the dangers of experience than more briefings and another FCIF.  USE YOUR SIMULATOR!  Cockpit Resource Management and the Aircrew Attention Awareness Management Program already use simulators to recreate documented crashes and phenomena such as wind shear and micro burst, but go the extra step and use it to train perceptions, not just procedures.  Us it to teach things too dangerous to do in the air—like running into another airplane so you can see what “excessive” closure is, developing an excessive sink rate on final, or completing a classic target fixation scenario.  Use the simulator to take the cockpit crew back to the point of no return and let them study what it looks like when they’re committed to ejection or death.

The way we’ve used simulators in the past often created the perception we can survive any situation in what you can consider the “I’ve never crashed and burned before” syndrome, when we could ust it to train how to recognize impending danger.  If we train people how to PERCEIVE a developing crash, we’re arming them with an additional tool to avoid wasting themselves and their aircraft.

That’s my story and my lesson learned, and it applies to the fighter jock who’s comfortable dive bombing, the trash hauler who’s heart rate no longer goes up facing a min weather strange field approach, or the rotor head who’s got good enough hands to consider autorotation something other than a controlled crash.  With all the changes in our operations (SERBs, RIFs, “feet on the ramp”), there are more people than ever in the “danger zone.”  One of the most important things we do as instructors is give others the knowledge they need to come back alive.  Let’s make sure we’re maintaining the same edge on our more experienced people too!

By Patrick A. Pope

(Published in “The Combat Edge”, June 1993 and reproduced with the permission of the author.)