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Safety Starts Before You Go
by Master CFI Bill Cornick
Pilots stumbling into TFRs, breeching the ADIZ
around the Nation’s Capital area, or bumbling into various classes of airspace
are symptoms of what Master CFI Bill Cornick sees as “one of the most consistent
errors in the cockpit: a lack of pre-takeoff planning.”
Inadvertently entering
controlled airspace is not the only problem resulting from poor advance flight
planning. Fumbling around for frequencies, searching for information on charts,
and unawareness of current and forecast weather conditions, are a few of the
other situations that can divert a pilot’s attention from controlling the
airplane and bring potentially dangerous results.
“Why would anyone take off
without knowing where they are going,” Cornick asks. “Yet I see pilots taking
the runway without having prepared the navigation equipment (GPS, FMC, VOR,
etc.) for the departure routing or first waypoints. From the time we are kids
learning to play, it has always been: Get ready. Get set. Go. I have never heard
it said: Go, Get Set. Get ready.”
Proper and thorough advance
planning and preparation for a flight are necessary for every flight but they
are essentially critical in a single-pilot IFR environment, Cornick cautions.
His advice: “Plan the Flight
and Fly the Plan.”
Master CFI Bill Cornick is
a retired airline captain with in excess of 24,000 flight hours. He is an active
air show performer and air show competency evaluator for the International
Council of Air Shows. He is an Aviation Safety Counselor for the FAA. He
instructs in the Soccota TBM 700 for the West Coast TBM dealer.
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