Windy Days, Long-Windedness, and World Wars

Happy Remembrance Day everyone. I hope you all had time this morning and did better than me to pause for our veterans. I missed my chance at 11:00 AM to give a minute of silence, as I was loading the airplane and pre-flighting for my first flight of the day and 11 AM slipped right past me. As I taxiied out I checked my watch to record the time up and it was 11:11. I guess the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month will have to do. I sat at the end of the runway lined up and ready to go, the engine idling, as I gave a moment to ponder our veterans of the 2 World Wars. I could only manage 15 seconds before I had to cut it short because there was an Embraer 110 on final behind me closing fast.

It was windy today. Very windy. Gusts on the surface started out strong, and got stronger as the day went on, but I was lucky in that the wind direction was lined up within 10 degrees of the runways on both ends of the flights, so I didn't have much crosswind to wrestle with. But it did mean I had almost a direct crosswind for the cruising portion of the flights. It was quite fun actually, the upper winds were pushing 50-60 knots, which meant my wind drift was almost 30 degrees. You always have at least a few degrees of drift (the angle between the heading of the airplane and the actual path its travelling), but I don't think I've ever had as much as I did today. When flying I find it difficult to wrap my mind around pointing the airplane 30 degrees to one side of where I actually want to end up. Its unintuitive to keep where you want to go that far away from directly in front of you. Once I had the airport in sight I had to resist the urge to steer directly towards it.

Since the winds were so strong I couldn't resist the chance to see if I could slow the airplane down, and turn it into the wind to see if I could stop the airplane in midair altogether. The slowest I managed was 8 knots groundspeed on the GPS, which pretty much looks and feels like a standstill looking out the window. The 206 with its Robinson STOL kit can land and stop in an impressively short distance to begin with, but today with the winds I could have it down and stopped in under 100 ft with full flaps and a nice slow approach speed. What fun!

The high winds picked up as the day went on as a result of a low pressure system moving in from the north. I could see the weather system moving in on on the trip before, the winds were getting quite strong, and we were pretty much out of daylight, so when I taxied in I figured we call it day. Normally we would have called it quits, but the next load included some electrical supplies, which HAD to be there that night. Apparently there was an electrician that had been flown up the coast and he was leaving the next day, so I agreed to brave the winds, rain (which didn't turn out to be that bad), and darkness to get the job done. Technically we're a day only operation, but we can fly the airplane just like a private operator for repositioning flights and such when there isn't any paying passengers or freight onboard. So I had to make it up north with the load before official night-time, and the flight on the way back which would be empty would be legal to make.

It made me think about the idea of managed risk. Its the essence of commercial aviation. In one sense you always want to mitigate the risk as much as possible, but at the same time there is a job to do, and customers that are counting on you. Private pilots have the luxury of just deciding not to go flying if the weather isn't exactly how they like it, but its a bit more of a delicate balance with commercial aviation. In this case NORMALLY we wouldn't have made the flight, cause they can usually wait a day or two for more pop and chips, but today they couldn't wait on the electrical supplies - at least not without incurring a great deal more expense. So I thought about where do we draw the line? By doing the flight both the company and myself were exposing ourselves to a certain amount of MORE risk/danger than usual, but we were still charging the same amount for the trip, and the consequences would still be exactly the same if I bent up the airplane (ie. expensive repairs/possible injury). So why did we make an exception for this flight? At first it seemed like we should decide on an acceptable level of risk and never cross that line under any circumstances, regardless of the urgency. If the immediate rewards were still the same (in the form of X number of dollars paid for completing the trip), why increase the risk?

I came to the conclusion that its not always that simple. Sometimes its just good business sense to increase the acceptable level of risk in certain conditions. Like I said, the essence of commercial aviation is to manage the risk, not to cap it. In that case I was still very sure I could make the flight safely, as was my boss, so that temporary increased risk was worth the reward, intangible as it may be, of proving ourselves able to be counted on by our customers. From a business standpoint that makes the difference. If it was just another usual pop and chips run that could wait, it wouldn't make sense to expose ourselves to the increased risk, because it wouldn't make such a big impression on the customer. But when it mattered to the customer, it mattered that we came through, and as a result will be around for that customer to call on us again to use our service. Safety is always counter balanced by running a viable business. If we cancelled flights too much out of "safety", the company would go under eventually. In the other sense, running a viable business also to some extent contributes to safety. If a company crashed or bent up an airplane every week it wouldn't take long to go bankrupt. Obviously there's a threshold where it just isn't worth the risk, but that threshold can be different for every flight.

I joked once that I was going to start up a competing company to the one I work for now. My fleet would comprise of Cessna 150's cause they're cheap (I'd operate them two-crew, for safety of course). That way in addition to not doing any sort of maintenance whatsoever, and hiring extremely low time pilots at minimum wage, I'd be able to offer much lower prices than my competitors. When an engine seized up or a wing fell off out of lack of maintenance and crashed in the bush I'd just buy another Cessna 150 and hire a couple more pilots. Its the perfect business plan... right? Anyways back to the serious discussion.

Flying freight in higher-risk situations is one thing, but what about exposing passengers to increased risk? That can sometimes be a tricky situation. When I'm flying freight the only one that's exposed to that higher level of risk is me, and I have the ultimate go/no decision, and I'm well aquainted with the level of risk for that particular flight. Not so with passengers. Most passengers would have no idea of the level of risk that they're being exposed to, and generally trust 100% that they're not being put in harms way. Luckily I found however, is that MOST of the time that works itself out, simply by the fact that flying in weather that increases the the level of risk an appreciable amount, is weather that is far beyond the level where most passengers would be scared crapless. Usually when its a passenger trip with questionable weather we cancel the flight out of fear that the passengers would be airsick, or scared crapless, or otherwise be convinced we're crazy to go flying (and choose not to fly with us again) long before we'd cancel the trip out of a genuine risk to safety. So in that sense consideration for our passengers' sanity (so they DO fly with us again) generally prevents the need to asses the actual risk to safety.

I'm essentially separated from the business side of the decisions, so I never have to weigh the safety vs. the business gain. Its a good thing, I've come to realize a long time ago I'm not a very good businessman. My job is JUST being the pilot. Somebody else gets to decide whether or not it would make good business sense to try to attempt the flight. That doesn't mean my fate is left to someone else though, or that I just skip the decision making process altogether. My job IS the pilot. Its still my right and responsibility to consider whether "I" think I can do it safely or not. I don't have to consider the business ramifications however, my decision is based almost entirely on if I'm gonna come back alive or not. In practice however most of this is all just theory, because my employers are ALL pilot's themselves, so they can generally make a pretty good decision all on their own, with the exceptions that sometimes they need input from me on current weather conditions (since they can't see it for themselves from the airplane) and my particular skill-level (although by now they know my skill-level fairly well).

So that was my thought process provoked by the flight today. Writing it down may have been long-winded and far too over-analytical for the actual importance of the event, but I won't apologize. Its my blog.