Self Evaluation

These are some exercises designed to help you learn a little about yourself -- your attitudes, your style of responding, your knowledge of aviation.

Think of this as being similar to the check-up you get from your physician, only here there are no needles. Just like your physician is looking for any indication of impending disease (for example, high blood pressure), what we hope to find are any factors that might place you at increased risk of being in an aviation accident.

Remember though, that just being overweight, smoking like a fiend, and eating a dozen eggs a day doesn't mean you will necessarily have a heart attack, but it sure increases the chances. In the same way, having a high score on these exercises doesn't mean that you are going to have an accident the next time you fly. But, in some studies we conducted earlier, people with high scores tended to have more close calls and accidents than those with low scores. The bottom line is that having a high risk score is a signal that you should look more carefully at how you fly. It also means that you should seek out some training to help control those risk factors -- either the training here on this site or from a competent instructor, or both.

Before you try one of the self-evaluation exercises, please create a Call Sign, if you have not already done so. This is optional and just lets us keep track of what kind of pilots use these exercises.

Hazardous Attitudes Your attitudes affect the way you approach problems and how you search for solutions to problems. This exercise will help you determine whether you have any hazardous attitudes that would place you at increased risk of an accident. There are two versions of this self-evaluation exercise that you can try.

Hazardous Events Accidents are like the tip of the iceberg. For every accident, there are many hazardous events (incidents or just scary moments) that don't turn into an accident. If you are having a lot of these events, then you may be at greater risk of being in an accident. Complete this scale to see how you compare to other general aviation pilots.

Pilot Judgment How do you think your judgement stacks up against the experts? Try this exercise and you can compare your solution to some common, sticky flying situations to the solutions recommended by our panel of experts.

Safety Locus of Control Are you the master of your fate or the victim of luck? Your attitudes about those issues can influence how you fly. This short evaluation scale will measure how much you believe you are in control and compare you to a large number of other general aviation pilots.