Respect the Holiday Season Pressures

There is a great deal of pressure to go when making a flight over the holidays. Here are some suggestions to improve your level of holiday flight safety.

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Welcome to the start of the Holiday Season-Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, New Year-the highest stress time of the year. Welcome to the season of intense pressure, spoken and unspoken, to make the flight you’re planning to be with your family.

Before you start saying that Scrooge was the more caring member of my family, the point of this piece is to suggest that we pilots take a step back and recognize and respect the pressures we are facing when we use little airplanes to travel during the holiday season. The risk factor can skyrocket because there’s not only intense pressure to go, we may also be facing some of the worst weather of the year and we haven’t made the mental switch from summer to winter flying.

It’s Thanksgiving and the Weather Stinks

I got my initiation into the challenges of holiday season travel via general aviation when I was in law school and wanted to be able to visit family 500 miles away over Thanksgiving. Short version, I had a miserable trip from Ann Arbor to Des Moines trying to avoid ice. I had to postpone the return flight a day because of freezing rain and then had to shoot an approach to minimums back home.

The trip made a big impression on me. I started keeping track of the weather over the Wednesday through Sunday Thanksgiving weekend in the Great Lakes and upper Midwest. For more than 30 years there was freezing rain on one of the five days within a significant portion of that geographic area. I’ve noticed that the forecast for this Wednesday includes freezing rain in Illinois and Missouri as well as along much of the northern half of the Eastern Seaboard.

Shortly after graduating, I went to work for a general aviation aircraft manufacturer. I immediately came into contact with the company’s accident investigators. I soon noted was that they were almost invariably not home with their families on Thanksgiving or Christmas. They could count on being called out on an accident investigation a day or two before Thanksgiving-often having to go directly to a second one right after Thanksgiving.

The same thing would happen at Christmas.

While my Thanksgiving weather record keeping and observations or the work demands of accident investigators aren’t scientific, I, nevertheless, watched general aviation accidents cluster around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years. I looked at a lot of the NTSB reports of those accidents. Most looked to me to be weather-related-and I looked at too many photos of wrapped Christmas presents in and near wrecked airplanes.

I raised my concerns with lousy weather over Thanksgiving with weather experts I respect. They told me that the latter part of November has historically been known for awful weather. Simplified, the weather is making the transition from autumn to winter. They mentioned the horrific November storms that killed so many on the Great Lakes in the steamship days as hurricane-force winds combined with bitterly cold temperatures. They reminded me that the time around Thanksgiving is often when weather causes some of the worst airline flight delays.

Holiday Season Human Factors

Face it, there’s intense pressure within American culture to be together with family over Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas and New Years. Being Americans, we also schedule as much as possible into our time-so we travel at the last possible minute and don’t always react rationally if something interferes with our plans.

General aviation pilots also tend to be Type A folks. If they’re planning to fly the family airplane over the rivers and woods to Grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving, they may have a hard time making that phone call to say they won’t be there. So what if the mag drop is just a little more than allowed by the POH or there’s a 3000-foot layer of stratus cloud with guaranteed rime ice inside over the departure or destination airport?

Are You Really Looking Forward to Dinner?

Perhaps it’s time we look at holiday flying with a little more jaundiced eye than our normally cautious pre-flight risk evaluation. So, as a public service for pilots-to help you deal with that unspoken pressure you feel to get to Grandmother’s house for the opportunity to overeat with a bunch of people you’re related to-I suggest youreally think about how much you’re going to enjoy that gathering. Are you going to risk getting a load of ice to have dinner with Uncle Bob? He’s the family member who can’t seem to accept that discussing politics or religion at dinner is not appropriate and, despite repeatedly being told to hush by Aunt Mary, is going to go on at length about how the country is in a hand basket because it has not been following his far end of the political spectrum ideology. Do you want to shoot an approach down to “I think I can see the lights if I go down another 100 feet” to be seated next to third cousin Heather as she loudly outlines your shortcomings because you didn’t make that loan to her precious son whose trips to the slam were because he’s misunderstood?

Is it worth agonizing over the decision to abort a takeoff when the airplane doesn’t seem to be accelerating right so that you can witness another tantrum by the teen-aged niece or nephew over the menu selection at dinner?

It might be a good idea to take a step back before making a flight this holiday season. Recognize the pressure you’re under to go. Maybe think about how hard you have been scrambling to get things done so that you can get away from work for a few days-and that the stress of the holidays and fatigue of the short nights you’ve had adversely affect your judgment and ability to fly the airplane.

Make the Holidays Fun

These are the holidays; they’re supposed to be fun. When’s the last time you did something to make them truly fun? Why not do something good for yourself and your flying? Yes, you can add a day or so on each end of the trip so that you’re not pressured to go or get home. After all, if the weather is lousy on Sunday and you can’t get home, you’ll find a way to deal with missing work on Monday. Find that way now and plan on taking the day off Monday. You’ll be less likely to lose sleep over the holiday worrying about weather. If you can fly home on Sunday, you get to reward yourself with a day to do what you want to do on Monday.

A Little More Conservative

Be a little more conservative with flight planning. That extra weight of the stuff-food, presents, clothes-that seem to be required over the holidays may put you over gross. If nothing else, the reduction in climb rate may hurt if you do run into ice.

Secure the stuff-getting bonked in the head by a Chanukah gift in turbulence is no fun.

Take a little dual before you go. I’m willing to wager that you haven’t been flying much in the last month or so. Now might be a good time to take the rust off.

When you run through that pre-flight risk analysis checklist, add a few points for the pressure you’re under to go-it’s there, admit it to yourself.

Let yourself postpone or cancel the trip. Believe it or not, even though the in-law the family only lets out of the basement at Thanksgiving may deny it, your family would rather have you miss this year’s gathering because you said the weather was too bad than have you miss all of them in the future because you decided to push it.

Rick Durden holds an ATP with type ratings in the Douglas DC-3 and Cessna Citation 500 series, is an aviation attorney and the author of The Thinking Pilot’s Flight Manual, or How to Survive Flying Little Airplanes and Have a Ball Doing It, Vol. I.

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