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An aeronautical decision that changed my life CRM-ADM

An aeronautical decision that changed my life In aviation we live in ever changing environments, dynamic scenarios, all dressed up in human factors.   Our performance depends on the decisions we make.   In some cases we see how a decision takes an immense toll on the lives of many. From an early beginning I understood that decisions were the meat of the matter.   During my pilot training I lost friends and acquaintances that took a seemingly small decision, which ended up taking their lives.   I was shattered by the enormous tax on wrong decisions in the career I had chosen.   One moment we were laughing, and the other we were looking for survivors. I had just left my teens, and this accidents were making a mark in my life.   I couldn’t calculate risks as I do now, I couldn’t see threats as I see them now.   I could only ask questions to get the wisdom from others. Wisdom I would gain with many years in my line of work, I needed it then and there. And this is how it ha
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How about some stalls!!-CRM

How about some stalls!! It has been a while since I told the story of how I learned to fly the powerful Helio Courier.   An airplane with so many treats and capabilities for the pilot that it makes you wonder about the team of aviators and engineers who designed it to be tough, to be safe, and to be a pilots joy.             Helicopter jobs were scarce so I learned to fly the incredible Maule M-5 Lunar Rocket.   That move catapulted me to appear in the roster almost every day with flights to every little strip of grass inside the mountains.   Few wanted that job so I was the king of the Maule, and that gave me an interesting status.                           The company had just begun a fixed wing operation delivering mail and cargo, which included a PA-34 Seneca, a PA-31 Navajo and also a small Cessna 172 for the new operation.             Before the Maule no one was going to give me the keys to the Seneca let alone the Navajo, but as soon as I began flying tail dragg
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Poker Face-CRM

Poker Face, We have all seen movies that show the difficult moments inside cockpits.   The tales are plagued with cool demeanor and almost poise composure.   When the subject arises seldom is the image of Ted Striker sweating profusely our benchmark.   This composure is a learned behavior, do you think is a technique? And by that let me tell you how I learned about it. In the beginning of my career I had three moments of truth that showed me how I was to behave if something went haywire.   My first encounter with that solemn demeanor occurred during a helicopter “payroll flight” in the Guatemalan mountains.   I was learning to fly in the area by watching and doing this incredible job.    (“Payroll flights” was the name given to these flights by the men and women who waited for us to bring payroll money to their locations) We had to jump between coffee farms, evading weather and navigating, which at the time was almost all what I could take from my rookie standpoint.   It w
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