Being overly confident in your planning and yourself can create serious safety problems. Confidence is a requirement for safe piloting, but ironically, too much confidence can be toxic. Cognitive biases like predictive perception and optimism bias can totally blind us to hazards. A healthy humility (and even paranoia) is a valuable safety tool.
Retain the useful paranoia that your perception or your plan may be flawed…
A lack of “Level One situational awareness” (failure to perceive a threat) is the #1 causal factor in the majority of accidents (76.3%). A healthy paranoia (or personal humility acknowledging “I might have that wrong”) functions to tune up your awareness. “Vigilant flying” has been the focus of many SAFE Blogs is an excellent ongoing resolution to maintain safe operations. This is especially important as we accumulate more hours—the “high time threat” of extensive experience.
I just dusted off an older blog from 2017, “Mario’s Rules.” This article focuses on advice from a Vietnam Combat veteran who accumulated 125 missions over North Vietnam (including 5 distinguished flying medals) without injury or loss of life. His “three rules of survival” emphasize staying alert and vigilant despite some seemingly repetitive and commonplace activities. Maintaining humility (and a little fear) is one Mario’s Rules for safer flight. Especially remember that the common takeoff and landing phase of flight is the causal factor in more than 60% of accidents. This represents less than 5% of piloting time, and it marks an essential place to stay sharp and focus your training in 2026.
Though I have emphasized the value of creative thought (non-AI), these tools, properly constructed, can have great utility. To that end, SAFE has created a new SAFE AI that utilizes Chat 5.2. It is trained specifically on the content of the SAFE Blog articles and other SAFE resources. We’ll be putting to the SAFE membership to give it a try and let us know what you think. It should make finding subjects on the SAFE blog archives easier, and especially specific articles from the past.
Have a happy and productive New Year!
