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 gotten 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 (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 take-off and landing phase of flight is the causal factor in over 60% of accidents. This represents less than 5% of piloting time; an essential place to stay sharp and focus your training in 2026🙏. Have a happy and productive New Year.
Though I have emphasized the value of creative thought (non-AI), these tools, properly constructed, can have great utility. To that end, I created this new SAFE AI that utilizes Chat 5.2. It is trained specifically on the content of the SAFE Blog articles and other SAFE resources. Please give it a try and LMK what you think. It should make finding subjects on this page easier and especially specific articles from the past.
Tell us what *you* think!