By Jay Adam Williamson

Remember the crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407? The pilots had flown into known icing conditions, which had resulted in a stall. Unfortunately, the pilots failed to take the appropriate corrective action, and ended up worsening the stalled condition, which inevitably culminated in the ensuing crash that occurred.

Tragic happenstances such as these serve as a constant reminder to the rest of us in the aviation community that sound judgment and critical decision making skills are among the most valuable assets of any pilot. When push comes to shove, do you follow your instincts or do you follow your training?

When you stall, your survival instinct may be to pull up on the yoke, to keep you from going down. But in reality, easing up on the yoke, and pitching forward is the recommended procedure in many cases, to recover from a stall.

Likewise, when you are flying on instruments, your natural instinct may be to trust the sensations of movement that are caused by the fluid in your ears that is responsible for maintaining your sense of equilibrium, when in fact you should be trusting your flight instruments instead. Your senses may tell you that you are turning, when in fact you are descending, for example.

So what can the rest of the aviation community do, but to learn from the mistakes of those who have gone before us? We can study their mistakes and learn from them, so that we can better handle similar situations when we run into them in the future.

Having said that, a real flight simulator can serve as an extremely valuable tool to help you better understand the factors that contribute to many aviation accidents.

Using a real flight simulator, you could conceivably reenact any aviation accident by setting up a similar scenario and then playing out yourself. For example, you can configure a real flight simulator such that icing conditions are present, you are flying through overcast cloud layers, at night in sub-zero temperatures. How would you handle the situation if you were to fly into known icing conditions, and your aircrafts wings were about to stall?

Obviously, using a real flight simulator, you remove the panic element the adrenaline rush that comes associated with the survival instinct. So you have the ability to pause, rewind, think, study, and review what exactly to do to avoid getting into, and how to get out of, these types of situations. If you were to simulate the build up of ice on the aircrafts wingtips, what would be your standard operating procedure to eliminate the ice build up? With a simulator you have plenty of time to react.

And so how does this help you in the real world? Obviously, if you have rehearsed and simulated this problems enough times, over and over again, with a real flight simulator, then when and if the situation were to occur in real life during an actual flight, you would be better prepared to act upon the knowledge and information you have acquired through practice.

Thus, you will be able to increase your own chances of survival.

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