Taken from CCAA newsletter:
We all want to enjoy a safe and pleasant flight, and a few extra minutes of calm and dedicated planning before the flight becomes an excellent place to start your enjoyment of the blue sky and that familiar feeling that inevitably overwhelms us every time after safely arriving at the place where a new story begins or a safe return to the people we love and the place I call home.
A proactive and responsible approach of the aircraft commander in flight planning and preparation is a necessary prerequisite for a safe flight. By planning activities for each phase of the flight, by anticipating possible situations, you establish decision points that enable you as the aircraft commander to always be a few steps ahead of the event and maintain complete control over the flight situations.
This approach to flight planning and preparation provides us with the advantages of prior insight into each phase of the flight and ensures an adequate level of preparedness and the ability to respond to changed circumstances by making the right decisions.
On this occasion, the Croatian Civil Aviation Agency has prepared several useful links to materials that can help you prepare, plan and make decisions for a safe flight.
In this material from the Croatian Civil Aviation Agency, you can find the most important elements of good preparation and a short reminder of those preparation activities that will make your flight safe and pleasant.
(Video on Croatian language)
The EASA Aviators Club has produced useful information cards to help the pilot-in-command consider the key procedures to be carried out at various stages of flight in order to conduct a safe flight. In addition, this material includes an evaluation checklist of the most important elements of each phase of flight that allow the pilot-in-command to evaluate his own performance after the flight. An objective assessment of the performance enables the aircraft commander to identify those elements of the flight performance that were not satisfactory and for the preparation and performance of which additional attention should be paid on the next flight in order to eliminate their causes to prevent repetition and further increase safety.
What is ADM (Aeronautical Decision Making)?
A common link in many general aviation accidents is the inability of pilots to make sound decisions. The reason for this may be the neglect of known risks, the willingness to be exposed to conditions that exceed the pilot's abilities, or the lack of information that is necessary for making a correct flight decision (for example, insufficient information on METEO conditions).
ADM provides a systematic approach to the mental processes used by pilots to determine, according to the circumstances in which they find themselves, the best course of action based on the latest available information. In this sense, ADM represents a continuous process that starts before the flight, lasts during the flight and ends with the assessment after the flight, where these are also the three basic categories of ADM. Such a continuous approach especially recognizes the fact that effective risk management is a repetitive and continuous improvement process that requires patience, experience gathering and willingness to learn from own examples and flight performance.
Watch an interesting lecture on the topic of decision-making (ADM - Aeronautical Decision Making) held by EASA.