Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. It is just about exactly two months until the gun goes off in Salzburg. So for the Red Bull X-Alps, things are a little bit crazy right now with training and just life. It's been nuts. I was just out in California for a month. I'm back home now. The training has been incredibly intense. Also, at times, fun, but mostly incredibly intense. tents, so and then about a month from now, heading over to Europe with the family, we'll have three or four weeks before the race to get it all sorted out and be over there with my team. And so, yeah, it's all happening. That is pretty exciting. I have just launched a way for people to contribute to that, not to us personally and not to, you know, to myself or the other guys in the U.S.
Team Cody Mittanck or Willie Cannell, but I thought, you know, I was kind of just cruising, cruising around online either night thinking about, there's got to be a way that we could raise money for a good cause using the X-Alps, and I'm pretty cognizant that it's this massive undertaking and it's, but it's also pretty selfish and, uh, I thought, man, there must be a way, you know, like people do these kind of things when they run a marathon and they get people to pledge, you know, per mile, and that money goes to a really good cause. Well, the foundation for free flight is, is one of these great causes. It's all staffed by volunteers. They do a ton of work with protecting sites and supporting free flight in a lot of different ways.
They're terrific people, they're a terrific organization. They have supported us quite generously in the past X-Alps races and also the world's team. But even if you're not obviously a US-based pilot, pilot, which many, many of you who listen to the show are not. They do do really good work and it's important for the flying community. So we've got this Pledge It campaign. That's the platform. If you go to the website cloudbasemaham.com, you'll find it on the homepage where you can pledge just a, you know, fine item out, five bucks, 10 bucks or something. But you can also pledge by the kilometer. And I just thought that'd be a really fun way to make the race a little bit more engaging. aging. So, you know, like a penny a kilometer kind of thing or something, which would be just make the race fun and, and also throw some support to a really good cause, the Foundation for Free Flight.
So I wanted to give them a shout out there. I have been super, super busy, not just with the X-Alps, but with the boat. You know, some of you know, I have this whole kite surfing expedition called the Cabrinha Quest. We've been running it for many, many, many years. I used to to be the captain of the boat, and now I just run the back end, and we're finishing up on a big long one-year refit and getting ready to go do another five years around the world, and that's not me anymore; it's just the boat and the business and the members and all that kind of stuff, so I've been really busy with that. I bring that up because I have been getting a ton of, uh, you know, I always do, I get a lot of emails and texts and stuff and, uh, messages from you, the community, recommending people to get on the show. And I really, really appreciate that.
I just haven't had the bandwidth to, I'm sure I'm missing some people and I'm not getting back as I should. And I just apologize for that. But also if you do reach out with those, if you could do it through the website and send me an email through the contact page, because then it's at least in my inbox. I will find it. I will get back to you. I will log those people better and reach out to them And because when it's done on Facebook, it just disappears into the Internet. It's gone. And I don't use Facebook enough. I don't use the messaging thing hardly at all. I know that's an easy way to do it, but there's just no way for me to keep track of it there because so many people message through that. So if you could, if you do have someone you want to hear on the show, I take those very seriously.
I will reach out to them. I will try to line them up, but do it through the website if you could. That would help me out a lot. I've talked about in the last few shows that we're switching over from Patreon to our own subscription service. So we will bear more of the cost of that and more of your money if you donate and support the show. We'll make it to the show and not these other platforms and taxes and all that kind of stuff. So I think it's a good move. It turns out it's been quite a bit more complicated and quite a bit more work than I anticipated, but we are almost there. It's actually live on the website, but it's not looking real great. We still need to kind of just clean it up and do a lot more testing and making sure it works. It does work; several people have already done it. I appreciate that, but for now, stick where you are—either through PayPal or Patreon, or however you've supported us in the past—and we will get this up and going here very, very shortly.
We have been working on this weather show, uh, that's going to be multiple podcasts. It'll be in a few different series; it's really aimed at helping people, people identify the day. So we're asking people about their weather flow. So we're kind of going to experts and asking them how, how they identify good days. And we're talking to people in different parts of the world. So depending on where you live or where you're traveling to, we hope to kind of hit it, you know, the Himalayas and Australia and New Zealand and the States and the Alps and the UK. So it's proven to be a big task and a lot of editing, But I think you're going to like it. We're just about ready with the first one, so that'll be out here, hopefully, in the next couple weeks. But we're still looking for a few different people in different areas.
So, if you have, if you know somebody at your local club, or you just know somebody who's a real wizard with weather and can explain it well, uh, you can kind of talk in layman's terms, then send them our way. Let it, let us know, and we'll try to get them, we'll try to get them interviewed presentations. I'm, I'm booked for a couple of presentations in Europe this summer when I'm going to be over there. So, you know, between kind of May 20th and the end of August, giving X-Alps presentations. I've been doing this in various spots around the world at comps this year. It seems to be well received. It's been a lot of fun. So I give a talk, this kind of multimedia thing on the 2015 and 2017 races. And I suppose after this race, I'll be able to add that to it, which will be kind of fun. So if you have a club or you want me to come and give a talk, just reach out to me.
I'll try to fit it in. And it might be hard before the race, but I'd love to do it afterwards because those have been quite fun. And this show. So this one is with a friend of mine, J.K. Nicholas. He is a commercial airline pilot. He's been flying paragliders for an awfully long time, but he admits in the show that he's definitively a sport pilot. And not a huge sender or a Jedi by any means, but he loves flying. And he's been a commercial airline pilot for a long time. He reached out to me quite a long time ago about TM, threatened error management, and said, "You know, hey, I think that, you know, this is something that really got developed big time in the airline industry in the 90s after a series of accidents, and they really looked at, you know, human error, the psychology of why people make mistakes.
It wasn't, you know, it wasn't gear, it wasn't the equipment that was usually failing; it was just people making typically a cascade of mistakes, not always, sometimes they're just one critical one. But anyway, they really looked into this and they have, in a lot of ways, solved this problem. I mean, obviously there are still accidents, but the accident rate went way down, and there's a ton of crossovers here with, with free flight, and so I found this pretty fascinating, and we talk about internal and external threats and how they can lead to errors, although they don't always have to, so you can go directly to an error without any threats." But, you know, so the kind of nuances of that whole thing, you know, the headspace you're in, the food you've had, how you feel, you know, how confident you are in a certain day, you know, kind of like internal threats and then, you know, external threats, other people in the air, weird air.
Anyway, I think this gives us something to kind of fall back on, even if it's not something you really consciously use. I think it's good for us to know so our subconscious can maybe drift back to it in times of need so please enjoy this fireside talk with jk nicholas jk
Awesome to have you on the show. I really appreciate you, uh, literally flying into town to do this, and, uh, I always call these fireside chats, but we're literally having a fireside chat. So, listeners, you're gonna hear some crackling of the fire here on a nice evening in Marshall in Southern California. So, uh, JK, we're going to talk about TM. You're an airline pilot and you're a paraglider obviously. And, uh, we're going to talk about Rick Brazina's crazy dust devil flight that all of you listening, I'm sure have seen that went crazy viral down in Manila recently. And, uh, the article that came out of that in cross country and how that relates to TM, EM, Threat and Error Management. So let's start there. What is it and why are we going to talk about it?
Yeah,
well, thanks for having me on your show, Gavin. Like I say, I'm not one of the best pilots in the world, far from that, but I have a little something here that I hope I can pass along
to paraglider pilots and hangy pilots as well, anybody in free flight. And I just want to say, Again, hats off to you, Gavin, for doing these podcasts. It's a treasure trove of information, and it's doing a lot of really good things for our community and hopefully making people safer. And that's the hope here. A little bit of history. In 94, some psychologists at the University of Texas, psychologists that were focused on human factors and safety, they got their hands on some really detailed commercial safety investigations of accidents. And they walked into it knowing that pilot error is pretty much the cause of most accidents. But they knew that there had to be something more to it than just pilot error because pilots don't intentionally make errors.
And they wanted to uncover how and why it happened. And after looking at all of these investigations, they found out that for the most part, there's things in our environment, in our flying environment, that can trip us up and lead us down that road to making errors. And they called those things threats. And threats specifically, not just any kind of threat, not like a mugger in the park or an active shooter. We're talking about threats to flight safety. Threats can be anything from weather to new equipment or dehydration or hypoxia, any number of different things that could be in our flying environment. So threats are ubiquitous
in a sense. They're everywhere.
They are. They're there all the time. sometimes we expect them, sometimes we don't. But the the biggest takeaway is that threats that we are not aware of have their way with us and threats that we are aware of and are expecting and we have a plan for them, those are the threats that we manage effectively and thereby prevent the error from occurring. So it's kind of like a it's a chain not of errors that causes an accident but But it's a chain of threats and errors, and you're much better off managing the threat and not having the error than managing your errors and not having an accident.
And that's how this kind of upside-down pyramid, the symbol that you guys use on your flight card that you all wear when you're up in the cockpit flying these airplanes, it's like you describe it as kind of an upside-down ice cream cone. So, in other words, it starts with threats, it leads to errors. If you don't catch the error or errors, you end up with an unstable aircraft.
That's right. And the cone can be divided into thirds. The top third is the biggest one. That's the threat or the threats. And then the middle is the errors. And then the one at the bottom, the one that happens the least but is the most consequential, is the undesirable aircraft state. You're always trying to keep things at the top. Manage the threats first, deal with that, and everything works great. If you—if you miss something and you don't, you're mismanaging a threat. Then it may work its way down to an error, and then when that happens, you need to recognize it and repair it. And if you do, then you go back to managing threats again. Everything's good with your flight, but if you don't, then it could—it could progress down to an undesirable aircraft aircraft state.
And that could be, it could be a stall or a spiral or just a simple vector into terrain. And that you need to correct. And if you don't, you have an accident. So the neat thing about threat and error management is that it's an effective tool for forensics. So you have an accident and maybe you're confused about how it happened and you want to uncover the reasons why why it happened. And so you take the accident and then you figure out what the undesirable state was and you find out what errors led to that undesirable aircraft state. And unfortunately, in our sport, a lot of times we stop at the error. You know, the error is almost obvious in some cases. And you say, okay, well, this is what the guy did wrong.
Don't do that. And everyone says, yeah, that's obvious. Don't do that. I'm not going to stall at 20 feet off the ground. I'm not going going to do that. And then in time, someone else does. And they don't look beyond the error. They don't look at the threat that led the pilot to that error. And that's what we need to focus on when we fly. We need to focus on the threats. And when we're aware of what they are and we can manage them effectively, then we reduce the error tremendously. And so that's the focus of this this threat in your management so
JK, the, uh, one of the things in your, in your kind of ride up with TM, you know, very common problem that the airline industry, you know, figured out in '94 with these psychologists and they instituted TM, was that there, there typically isn't just like something that happens and that's it; it's a chain of errors. It's a number of threats that don't get identified. Identified threats can lead to errors. The errors don't get repaired or recognized, and then you end up in this unstable aircraft state. Is that correct?
undesirable aircraft undesirable
aircraft state. UAS, so you know, in paragliding speak, that's, you know, the—you you've spun, you've stalled, you've balled it up, uh, or you screw up a launch, you screw up a landing; those are also undesirable, terrible aircraft states. I always think about, I think I've told this story on the podcast before, but I'll tell it again because it's a great one. And this is definitely TM now that I know what it is, but I didn't back then. But Matt Beechinor and Nate Scales were flying Sun Valley a bunch of years ago. This was before oxygen was being used and, you know, things were a little more cowboy. And, you know, for whatever reason, you know, Maybe it was a little less sleep than normal, or an extra beer the night before, or the hike that morning.
You know, physiologically, something was a little different with Matt, and he takes off, and he's not even that high yet. He's like 13,000, which in some valleys, pretty low, and calls—far calls—Nate to just check in on the radio, and Nate answers back, like, "Dude, you sound like an idiot. What's going on?" And, uh, and Matt checks his radio because he feels fine, and he calls again, and Nate's like, "You sound like a four-year-old. Something's wrong with you." And then, right then, he starts losing his hands, and he loses his elbow, and he loses all the way up his arms, and he's like, "Holy cow, I'm super hypoxic." And, uh, so he, you know, he kind of like does the Jesus Christ thing, you know, hands out through the toggles all the way up to the shoulders, so he can feel and he can pilot his aircraft, and he goes and lands, you know?
So that, I mean, as I understand it, isn't that kind of pretty exact tem. So there were some threats you, you know, there's the physiological threats, there's the threat of flying a paraglider at high altitude, but he recognizes it. There's some errors, too. He gets hypoxic, you know, he doesn't have oxygen, but he recognizes it and he repairs it, and we never get to the undesirable aircraft state, so pretty classic TEM. Yeah,
that's an excellent job, and that's kind of how it works, exactly. Exactly. But if he would have been aware of hypoxia before he went, maybe he would have recognized some of the symptoms before they took a hold of him. He could have been able to recognize it himself. I was in the Air Force for 25 years. And one of the requirements in the Air Force is every five years you have to do what's called a hypobaric chamber flight. I'm sure you've heard of a hyperbaric chamber, which is what they do if you have the bends in diving and they pressurize it and puts you back to a level where your nitrogen can go back into your blood. Anyway, hypobaric is where they suck the air out and they put you at altitude so you can experience hypoxia. And the reason they do that is because the hypoxia symptoms are different for everyone.
Some people react in a way that they get drowsy, their mind wanders. Some people get punch junk happy. Those are the fun ones. And, um, anyway, the point is that everyone has a slightly different reaction to hypoxia and they do this so that you can recognize your own symptoms should they surface. You know, like you said, once every five years is what you have to do there. So that helps with threat awareness. And Rob Sporrer just recently in one of your shows, you asked him what he would recommend to pilots, uh, um, to be more safe. And what he came up with, one of the things he came up with was fly with other people. And that's what Matt was doing.
And the reason that's so important is because it expands your threat awareness. Maybe you don't see something, but one of your flying buddies does. And he brings it to the surface and mentions it. And that's what happened here. And that's a really positive way to get the threat awareness side of the house. The other thing to think about is when we have threats, especially if we have these internal performance decreasing threats like dehydration, fatigue, hypoxia, they can combine. And although you might be able to deal with fatigue one day, if you're fatigued and dehydrated, then that might take you to an even lower level. And now you can't perform, you can't do what you have to do to remain safe.
How
do they teach you guys to identify threats? You talk about when you're before you, I found this fascinating that you make way more errors as airline pilots than free flight pilots because there are so many errors to make. There's just pages and pages and pages of checklists with every flight. So you just, you know, it's inevitable that you're going to miss one or two. And, you know, it's the reason airplanes aren't falling out of the sky is there's so much redundancy and there's so many checklists to cover the other checklist. But how do you, how do you learn to get better at identifying threats?
Let me just start by saying that a lot of these checklists and procedures and, and call outs that we have in the airlines are built in threat mitigation. You know, in order to manage your threats effectively, you have to, uh, you have to have, you have to have defensive, in, in some cases, defensive, uh, measures in place to prevent these threats from causing, uh, causing problems. And so we have a lot of that stuff built into our procedures. So with all those procedures that we have, we have a greater likelihood of create causing an error when we fly because we have so many more things to do, and, and, uh, it's not just, just with the procedures that we do, but also the communications with air traffic control and a number of other things that we have going on. A lot of those mistakes are inconsequential, but they're still mistakes.
They're still errors. In paragliding, we don't have nearly as many. We don't have any procedures for the most part. We don't really have any airspace to deal with other than to avoid it in certain cases. What checklists we have are the ones we make up ourselves prior to launching, that kind of thing. So, there aren't as many to make, but when a paraglider does make an error, then they're usually not inconsequential. They're usually an error that's got to be dealt with and corrected. And so, that's the reason why airline pilots make so many more errors. And it's okay to make errors. I mean, there's no such thing as a perfect flight. Every airline pilot realizes that. They strive to be perfect in every flight, but they know they're not going to be. The important thing is that you recognize the errors that you're making and, you know, you correct them before they cause a problem down the road.
Do they teach you any kind of specific skills to recognize, you know, a potential chain of errors or even just recognize, you know, the more than the normal threats? Are all pilots in your industry kind of equipped, would you say equipped better than free flight pilots are in general just to recognize, oh, wait a minute, okay, there's the this and this and this. I got to break this chain.
Yeah, I think that there's a certain safety culture in place. You know, definition of culture is just something that everyone is clued into. to. Everyone knows what you're talking about when you talk about something that's part of your culture. And so in the airlines, they make threat and error management part of our culture. And every airline pilot is pretty well versed on what a threat is and what to do with one when it surfaces. They're also aware that they lead to errors and they understand how that process works. And the best way to stop that process from taking its course to an accident is to disrupt it. And And so I think in those terms, we're better equipped than a free flight pilot.
But I think that that's something that we can change. And I think that if free flight pilots understand how that process works, they're going to have some tools to work with to prevent the threats from taking charge and turning things into errors and then running it down, you know, into an undesirable aircraft state. What are the tools? Well, the number one thing is to take care of the threats, because if you do, then the threats won't lead to errors. So the focus is on your threat. And it's a very deliberate system that you can use. And there are basically four things that you can do to mitigate your threat. I call it the threat mitigation toolkit.
kit. The first thing you can do is avoid it if you can. Just don't let it get in your way. If you know there's turbulence somewhere, go around it. If it's a bad day to fly, don't fly that day. And I know sometimes it's hard to do that because it looks like it might be okay and then you commit to flying and now you're in the air. So then you have to step into the next thing that you could could do. And the next thing is passive safety. And that's something you have to think about before you fly. Usually that's protective clothing, helmet, gloves, boots with good ankle protection, things like that are passive safety, but also the wing that you choose. You know, that's a big one.
You're flying a triple C or a B because there's a whole lot of built-in passive safety in the B wing. And that might be the wing to fly on the day you, you choose to fly. And then the other two things that you have in your toolkit are a defensive safety and, uh, by definition, defensive safety is something, is some action that you need to take prior to encountering the threat in preparation for it, whether it happens or not, and by
Prior, you mean training? You mean SIV? Or you mean immediately prior? No.
I'm talking about immediately, immediately prior. For instance, when you're launching, there's a possibility that you could have turbulence after you launch. You could fly under thermal, you could have a frontal. And so you do a torpedo launch because it puts you in the right body position, not only to keep your wing open, but also it puts your body in a good PLF position in case you end up coming down onto the ground. You're not going to come down on your back, you're going to come down on your feet. I think that's why we do a torpedo launch. I think Mitch Riley mentioned in his podcast not long ago, he thinks that pilots should have a torpedo position when they land, and for the same reasons. Yep. It's defensive. It is, and it's because a PLF is all you've got left.
You're not going to be able to throw your reserve if you suddenly come down hard on a landing. That's not an option anymore. more. All you've got is a PLF and you can't decide just before you do a PLF to put yourself in a PLF position. It doesn't work. If you're sitting back in your harness and you're 20 feet off the ground and you suddenly get dropped, you're going to get dropped on your back. And so being in a PLF position before you need it is the only way that you're going to have it. And that's defensive. That's defensive threat mitigation. And there are lots of other examples. For instance, if you're scratching on a cliff or steep ridge in a thermic site, I mean, in Hawaii, it's pretty laminar coming in off the ocean.
But if you're at the point of the mountain, for instance, there's a good chance that a thermal could come through your ridge. And if it does, and you take a collapse on the mountainside or on the hillside wing, the wing's going to turn you toward the hill. hill. And you need to weight shift away from the hill. So my first instructor was Santa at the point. I worked with him for my first week of training. And he said, you know, if you know that going toward the mountain is bad and you want to go away from the mountain when you're scratching or when you're close to a ridge, you should have a little bit of weight shift away from the hill at all times. That's defensive safety. So that if you do take a collapse, then you've already begun your weight shift and you just have to increase it to something that you need in order to fly straight or fly away from the hill.
So that's an example of defensive safety. And finally, the fourth thing that you have in your toolkit is active and reactive safety. And a lot of times that's what we rely on, especially with turbulence and taking collapses. we have to react to that collapse. The thing that you have to keep in mind is if you have a lot of weight on your active reactive safety, as far as your toolkit goes, then you better not have too many threats that lower the bar on your ability to perform. So in other words, and I'm looking at you square in the eye right now, Gavin, and I'm wondering how you're going to pull this off. But when you go to X-Alps, you're going to have a lot of active reactive safety that you're going to have to rely on, especially if you fly in some ratty lease side stuff.
And that could be after being up for, you know, 14 hours and, you know, on your sixth day of five hours of sleep, dehydrated maybe. And, you know, your bar is going to be lowered on your ability to perform. And maybe that'll be offset with your adrenaline. I don't know. But anyway, anyway, whenever you're, whenever you're thinking about your threat mitigation, you've got to take into account all your threats, not just the one that's on your, um, you know, on your plate at that time, but all the threats that you have to deal with that day and think about how you're going to deal with them if they surface, what's your plan. So be aware, have a plan. And, um, You're already two or three steps ahead of the guy that's clueless and encounters a threat with surprise and confusion, so that's really the—that's the gist of threat and error management.
If you had to describe it in a breath, it would be threat awareness with a plan, okay?
you you use the analogy of the art of war in your write-up uh and some similarities with that awesome book uh and and also chess. Kelly Farina talks about it in Mastering Paragliding, the analogy of chess. And we've all heard this analogy of chess with paragliding. I'm surprised how often it comes up. But Kelly really talks about it offensively. You use it to talk about it defensively with TEM. Can you explain that?
Yeah, that's right. I really enjoyed that analogy. And I know it's used a lot. And I think it's used mostly in terms of offense, Because people talk about cross-country paragliding like, like it was chess, because you got to think two, three, four moves ahead, you know, if you're going to get from point A to point B. And, um, uh, I take the analogy one step further, and that is you can't be a good chess player and just be thinking about offense if you're not thinking about defense also. Also, you're gonna have a checkmate on your hands, so you got to be mindful of the defense as well. And the interesting thing is the first, I think it's the first chapter in Kelly's book. He's got this diagram. It's like the first thing he's got in there of any kind of diagram or picture. And it's a pyramid of progression. And he talks about how you build, uh, the skills that you need to reach the peak.
Uh, yeah.
At the bottom are like foundation, foundational stuff and all that kind of stuff. And then on up. Okay. That's
right. That's right. If you flip that triangle upside down, I, well, let me just take a step back real real quick. That pyramid, although it may not be just about offense, I see it mostly as the offensive side of paragliding in terms of the chess analogy. But if you flip it upside down, it becomes defense. And it becomes the symbol that we use for threat and error management. You know, how the top of the pyramid is your safe flight. The top third of the pyramid is your threat that you have to mitigate. And then the one in the middle is the error. And if you can't manage that, then it goes to the undesirable aircraft state that points at the ground. And then if you can't correct that, then you have an accident or an incident.
So it's kind of the whole thing upside down. And I think that the saying goes, the best defense is a good offense. And that's true if I'm playing you and you're playing me in the same game. But that's not the chess we're talking about. The chess that we play is against Mother Nature, and so we're not up against an equal opponent. So that, that, that goes right out the window. That's not the best defense. Um, you have to think of things a little bit differently, and you know, as far as a one-on-one game goes, but yeah, I think that the chess analogies is great, uh, and I think it also applies to defense here's
one though that, you know, one of the things that I'm caught with all the time, and and you actually talk about this with guiding and big, big mountain skiing and backcountry skiing and touring and that kind of thing. Um, a lot of the risk that we encounter in the backcountry, a lot of the threats are really pretty hidden. You know, we might know that, you know, we've got a persistent slab problem and we've got, we should avoid these kinds of angles, you know, and these, this slope and this perspective, and and we could, we could think we're being really safe and we could ski something that didn't go, and it might have been one percent and we wouldn't have a clue.
We'd go back to the car, we'd have a beer, we'd go home. We had no idea that we were pushing it that day, you know? We really thought we nailed it, and I think that that is just totally parallel, parallel with paragliding, you know, that, that we, I think we're often right on the edge and we don't know it, um, because we haven't identified, we haven't accurately identified the, the risk in that one situation. And every flight is so unique and it only takes that one time. So how does, how do we use TEM more effectively to know how close we are to that, to going over the edge? Yeah,
that's a great question. And, you know, one of the big disadvantages we have in paragliding, not so much in hang gliding, but in paragliding, you know, I like to say that one of the coolest things about paragliding is that you can take your wing and fold it up into a pile the size of a rucksack when you're done flying. And the bad thing about paragliding is, you can fold up your wing into a size about the size of a backpack while you're flying. And, and it's true, it we have we have a collapsible wing, and if you fly it into turbulence, you are introducing a threat that you need to manage, and the threat is something that you can't see. it's the air. I mean, sometimes you can, you can see signs, but But, you know, you just, you can't see air and you can't really see that it's doing something that you don't want going over your wing.
So that's a huge disadvantage for us. You know, you have to react to that. You have to react to turbulence with an input, active, reactive. And if you do and you keep your wing open, you've done your job. And I had an SIV instructor one time that said, you know, your job is to keep your wing open. open. My job is to teach you how to fix your wing after you don't. And that's kind of when the light bulb came on for me that, you know, if you have a collapse, you made a mistake. And it's really, really hard to accept that sometimes when the turbulence comes out of nowhere and it hits you with so much force that there's no way a normal human being could keep that wing open. open but just because you flew your wing into air that required superhuman skills and reaction
Doesn't mean that you didn't make a mistake; you made an error, and now you've got to deal with a wing that's partially open, um, or not open at all. And, uh, so that could result in an undesirable aircraft state really fast, or you could be faced with another threat; you could be faced with the a wing that's partially open that you can fly straight. That's not an undesirable aircraft state by the book. You've just got another threat handed to you. You got a wing that's partially open. So the threat, although you would think there's no way that I could do that, no way I could keep my wing open with that kind of turbulence.
Theoretically, as far as the model goes, you should have been able to. And if you didn't, then you've made an error. Now you've You've got to correct that error and get yourself back to a safe flying environment. So it sounds a little theoretical in some ways, but the model still works even in those conditions, even with our classical wings. I
think it's interesting and valid, too, to talk about the turbulence and the wing balling up. But statistically, those are still a tiny fraction of where accidents happen. Accidents happen landing. And, and then launching and then way down the line is something happening in the air. You know, it's just not, it's just not, it does happen, but, um, you know, most of the accidents, uh, happen near the ground, like you've said. So how can we use, I mean, that's, you know, getting plucked. Rob talked a lot about this, uh, in the last podcast. I don't want to go over that again, but I mean, how can we use TEM there?
there in the critical, what do you call it? I love this. Critical phase of flight. Critical phase of flight. Right.
And in the airlines, below 10,000 feet, we have what we call sterile cockpit procedures where you're not allowed to talk about anything unless it has to do with the flight. You can't talk about the last stock you traded. You can't talk about your drive into operations that morning. All you can talk about is what's going on with this airplane and and things that are pertinent to your flight. And when you get above, the reason is, one, is you're fairly close to the ground. You're below 10,000 feet. But another is because you've got a high density of air traffic below 10,000 feet, because that's where general aviation operates. And you can't afford to not get a radio call in a timely manner. They would alert you to traffic or a number of other things. So we have the sterile cockpit procedure.
procedure. Even lower we have, and it's not a defined altitude, but anytime you're in the approach mode, I'd say below a thousand feet, you're in the critical phase of flight all the way to landing. And then at the beginning of the flight from takeoff until you get to at least a thousand feet, you're also in critical phase of flight. I
love this, this sterile cockpit mode. I mean, we could have, we need a different terminology, but you know, How many accidents have we all seen? Because, you know, you... somebody's been distracted on launch. They don't do their, they don't do their checks. They haven't clipped in. They haven't clipped their helmet. They haven't done their leg straps. You know, somebody just died this season down in Columbia, forgetting to do their leg straps, fell out of their harness. Yeah, it happened just like you said. Uh, I have thrown my reserve and it wasn't attached to me. Everybody's known knows that story. It happened to a guy down in Columbia this year, and you know, he got hurt pretty bad, but he got lucky. Uh, but you know, you... You don't want to rely on luck, but that's one of those classics like, well, yeah, but, but I won't do that. That's stupid. You know, so that's, that's exactly where TM comes in.
But if you had this sterile cockpit approach to launching and landing, um, I think why landing gets a lot of people is yet, you know, you've just had this Epic flight. You're tired. Uh, you know, you might've been out there for hours. Maybe you haven't done enough training to have been able to fly for five or six hours and you're, you're pretty beat up. but you're still flying. So you don't recognize it. You know, that your, your mind is just not totally there. And often after we land after those kinds of flights, you have this flood of like, whoa, I am a zombie, you know, but you just were flying a paraglider. So you were obviously a zombie five years, five minutes ago as well, right before you landed. So, um, but if you had this kind of like, Hey, heads up, I'm still flying this aircraft here.
It's just Brad Gannuccio had that terrible, uh, 50 feet off the deck coming into in Chelan, where it was just like, you know, you're coming into a soccer field next to a river. How could the air be bad there, you know? And he got hit and went in from 50 feet up, so I like that concept of just having this kind of external cockpit approach to flight.
right or just consider takeoffs and landings as a critical phase of flight and eliminate as many external threats as possible. And what you talked about, some of the internal threats that can get you are insidious, especially the ones that affect you more toward the end of the flight because you're tired or you're dehydrated. You probably didn't start out that way, but at the end of the flight, maybe those things become more prevalent. And it's really hard to recognize those because they're internal and they just come up on you very very gradually. So when you do come in for your approach and landing, you almost have to ask yourself, okay, how am I right now? What's my state? What am I dealing with as far as threats goes, particularly the internal threats and external threats too?
Are there dusties in the area? Is anybody else having issues with whatever's going on? And sometimes a radio call can help a lot, and and a radio call can be very timely, uh, and alert you to a threat that you weren't aware of. That's why I always advocate people fly with radios, because that's your—that's your avenue or your channel to receive inputs on threat, and that just widens your threat awareness envelope. And then that goes along with flying with others; same thing, flying with others and flying with the radio are two great ways to increase your threat awareness. And then another thing that you were talking about in terms of what can you do and how can you know what to look for, particularly in some of those not clipping in type situations or when you're getting ready to launch,
is that threat and error management works really well both ways. You can start with the accident and work it backwards, find out what the errors were. Yeah, you didn't clip in. Don't do that. Okay, I won't, and that's a disservice to everyone if you have an accident that involves something like that and you don't take it to the next level and explain what it was that caused you to make that error, whether it was a distraction, or you were in a hurry, or you had a new harness and you didn't—you weren't familiar with clipping in. Um, I have to admit, so
Work it back through the errors to the threats, you know? Like, in my case, when I threw my reserve over the desert and and it wasn't attached, you know? The night before, I switched all my gear. I was super tired, I was sick, uh, you know, it was dark. I didn't want to wake up my girlfriend, you know? So I was kind of doing in the dark, and it was like midnight, and then I had to get in the car early the next morning and drive down and hook up with Cody and go practice acro over the desert. You know, it's a whole litany of threats there that
You know that I was out of it. Well, here's the thing about the airlines: if there's an accident or an incident, it gets looked at very closely. There's an investigation and there's a board and these guys get together and they find out what mistakes were made, why they were made, and they identify the threats. And then they turn around, and normally they'll either change the way we do our training, or they'll change up the checklist, or they'll change a procedure, and they'll give us built-in threat mitigation through their findings, and they'll change the way we fly, so
the chance of that accident happening again or radically reduced, exactly. You don't see the same thing over and over.
If it's, if it's just somebody had a, it just made a mistake and and they couldn't really bring it back to any kind of threat, the guy just screwed up. They'll send him back to training and they'll get that person straightened out. But if they find an error and uncover a threat that caused it, that could also surface and trip up another pilot somewhere, then likely they'll institute some kind of threat mitigation throughout the entire operation. Now, here's the thing. No one's going to do that for us. We don't have anyone looking at our accidents and doing investigations and uncovering all this information. It's up to us to do that. And we can. We're enabled if we understand this model. It's the same model the airlines use. You just step it back and identify the threats that induce the errors.
And then once you identify them, come up with a plan of mitigation. Come up with a plan to manage them. For us, with the clipping in, we can build a little defensive mitigation called a checklist. We can make a checklist that catches those things and do that checklist every time we fly. And if we don't do the checklist because we forgot it, or we were in a hurry, we made an error. That's an error. And and now, and now you're, you're thinking things through a little bit more of the way the airlines work, the way airline pilots fly. Now you're introducing more air, and you're into your game, but it might be inconsequential, but it's still an error. And it may not matter that day, but one day when you got, when you have a new harness, or you're in a hurry, or you got distracted, now you're depending on that defensive checklist to catch the error, and uh, and it'll save
You, I love how this ties into the last show in some ways with with Rob, because we were talking about Revis's, uh, checklist. He has this thing where if he makes three mistakes before he takes off, he doesn't fly. And the mistakes can be, let's call them errors, we'll stick with tm. If, if the errors are, they, they can be really minor, but if there's three, then he sits back and goes, "Wait a minute, what's wrong with me today?" I mean, that could be as little as, like, he forgets to put his phone on his flight deck or forgets to turn his tracking on, you know, stuff that you can easily do in the air, you know, but that would add a little bit of risk. So, I love that's a great system that I think everybody should just take on board right now, but
capturing the threat at the air level right and And maybe there are inconsequential errors or errors he's making before he flies, but he can step it back and say, okay, I'm pretty tired today. Yeah. Or I'm, you know, I've got something on my mind right now that's not letting me keep my mind on flying. Yeah. And, and so he's actually, that's pretty advanced. He's using threat error management on the fly. Yeah. That's pretty good.
Yeah. I mean, and it's, it's, but we need, we need a means of identifying these things. We need a means of identifying that you're tired. We can all be tired and we know we're tired, but you know, without, without having a something that we can feel and hold and touch and see like that, you know, like this, this real easy checklist. And that's just, that's, that reaffirms, Hey, you're, you're tired, but you're also, you're not thinking very well, you know, um, I'm going to be tired in the X-Alps. That's inevitable. It'd be, if you train for it and all those things, but in, even in the X-Alps, like there there was a day in 2015 where I launched and my harness was all screwed up, you know, because I was, I wasn't thinking clearly and I just spun around and top landed and, you know, but it was radically, you know, it was a pretty on day.
It was really increased my risk, you know? And so on a recreational day, I would have, if I'd had this system, I would have not flown. It would have been like, Oh, I know I'm not even clipping in correctly, you know? So, so let's, let's, Let's run from that. Describe the difference between threat and error management and risk management.
Great dovetail, because I was just going to talk about that with what you just said. Sometimes we are tired and we know we're tired, but we still decide to fly. And that happens. But from the minute we leave the ground until the minute we touch down again, we're committed it to that flight. And if we launch knowing we're tired, which will happen, the important thing is to realize that and understand that it's going to lower your level of performance. And any other threat that you need to manage that requires you to use active or reactive mitigation, threat mitigation, like for instance, flying through Leaside, maybe it's a 15 kilometer day of wind and you decide it's okay to go on the lee, maybe that's okay when you're on your game.
But if you're tired, maybe that's not the day to do it. So that's a good way of looking at the difference between threat and error management and risk management. Now, risk management is still valid, and we still use it in the airlines. And I think everyone should be using risk management. But risk management is a little bit like taking all of the bits and pieces, is all of the different threats and errors that you can think of that are going to be valid or possible for that day and assessing them before you fly. You know, the most important thing to do, I think, is define these things. If you have to manage something, you should be able to define it. And the definition of risk is the likelihood or probability of something going wrong and the
the consequence of what happens if it does. It's, it's sort of a two-part thing, and you, you could have, you could have a day, uh, you know, you could, you could have a—I can't, I can't think of a good example off the cuff, but um, if, if something goes wrong and it doesn't affect anything, there's no risk. If some is a very small chance of something going wrong and there's a massive amount of loss if it does, that also is a risk. And risk management is important. Risk assessment, I should say, I think is more important. But it's something that you do before you fly. It's something you do to choose whether you're going to fly or not that day. And in some cases, if you accept a large amount of risk and you decide to fly and you're aware of that risk, then you You change the way you fly.
You change your flight accordingly. You keep a larger margin of safety when you fly with a lot of increased risk than if you flew with less risk. Now, once you commit to flight, it's very difficult to manage risk, in my opinion, because risk is a cocktail of threats and errors. And you're much better off keeping your eye on the ball and focusing on individual threats as you go when you're actively flying. I think it's just too much for the dynamic flight environment that we have as pilots. I mean, obviously, if something like a massive cumulonimbus shows up, you know, that's going to be a gimme.
It's an obvious risk that you don't want. You're going to have to land. You really should land. But if you're dealing with lots of little things, a little bit tired, you're a little bit dehydrated, you know, you've got a little bit of turbulence, you got a new wing, all those things combined equal risk. But it's going to be a lot harder to deal with those at a risk level. It's going to be, you're much better off as a pilot to focus on the threats and the errors while, like, while you're flying. I think of risk as something that you use to decide whether you're going to fly or not that day. It's something that a comp safety director would use to decide whether or not they would have a task that day.
But once you start flying, risk and error management, I think, is the way to go, I
wouldn't imagine, you know, I used to call sailing 99% boredom and one percent sheer terror. Uh, do you do in the airline industry, do you have incidences that are truly terrifying? I'm sure some do, but will will every pilot in their career have a? Because one of the things that we talk about on the, I'm gonna let you, I'm gonna tell you where I'm going with this because because otherwise it won't make sense. Most free flight pilots will be scared shitless at some point in their career. Maybe all, unless you're just weird, you know, at some point you're going to have an incident that's going to really scare you. And depending on how the incident goes down and how you process fear and your own history with, you know, with scary things.
I mean, People come back from those instantly, never, and everything in between. Can TEM help us with
that? I think it can. I think fear is a very difficult thing to work with sometimes. If your fear is from something that you don't understand or can't get your arms around, Sometimes, if you can determine exactly what it is that you're afraid of, and then get to really understand that—that thing, whatever it is—and then come up with methods of mitigation, or how to manage that, that threat, or that fear, then I think the fear melts away. If you're afraid of something in general terms and you can't put your finger on exactly, specifically, what it is that you're afraid of, you know, it's a lot more difficult, I think. But if you can, if...
If you can pinpoint, you know, what it is that makes you fearful, then I think that, you know, you can you can overcome that by understanding it and having a plan to deal with it. Because
I imagine like, like, you know, of course, this is Hollywood. But but, you know, watching the movie, Sully, I am I would imagine that there was very little or no fear for him going through that. That, and then it hit like it did in the movie. You know, the movie opens with him in that kind of dream sequence; it's what, you know, it was just like going through the city and, you know, the wings hitting the buildings and stuff. And, you know, I imagine the fear for him hit afterwards, you know, like, "Oh my god, I'm responsible for all these people," but in the moment, it was probably just his training and solving the problem. You know, I mean, I, I have had many incidences with my paraglider where, you know, you're, you're, you don't have time for fear.
You just, you got to solve the problem. You got to fix it. But then afterwards it's like, Holy cow, that could, that was really, uh, that was cutting the edge. That was cutting pretty close there. Yeah. I'm just, I'm wondering how, uh, we can use this model or if you, you know, if the, if, if, if, If, you know, after incidents is due, does the airline industry have to deal with fear in their own pilots? Is that on a kind of a one by one, you know, you go see the psychoanalyst or does this model help us?
I think airline flying is pretty controlled and I don't think we normally have too many things that happen that would cause a fear injury. injury, uh, I don't, it's possible that if you had something really crazy or wild happened to you and it, and it could then, um, you might have that, you might have that issue, but, um, yeah, it's, it's a pretty controlled environment as far as, as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, maybe not everybody would agree with me on that, but you know, fear isn't bad thing. I think fear is good, it's self-preservation. I think that fear is essentially threat awareness or perceived awareness without really understanding exactly what it is. And I think once you pinpoint the thing that you're afraid of and you can understand it and then have confidence in managing it, I think the fear will melt away.
Do you find yourself in your own flying? How long have you been paragliding? Uh oh, four, I started. Okay, do you find yourself, uh, because you're so intimate with this system and flying airplanes and used to that environment of checklists and, uh, you know, the sterile cockpit under 10,000 and all these things you've been talking about, do you find that that's just, just naturally how you think about free flight as well? Do you, do you find you're using that system quite naturally?
At first I didn't. I think that, you know, we all, we all have a crossover experience or a number of different crossover experiences that we bring over with us when we paraglide. I mean, you, for example, you've got a lot of good experience in, in free flow gravity sports. And, and I think in kayaking, You've got some great ability at reading water, which water and air, they're both fluids and they both work similarly. And so your ability to read water, I'm sure, translates to your ability to read air. Even though you can't see it, you can imagine it. And that's a very important thing, I think. And, you know, your time on a boat and sailing around the world, I'm sure that you've had a number of situations where you had to make safety assessments and
deal with threats and not let them get the best of you. And so I'm sure you've crossed a lot of that over into paragliding. And so there's some crossover for me from flying in the airlines. And a lot of it has to do with the safety culture. Maybe I've drunk the Kool-Aid a little bit more more than in others because I was involved in some safety audits that forced me to sit in the, well, not forced me, but I sat in the jump seat and observed crews making mistakes and having threats come their way and see how they managed them. And then I had to take all the notes from those flights and I had to put them through the Threatener model
and show how things were done. And it's called a safety audit. LOSA is the term we use for that, line-oriented safety audit. And the reason we do that is we try to, a little bit like Revis, we're trying to discover where the threats are before they lead to an accident. So we observe flights, just normal everyday flights. And we watch crews encounter threats and make errors and manage the threats and manage the errors. And we put those through and create a huge database, hundreds of flights. And we try to identify threats that we're not aware of or that we're not managing very well. And then we use that information to change our procedures and our checklists and our training.
It's sort of a proactive method of dealing with threats. And like I said, hats off to Revis. He's doing his own low sell on himself. And he's taking care of things, you know, before they go down that road. So that's the biggest crossover I have from my job and from flying is that threat and error management. And I think it's something that everybody can use. Even if you understand it just fractionally and just barely get the gist of it, as long as you can recognize that the threats that aren't managed well lead to errors, you need to be aware of the threat. You need to have a plan to deal with it. You're already miles ahead of anybody else, you know, that hasn't looked at flying in that way.
And I think it's potentially really helpful for our flying community if we—if we think of our flight in terms of threats and errors as we fly. It's basically defensive flying, but it gives you something to focus on. Yeah,
I like the second P of the plan and preparation, you know? I think that, uh, you know, with the launch example that we used, you know, that that could be one where, what if you're totally on it that day? You've done all, all your checklists, you've nailed it. You walk up to launch and you have a Rick Brazina moment, you know, really good pilot. So let's, let's end with what, let's end with him. You know, what Rob and I talked about with the plucking and that kind of thing is that, you know, if you walk up to launch and you're not sure you've got those moves in those conditions, then you probably don't have them. You know, you haven't done enough training. You haven't done enough ground handling. You don't have the, you know, You're not confident enough that you can handle the big gusts that are coming through, um, and that, and that, and that's your threat assessment.
You've done the threat assessment, and you're, you're not there. So it's, you know, you're not going to have the surprise, you're not going to have the pluck, uh, because you're either not going to fly, you're going to avoid it, or you, you do, you have done the preparation. You're not going to get plucked because you're really good at highway and launching. So let's talk about Rick, and then we'll end it there. Sure, yeah.
A great example, um, uh, Rick Buzina, and I'm sure you all know, is an ex-Alps pilot, and he was flying in Manila just recently, and uh, and a video of a dust devil that, uh, that plucked him and took him for a, for a ride went viral, and um, it was just amazing, amazing to watch. And, and I would say that that classifies as an incident, you know, it wasn't an accident, but it was an incident. And like any and every accident and incident that happens, whether it happens to you or a friend of yours, it needs to be looked at. I think it needs to be pushed through this threat and error management model, so that we can identify the threats and uncover the errors, so that we all know what happened and why they happened, so that we can all come up with a plan to deal with them in the future.
And this write-up in Cross Country Magazine did just that. It was just perfect, really good. They were talking about dust devils. They talked about how they happened, where they happened. They gave us background on it, background information so that we understood them. Then they talked about where they can happen. And if you're in a place like that, like, uh, they were, they were in the lee of some light flow, which is where dusties like to spawn. So they say, if you're in an area where the dust devils are possible, you need to be aware of that, and you need to have a vigilant
yeah you
Need to have a discussion with your with your flying partners. You say, "Look, we're in an area where dust devils could happen, and if they do, this is the plan." And um, first thing is to communicate that if somebody sees one, they let everybody else know as quickly as possible. And then they they have a plan, they take action. And they talked about the best things that you can do if you do have a dust devil is you need to grab those wings and don't don't just jump on them, grab an end and then hold that end so that the wing can't power up. If you hold two ends, guess what? You're hanging on to something that can take you for a ride. And and and if somebody's clipped in them as well, so they identified some potential errors. And if you do make, you know, if you make one of those errors, and you'll be aware of that as you make it, and then you can correct as need be.
So the takeaway I got from that write-up, it was really well done, is that they took the incident, not an accident, but an incident, and they they did the forensics on it, and they found out what the threat was, how you can mitigate the threat if you're encountered with the same thing, which gives everybody a way ahead so that if they do have dust devils in the area, they know what to do. They know how to best manage that threat and prevent something like that from happening again or doing something even worse. and
I heard that, uh, he went on to fly like 170 or 180k or something, so yeah, hats on, hats off, man. I know how tenacious that dude is, so that was—that was pretty amazing. So I'm glad that all worked out. I'm glad it was an incident, not an accident, jk. Thanks very much, I really appreciate it. Um, super valuable advice and thoughts, and, uh, very interesting. I appreciate it. Thanks, Gavin. I
hope you enjoyed that always fun to sit down with these great pilots in different parts of of the world. Super inspiring. As always, all we ask for is a buck a show. If you're getting something out of the Cloudbase Mayhem, there are many ways you can support it, either financially through PayPal and soon to be just directly through our website. We'll have details of that up pretty soon. But if you can't support us financially, we totally understand this will remain free as long as we can do it. But you can support it in many other ways. You can give us on a rating on iTunes or Stitcher or however you listen to your podcast. That really goes a long ways. You can blog about it on your own blog, you can post about it on social media, share it with your friends, talk about it on the way to launch. I know many, many of you are doing that; I really appreciate it. And another way you can support us is through our store.
We've just got a whole new load of awesome Patagonia t-shirts for men and women, and a whole new box of super style the trucker hats by recaps. Each one is totally unique, got a whole bunch more, more colors that seem to be more in favor. So go to cloudbasemayhem.com, click on the store link, and get some cool swag. That's another great way to support the show. But yeah, get behind us. You know, we're doing this directly just through you instead of sponsors, because I just can't stand having that whole sponsor thing at the top of the show, and I want you to know that it's a authentic conversation. It's just opinions, and they're not being skewed by advertising dollars, which I think, I think it's a pretty toxic thing that's happening, going on right now globally with all the stuff going on with Facebook and others.
So anyway, we'd like to do a direct. We appreciate your support and we'll see you on the next one. Cheers.