Michael said:
Do you use any sort of flight assessment before departing on a XC?
I can think of a couple of flights I would not have made if I had used this form. One thought, It is important to have a personal minimum and stick to it, but, How can you ever grow as a pilot without stretching your own minimums?
I have learned a lot from flights that didn't go quite as expected. I feel I am better prepared now for when those unexpected occurrences happen. That being said...Thought Id pass this flight assessment form along.
Like Ron said, the process gets to be almost subconscious after a while although I do believe that we become more complacent about many of the things on your list as the the hours accumulate.
I think such a form would be useful for at a minumum making you more aware of the many things that can affect a flight, but I can't see a reasonably experienced pilot being able to reduce every possible concern to numbers on a list. What I find works for me is to consider what I think are the risk factors unique to a particular trip and assess whether I have the means/skill/options to mitigate the additional risk.
And WRT your actual list, I would adjust some of the ice factors. For one thing IMO structural icing is a bigger threat to IFR flight than VFR. When VFR you can usually see potential icing conditions and avoid it laterally, at least in the daytime. IFR often puts you where the ice is most likely to be and you have no way to detect icing conditions until you're in them. So I'd swap the 10 and 30 you have. Second, some icing forecasts (freezing precip) can affect VFR as well as IFR flight so that number should be greater than 0.
I'd also consider some mountains to be a much bigger risk factor than your list assumes. Flight over the Alleghenies might be a "slight" +3 factor, but the Colorado Rockies pose a much bigger threat to both VFR and IFR flight.
I guess the biggest problem I have with such a scheme is that it doesn't place enough emphasis on the combinations of threats. The increased risk from different issues isn't really additive, it's more like multiplicative. Night flying with clear skies and good visibility hardly bumps my risk meter. Neither does a daytime flight in good weather that per plan will use all but the last hour of my 5+ hour fuel supply, or a flight in marginal weather with lots of fuel (and options). Combine all three and the risk goes way up, far beyond the sum of the individual risk factors.
