What Can We Do During The First 100-Days Of Aviation Club Operations?

Safety culture: Again, if you don’t actively define your safety culture, one will emerge, and you may not like it. Now is the time to define and follow a method to ensure that club members stay proficient, and not just current. A culture of safety is essential for any pilot, but particulary for a club, where positive mentoring is such a powerful positive tool, yet where complacency and poor examples, especially from members who are perceived, rightly or not, as “a good stick”, can have an equally powerful negative impact.

We’ve done a lot of work this year on the notion of a club’s safety culture and we recently introduced WINGS for Clubs. The FAA Safety Team (FAASTeam) WINGS program is exactly what clubs need. Many of us use the faasafety.gov website as a source of courses, quizzes, seminars and webinars, where members can stay proficient in aviation knowledge, but WINGS is so much more than that. You can earn a “phase” of WINGS by completing within 12-months, three knowledge tasks and three flight tasks, with a CFI. These tasks are well documented with background material and worksheets designed to conform to the ACS—Airmen Certification Standards. Compare this with the “currency” requirements of a Flight Review. Instead of the predictable minimum 1-hour of ground and 1-hour of flight time every 24-calencar months, competing a phase of WINGS gets you flying with a CFI three times a year, so you go beyond currency and strive for proficiency. Oh, by the way, completing a phase of WINGS also qualifies as a flight review.