By Jeff Schweitzer

One If By Land, Two If By Water?

The decision to fly a single over water is complicated and involves your survival training and equipment.

As pilots striving to promote safety, we all have daily rules to live by. Beyond the purity of the classroom, in the real world these rules are not written in stone, but instead morph with changing circumstances, depending on our currency, recent experience, equipment being flown and weather variables, among other factors. While safety-related procedures are often considered fixed, as in the appropriately rigid adherence to a checklist, such blind fidelity to a single course of action is not always helpful. The multiple variables one must consider when contemplating a flight over water offer a perfect example of how our approach to safety can be reasonably malleable in the face of changing circumstances.