Risk Management Magazine

My unit had been fighting fires with as many as five other crews at once for a little over a month when the following incident happened. During this time many of us had logged between 50 and 70 hours on the fires, which is an extremely intense environment for all crewmembers.

“Every landing is a slope landing” was always preached to me during flight school and progression to Readiness Level 1. Now, instead of just doing it because I was told to, I believed in it from experience.

While attending the Aviation Safety Officer Course at Fort Rucker, Alabama, I was reminded of a let’s-not-do-that-again event that occurred while I was deployed to Kosovo in 2012. Such lessons-learned situations shaped how I operated as a young pilot in command.