The Instructor Who Is Also the Safety Officer
You are the instructor for a training flight and also serve as the program's safety officer. The flight is a multi-aircraft training exercise with three students flying simultaneously in a defined training area, each with a visual observer. Ten minutes into the exercise, one student reports a loss of GPS signal and begins drifting toward the boundary of the training area, where a manned agricultural aircraft has been observed working a field. The student's aircraft is at 200 ft AGL, the agricultural aircraft operates at 300 to 500 ft AGL, and the training area boundary is 0.3 nautical miles away. Your radio is shared with all three students, and one of them is mid-way through a landing approach. You must decide whether to take control of the situation as instructor, as safety officer, or both, and how to communicate.
1. What is the correct role decision and communication sequence?
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The instructor should act as instructor first and safety officer second, because the immediate need is to control the aircraft and the students, and the safety-officer role is about the program-level response that follows. The communication sequence should be: a clear, calm instruction to the drifting student to hold or climb and turn away from the boundary; a brief instruction to the landing student to continue and report when down; and a general call to all three to confirm they heard and to state their positions. The instructor should not flood the shared frequency with a long explanation. Once the drifting aircraft is stabilized, the instructor should notify the agricultural operator if a common frequency exists, or move the training area boundary if not. The safety-officer role then begins with documenting the event and reviewing the training-area design.
2. How should the instructor manage the conflict between controlling the aircraft and managing the other two students?
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The instructor should prioritize the highest-risk aircraft and delegate the rest. If a second instructor or observer is present, assign that person to monitor the landing student and confirm the third student's position. If not, the instructor should give the landing student a short, unambiguous instruction to continue and call when down, then focus on the drifting aircraft. The key is to avoid split attention during the critical seconds: one clear instruction to each aircraft, in order of risk, with confirmation. The instructor should also use the visual observers as an extension of the crew, asking them to report boundary proximity and the agricultural aircraft's position. This is a crew resource management problem: the instructor is the leader, but the team includes the observers and the other students.
3. What should the safety-officer review examine after the event?
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The review should examine the training-area design and its proximity to agricultural operations, the GPS-loss contingency plan and whether students were briefed on it, the radio discipline during the event, and the decision to fly three aircraft with one instructor. It should also examine whether the shared frequency was adequate for the workload and whether a discrete channel or a second instructor should be required for multi-aircraft exercises. The review should produce specific changes: a larger buffer from the agricultural field, a mandatory GPS-loss drill before multi-aircraft flights, and a written communication protocol. The findings should be recorded and shared with the program, and the instructor should follow up to confirm the changes are implemented.