Good decision making involves several items. These are: personal attitudes which are dangerous to safe flight, recognizing and handling stress, risk assessment skills, changing your behavior and evaluating these skills.

Pilot Decision Making

Hazardous Attitudes
Basically we have 5 attitudes which can and will affect how a pilot makes a decision. Understanding how they apply to your flying is important. These attitudes are:

• Anti-Authority: "Don't tell me!" - When people have this attitude they may resent having someone tell them what to do or they think of rules and regs as silly or unneeded.
• Impulsivity: "Do something quickly!" - This is what people do when they feel the need to do something, anything and now. Usually they do the first thing that pops up in them.
• Invulnerability: "It won't happen to me!" - Accidents happen only to other people. Thinking this may lead to taking more unnecessary risks.
• Macho: "I can do it!" - These guys we all know. Trying to prove that they are better than anyone else and taking more risks. Both sexes are susceptible to this attitude.
• Resignation: "What's the use?" - These people think that they do not make a great deal of difference in what happens to them. When things are going well they think: "Good luck". And when things are not so well, they seem to think that someone is out to get them.

Antidotes for Hazardous Attitudes
It is obvious that any one of these above attitudes can be dangerous to a pilot. Antidotes have been developed to become aware and to counteract the hazardous attitude.

Below we have a list with both the attitude and antidote for it:

It is doubtful that anyone could fly an airplane without a balance of these attitudes. The perfect pilot (if there is such a pilot) has a mix of equally balanced characteristics. But as no one is perfect some of these characteristics will be stronger than others in a person. To overcome one of these attitudes to become dominant, you need to remember the antidotes for each of them. And I mean by heart! So that they immediately come to mind when you need it.