Making stress-free decisions

This post will give you one tool to make good decisions in difficult situations and avoid overstress. Spoiler: this framework helped me greatly in a critical situation, troubleshooting an unforeseen engine malfunction and landing in little to no visibility.

How many times in your professional career did you force yourself to bypass a decision making process and jump into conclusions because you were "short on time", causing stress to yourself and your colleagues? I give you a real-life example when a failure to follow a proper decision making process would have put me into a real danger.

It was a sunny day in July 2020, I was planning a flight from Corfu, Greece to Zurich, Switzerland with a Mooney M20M. My family decided to extend their vacation in Greece and return home on a commercial flight a week later, hence I was flying alone. I was planning to fly back along the Adriatic coast, Italy and the Swiss Alps. With a quick fuel stop in Portoroz, Slovenia, the entire flight time would be just over 3 hours.

It was a hot day and thunderstorm cells were building up over Croatia, the upper limit of thunderstorms was forecasted around 20,000 ft (6.8 km). I was flying an extremely capable aircraft on that day and could fly over, hence this was promising to be an uneventful flight.

Problems started to happen on the ground. The air traffic controller had issues with my flight plan and it took them about 1 hour to fix it. All this time, I was sitting in the aircraft under the scorching sun, cursing the bureaucracy. After departure, I climbed to 19,000 ft and it was all good. Because the aircraft is not pressurized, you have to sip oxygen (similar to the one found in ICUs) to avoid hypoxia.

There is one thing you should know: when you fly so high, you must breathe in with your nose and breathe out with your mouth to ensure appropriate oxygen digestion. If you do not do this for over 30 seconds, you pass out and die of hypoxia. To mitigate the risk, I always fly with an oximeter: it alerts me if my blood oxygen saturation drops under 90%.

Flying along the coast, I was approaching the thunderstorms I saw on the satellite pic, they were much higher than 20,000 ft. I had two choices: deviate or climb higher. A deviation would add more time to the journey and the aircraft could still climb another 5,000 ft. I checked the engine, it was running smoothly and  had power reserves. With that, I requested to climb to 24,000 ft. Right after I reached the new altitude, I noticed something that looked like ice crystals on the windshield.

This was strange. I was too high and the outside temperature was -20 degrees centigrade. Generally, ice cannot happen under these conditions. What is this then?

I will demonstrate to you a simple and reliable decision making framework that I always use in such scenarios. I learned it during my pilot training and it is called SPORDEC (situation, preliminary actions, options, rating, decision, execution, controlling):

Understand the perceived problem: "I have something that looks like ice crystals on the windshield. It maybe something coming out of the engine compartment".

Define quick actions that will help you advance forward. This could be asking for help, bringing more people in, delegating tasks or getting readily available documentation (checklists, reports, books etc). Here is what I did:

• Reminded myself to keep breathing using the special technique, monitoring O2 levels.

• Switched on the defroster: it is quick, will not make the underlying problem better or worse, but would provide valuable information.

• Decided not to declare emergency (MAYDAY) or urgency (PAN PAN) for now: I was flying, engine parameters looked normal.

• Consulted available checklists and ensured there is no relevant entry in the Emergency Checklist for the problem I am observing.

• Verified the engine is running smoothly and tried different power settings.

List all possible reasons or solutions for the problem without prioritizing them. Here is my list:

• Deviate to the nearest airport and land as soon as possible with or without declaring urgency or emergency. Note this option is typically advised by the aircraft manual if you observe unexplained substance coming out of your engine compartment.

• Deviate to another airport, which would be better suited to troubleshoot the situation on the ground.

• Carry on to destination, taking extra precautions and avoiding stress on the engine.

Collect relevant data to rate the options you have identified:

• Nearest airport: the nearest airport is Split and landing there would require me to navigate through thunderstorms below. Split has no facilities to do repairs on a general aviation airplane. 

• Other airports: options included Zadar and Pula (these were along the way) as well as Trieste and Ljubljana. All airports but Ljubljana lacked maintenance facilities; airports in Croatia were outside the Schengen area making customs more difficult. Ljubljana was further away than the destination.

• Continue to destination: my destination, Portoroz, had good maintenance options. It was still an hour away, but I was at 24,000 ft - at this altitude I could glide and land safely at Split, Zadar or Pula even if the engine would completely stop.

Make your decision, but identify triggers to revisit it (changing situation, new options or rating data). I decided to continue to my destination, carefully monitoring the engine and avoiding any unnecessary stress on the equipment.

In these phases you execute on your decision and verify if any of the parameters changed, requiring you to run SPORDEC again.

My cruise was uneventful and enjoyed the views, blasting with 240 kt (450 km/h) along the Adriatic coast. I started my descent past Zadar. The situation got much worse when the ATC in Pula sent me through a shower. My "ice crystals" became a semi-transparent mess that was very difficult to see through!

I ran SPORDEC again: now it was apparent that the "crystals" were droplets of some sort of grease, which was not oil. Oil is much darker and more liquid. With poor visibility, I decided to land in Portoroz - I knew the approach path to this airport very well, it had a reasonably long runway to allow for higher error margin and trivial taxi on the ground. My landing was uneventful, I was greeted by a marshaller, who guided me to my parking position. His face was telling me that something was seriously wrong.

This did not look good. I did another SPORDEC, called the maintenance and sent them the pictures. They reviewed maintenance history and evaluated my flight, coming to a conclusion that the substance on the cowling was a propeller lubricant. They suspected it could have been pushed out of the propeller because I was flying close to the service ceiling.  They advised me to clean the aircraft, perform a propeller test and continue to Switzerland at lower altitude. I did so, everything looked good and I had one of the most beautiful flights of my life:

Further inspection revealed that a company performing propeller maintenance did a poor job. The mechanism had bubbles of trapped air, which burst through the sealed O-rings when I was flying high. This also damaged the seal, letting some of the grease come out.

During this flight, I had to make three complex decisions which probably saved my life. Had I picked a "default" decision following the standard practice and landing in Split, the situation would be much worse. Flying around thunderstorms exposes an aircraft to turbulence, heavy precipitation and wind gusts during landing. Would I have been able to land safely with an obscured windshield under strong wind and rain? I do not know.

Following SPORDEC helped me to stay calm and not to get stressed - I even had time to take pictures that you can see today. We often jump to what we believe is a good decision, bypassing identifying all possible options and collecting data relevant to rate them. With this post I hope to explain that "I did not have time to think" is nothing but a poor and unprofessional excuse.

P. S. Consider watching a 4-minute clip from a movie called "Sully", telling a story of US Airways Flight 1549, which suffered a dual engine failure after departing from JFK. The aircraft landed in the Hudson river and everyone survived without injuries! When watching this video, try to count how many decisions did the crew have to make within less than 3 minutes after takeoff.