Superior Judgement: Mike Jesch on Risk Management for Pilots — The Calm Cockpit Podcast

The best risk-management line in aviation might be the simplest. Asked how he thinks about flying safely after four decades, Mike Jesch’s answer is that he uses his superior judgment so that he never has to demonstrate his superior airmanship. Spot the threat early enough and you make a small correction now — one nobody even notices — instead of a large one later.

On The Calm Cockpit Podcast‘s Season 2, Episode 16 (August 5, 2026), hosts John Niehaus and Gita Brown talk with Mike Jesch — the 2026 National FAA Safety Team Representative, a senior Boeing 787 captain, and a flight instructor with roughly 40 years in aviation — about Threat and Error Management, personal minimums, and the habits that keep small problems small.

Jesch soloed before finishing high school, was instructing at 21, and was hired by an airline at 23. He still flies general aviation actively — he owns a Cessna 182, specializes in 182 and Mooney checkouts and IFR training, serves as chief instructor for a local multi-engine program, and flies for Young Eagles, LightHawk, and Angel Flight West. He is also a heavy user of the FAA’s WINGS program, with dozens of completed phases across the Basic, Advanced, and Master levels.

Here are the ideas from the episode that translate directly to general aviation.

Threats vs. Errors — and the Verb That Matters

Jesch’s working definition is refreshingly concrete. A threat comes from outside the airplane, created by someone who is not in it — a weather system, airport construction, a navaid out of service, a maintenance issue. An error comes from inside the airplane, and usually from a pilot — often the result of failing to recognize a threat that was there all along, or something as ordinary as skipping a checklist step.

The verb he keeps returning to is trap. The goal is not to have a threat-free flight, which is impossible; it is to catch each one rather than let it, in his phrasing, sit there and fester. He notes his airline began focusing seriously on this framework roughly a decade or so ago.

A note on terminology: the formal TEM model used in airline training also includes a third element — undesired aircraft states, the outcomes when threats and errors go untrapped. Jesch does not use that term in this conversation; his framing is threats, errors, and trapping.

Brief the Threats Before the Engine Starts

The single most portable habit in the episode is when Jesch briefs. At the airline, the crew briefs with the brakes parked and the jet bridge still attached — what he calls zero knots and zero feet. His reasoning is about attention: with the engines off you have spare capacity to think, and once they are running your attention belongs outside the airplane.

The brief starts with whoever is flying, and the question is simply: what threats do you see? Night. Rain. An unfamiliar airport. A language barrier. Each named threat gets a named mitigation — and his own default mitigation is disarmingly plain: he will slow down.

He also explicitly gives everyone else permission to interrupt. If anyone needs more time, they should say so, and he will stop the airplane and pull off to the side — something he says he has actually done recently. In a single-pilot GA context, that translates to giving yourself permission to stop taxiing and think.

Surprises are meant for birthday parties, not airplane flights.
— Mike Jesch

His extension of that line is the useful part: open the package before the big day. The big day, on a takeoff, begins the moment you advance the throttle.

Niehaus adds the necessary caution. A briefing done by rote is worth nothing if you do not honor it — his blunt version is that a pilot can brief an abort and then simply not abort. The value is in the commitment, not the recitation.

Decide the Takeoff Before You Roll: The 50/70 Rule

At the airline, the takeoff is briefed as a two-door decision. Before a defined speed: close the throttles, maintain directional control, stop on the remaining runway. After it: continue flying, run the memory items, climb to a safe altitude, work the checklist, and only then decide about returning, fuel, or a different runway. Landing performance for an immediate return is calculated before departure. In the moment there is no invention required — only door A or door B.

The general aviation equivalent Jesch teaches is the 50/70 rule: if you are not at 70 percent of takeoff speed by the 50 percent point of the runway, abort. He credits it to Sparky Imeson’s Mountain Flying Bible, a book he recommends even to pilots who never go near mountains.

His real teaching point, though, is the follow-through that most pilots skip: do the arithmetic on the ground. Seventy percent of what, exactly, in indicated airspeed? Convert it to a number you can actually read on the ASI. Then convert the 50 percent point into something you can see out the window — a specific taxiway, a particular tree. A gate you have to compute at 60 knots is not a gate.

Niehaus supplies the cautionary tale. Instructing in a Cessna 152, he was still asking his student whether the throttle was fully forward as they passed the midpoint, and they barely got airborne over a tree. It turned out the engine genuinely had compression problems. His own diagnosis afterward was denial — assuming the sluggishness must be something the two of them were doing wrong rather than something wrong with the airplane. A briefed abort gate would have kept them on the pavement.

Swiss Cheese That Melts

The most original idea in the episode is Jesch’s revision of the familiar Swiss cheese model. Each slice is a barrier standing between you and an accident:

Your procedures and checklists — the ones specific to your airplane
The regulations — fuel reserves, required ATC calls, equipment requirements
Your insurance company — a layer few pilots think of, which may require training beyond the FAA minimum
Your pilot community — added later in the conversation at Gita Brown’s prompting

His twist is what happens over time. Leave cheese in a warm room and it melts — the slices thin, the holes widen, and barriers that once protected you no longer do. He credits the image to a book outside aviation, Matt Parker’s Humble Pi, about mathematical and engineering mistakes with serious consequences.

The implication is that safety margins are not a state you achieve; they are a state you maintain. Recurrent training, WINGS phases, regular sessions with an instructor, and safety seminars are how the slices get thickened back up.

Automation Is a Crewmember You Have to Verify

Jesch had a three-axis autopilot installed in his 182, and he engages the hand-flying-degradation debate honestly — he calls skill erosion a very real possibility. His counterargument is about where your attention goes: the autopilot handles the low-level chore of holding heading and altitude accurately and smoothly, which frees your mind for anticipating and planning. His example is working a diversion — where to go, why, whether it is a fuel stop, a mechanic, or an overnight.

His conclusion is deliberately unresolved: there is no single right answer for every situation, so think it through in advance and know how you intend to use the tool.

The transferable procedure is his treatment of automation as another crewmember. When he engages the autopilot, he says it out loud, including the mode — autopilot on, heading mode, altitude hold. Two reasons: everyone needs to know who is flying, and stating the intended mode lets someone catch a mode that did not actually engage. Niehaus offers the failure case — sitting in heading mode for 45 minutes without noticing, because the track happened to parallel the heading, and only catching it at a dogleg.

Jesch’s framing is that the autopilot is a third or fourth pilot: trust it, but verify it. Again — no surprises.

Brief the Go-Around Before Every Approach

Jesch briefs a go-around before every single approach — the glideslope, the decision height, the lighting system he expects to see, which side the PAPI is on, and precisely which visual references he needs. If those references are not there, he goes missed. The missed-approach actions are mentally run just before the approach so they are already loaded.

He notes his airline’s safety-management data shows go-arounds are flown poorly, both at the airline and in general aviation — which makes the pre-brief more than a formality.

He also pre-thinks the constraints: terrain on one side, traffic on the other, so he already knows which way he cannot turn. And when a student’s first instinct on a go-around at a non-towered field was to key the microphone, his correction was the oldest one in the book — aviate, navigate, then communicate. The radio call comes last.

Loss of Control, Distraction, and Two Words

Jesch points to loss of control as the NTSB’s leading category, and frames it less as a stick-and-rudder failure than as a consequence: the pilot was distracted, and the distraction usually arose because something was not anticipated. More anticipation, fewer distractions, fewer opportunities to lose control.

His illustration is a Mooney checkout where a door popped open in flight and the new owner’s anxiety spiked. Jesch said two words — fly the airplane. They landed, closed the door, and went back up. Days later the owner called to say the phrase was still with him.

Proficiency: Primacy, Recency, Repetition

Jesch leans on the classic laws of learning. We learn best what we learn first (primacy), we perform best what we did most recently (recency), and repetition consolidates both. His conclusion: do it correctly the first time, do it often, and do it recently.

That leads to a pointed opinion — a flight review every 24 months is not adequate, particularly in a high-performance, complex, or multi-engine airplane. He also argues for getting a flight review from an instructor who will genuinely put you through the wringer rather than a friend signing you off at the minimum.

He wishes GA pilots used simulators far more, ideally with an instructor building scenarios that force the tools into play. In his own multi-engine syllabus he runs a simulator session before serious engine-out work in the airplane, and tells students that if both engines are running for more than about 30 seconds, he is not doing his job. The simulator’s real advantage is that it can explore the regime the ACS will not permit in the aircraft. Plain chair flying, he says, is a perfectly adequate substitute when you cannot fly at all.

His proof case is personal. He had a genuine engine failure in a Cessna 310 at roughly 500 feet — inside exactly that unpracticeable zone. Because he had been teaching and rehearsing the drill constantly, the response was automatic. He records every parameter of every flight, and says the data trace shows no visible disturbance in the flight path.

Watch Your Own Small Mistakes

Jesch’s self-assessment method is to treat minor errors as a leading indicator. The day before recording, on a long flight, he checked in on a frequency he had already been moved off of — inconsequential in isolation, but exactly the sort of thing that accumulates.

The best practical idea here comes from a FAASTeam colleague who keeps a pocket notebook and logs every small everyday mistake — misplaced keys, opening the refrigerator and forgetting why. The point is not self-criticism; it is establishing a personal baseline so you can recognize when you are running above it.

He also raises fatigue parameters worth deciding in advance: how many hours will you fly today, are you flying after a full workday, has the departure slipped later than planned. And he highlights a recent case of a crew declaring an emergency for fatigue — the first he had heard of — which he calls a good decision and a useful precedent for everyone else.

Resilience or Denial?

Jesch draws a clean line between two states that feel identical from the inside. Resilience says: this is a small problem, and I will work through it. Denial says: that is not a problem at all.

The tell is a failure to appreciate that things are not going your way — manufacturing explanations so the original plan does not have to change. When the explanation is “I have done this before and it worked last time,” that is what he names normalization of deviance. He notes these patterns all have names precisely because everyone has been there.

Crucially, he says the threshold is personal and situational — only you can define it, and it can shift over the course of a single day.

His example is a positive one, which is rarer and more instructive than a crash story. Flying home from Yellowstone, delayed by low cloud and then facing hot, bumpy desert air his wife dislikes, he stopped in Wendover, Utah for a break and lunch. Still rough near Las Vegas, he offered to stop for the night and let his wife make the call; she chose to continue, and it smoothed out over California. He had already decided that if it were still rough further along, they would stop before the last ridge. The week before, he had simply declined a family flight rather than be boxed into a now-or-never departure.

Personal Minimums That Mean Something

This is the most actionable block in the episode, and Jesch is specific about the mechanics rather than the numbers — he is explicit that only you can set your own values.

They are not only weather. Alongside ceiling, visibility, and crosswind, he includes fuel remaining as a personal minimum in its own right.
Write them down. Writing converts a preference into a commitment to yourself, your family, and your passengers.
Set them the day before — never on the day of the flight.
Never change them to accomplish a particular flight. If you do, in his words, you have thrown the whole card out and it means nothing.
Have a policy for how they move. Recent training can lower them; a long layoff should raise them — but decide the rule in advance.

He draws the parallel from his own airline career: pilots checking out in a new seat or a new type must raise their personal minimums until they build experience, and it is written into the manual. When he checked out on the 737, takeoff visibility was below his own elevated minimum more than once, and he simply could not go.

Niehaus offers the flight-school version — pilot qualification cards, written limits per pilot that remove the ego and guilt from the conversation entirely. If the school wanted you flying in more, it would have written you a different card.

Brown adds an accountability mechanism most GA pilots lack: an online pilot community with a public thread for posting your personal minimums and a separate go/no-go thread for asking others to sanity-check your reasoning.

Your Options Shrink as You Fly

One of Jesch’s most compact ideas: your options exist inside a circle whose radius is the fuel in your tanks — and that circle contracts continuously as you fly. When you are down to exactly one option, you are already in trouble, because every other door has closed behind you.

The episode’s practical counterweights to that pressure are memorable. Niehaus offers a line he credits to Brian Schiff — his suitcase does not care where it spends the night. Jesch adds a friend’s version: the best piece of safety equipment on board is a credit card, because it will find you a hotel anywhere. And the hosts note there is no emergency takeoff checklist in any POH. You never have to go.

Learn From Other People’s Mistakes

Asked what underpins the whole approach, Jesch names curiosity. He belongs to the alphabet organizations, reads the magazines, follows the online forums, and points to Flying‘s long-running “I Learned About Flying From That” column as a model. His reasoning is arithmetic: he will not live long enough to make all the mistakes himself, so he had better learn from people who already have.

He extends the same curiosity outside aviation — the melting-cheese insight came from a book about mathematical errors, not a flying book.

He is also notably unimpressed by his own longevity. Being at it a long time, he says, does not mean he is good at it — it means he does it a lot and has been fortunate.

The Bottom Line

Nothing in this episode requires equipment, budget, or a new rating. It requires deciding things earlier: briefing threats with the engine off, computing an abort gate before you roll, pre-briefing the go-around, saying the autopilot mode out loud, writing minimums down the day before, and noticing when your small mistakes start stacking up.

Brown’s summary of what good Threat and Error Management buys a pilot is a useful checklist in itself: more cognitive bandwidth, a downregulated fear response, threats that feel manageable rather than frightening, better error-trapping through talking things through, and thicker barriers between you and a bad day.

Or, as Jesch puts it — use superior judgment, and you will rarely need to display superior airmanship.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Threat and Error Management? In Mike Jesch’s framing, a threat originates outside the airplane and is created by someone not aboard — weather, construction, an out-of-service navaid, a maintenance issue. An error originates inside the airplane and usually comes from a pilot, often from failing to recognize a threat. The objective is to trap each one before it compounds. The formal airline model adds a third element, undesired aircraft states, which Jesch does not use in this conversation.

What is the 50/70 rule? It is a general aviation takeoff abort gate: if you are not at 70 percent of takeoff speed by the 50 percent point of the runway, abort. Jesch credits it to Sparky Imeson’s Mountain Flying Bible. His key addition is to compute it on the ground — convert 70 percent into an actual airspeed number and the 50 percent point into a visible landmark such as a specific taxiway.

When should a pilot brief threats before a flight? Before the engine starts. Jesch briefs at what he calls zero knots and zero feet, because attention is available with the engines off and belongs outside the airplane once they are running. Each named threat gets a named mitigation — his own default is simply to slow down.

How should pilots set personal minimums? Write them down, set them the day before rather than the day of the flight, and never change them in order to complete a specific flight. Include more than weather — Jesch counts fuel remaining as a personal minimum. Have a pre-decided policy for how they move: recent training can lower them, and a long layoff should raise them.

What is normalization of deviance? It is the pattern of accepting a departure from good practice because it worked the last time. Jesch frames it as the difference between resilience — recognizing a small problem and working through it — and denial, which is refusing to see a problem at all. The tell is manufacturing explanations so the original plan does not have to change.

Is a flight review every two years enough? Jesch argues it is not, particularly in high-performance, complex, or multi-engine aircraft. He recommends more frequent recurrent training, a flight review from an instructor who will genuinely challenge you, simulator sessions with scenario-based instruction, and chair flying between flights, along with the FAA’s WINGS proficiency program.

This article summarizes discussion from The Calm Cockpit Podcast and is general educational information. It is not instruction, and it does not replace guidance from your flight instructor, the FARs, your aircraft’s POH, or current FAA publications.