Everyone is a Safety Officer

By CW5 Michael J. Muehlendorf

Article published on: June 1, 2025 in the April-June Edition of Aviation Digest

Read Time: < 5 mins

I've been flying Army helicopters for 20 years now. As my aviation career approaches the legendary unicorn status, reflection on my own ability to contribute and remain relevant in today's Army is my most pressing motivation. I was fearful I might "check out" and ride out the last couple of years doing as little as possible. "What can they do to me?" is the thought that crosses our minds when the fear of not making it to retirement vanishes completely. Over the last few years, a love for my profession has emerged more and more, unhindered by the fear of failure. As I reflect on the close calls and near disasters I've witnessed, I feel immensely blessed to have come to this point. What's more, I feel a new imperative on my role, and that is to communicate the urgency of risk management.

"Everyone is a safety officer!" If you've been in Army Aviation awhile, it is hard to avoid cynicism when we hear this. Yet here I sit, 21 years in and hitting a new stride. If there's anything I wish I could convey to my peers and junior crews, it's that you have to be mindful of risk and actively manage it in every moment. The easy part is that you already do it. Assuming you're a "normal" person (whatever that is), you are already concerned with your safety 100 percent of the time.

Most safety decisions are nested in our routines and the infrastructure our society has built so we don't think about them (i.e., they are on the subconscious level); however, the instant one of these assumptions fails us, fear strikes and we are left insecure. We feel the need to analyze and categorize what went wrong so we can avoid that danger in the future. Whether it is a trip on a sidewalk or foreign object damage in a confined landing zone, we take a step back and look at what went wrong. We consider how much worse it could have been and decide if the likelihood of it happening again motivates a change in our behavior. Should we start preparing for this to happen and plan our response?

As a Senior WO and "expert advisor" (I still feel like a stupid kid most of the time), I find it is essential to know my leaders and what is important to them. I care what they think about me, because I want them to listen to me when I'm bringing up concerns or problems they may not recognize yet. If I'm dying on every hill and never concerning myself with their impression of me, or if I'm violating the trust they've placed in me, I'm eroding away my own credibility in their eyes—mine and the WO cohort. That may be unfair, but it is reality. It is almost an art to decide what aspects of mission execution to emphasize and what risks need to be addressed in each forum. Some risk has to be trusted to lower echelons or we'd never launch. My most important goal now is to protect the aircrews and Soldiers in my battalion and protect my boss from having to make any uninformed decisions. I want to protect them, because I want every single one of them to make it to the 21 year mark and further. I want us all to do our jobs and go home to the nation we love so much. Let me use the following vignette to take a look at how the risk management process works.

So there I was, in Taji Army Airfield, Iraq. As it happens, it was national "burn your trash day" (as it was every day) in Baghdad. Something about the dew point and temperature spread, condensation nuclei, winds from the south, and the visibility were quite suspicious. We taxi to Taji pad, pick up our passenger, and decide to launch and assess the visibility in flight. The tower was reporting more than 3 miles of visibility but it was noticeably less to our south (Taji is just North of Baghdad). In the air, things got reeeeeally quiet for a few drawn out moments as we took up a heading for the assigned departure sector. Radio silence was broken by my sister ship asking, "what do you think?" Now let's clear something up right here. When a salty, high-fiving, line-cutting, sleeve-rolling WO, whose unbloused boots are the only thing extending lower than his sideburns comes over the radio and asks what you think, he is not at all concerned with what you actually think. It is the closest he can get to saying, "this looks bad, and I really wish I was on the ground" without totally surrendering his ego. It's not unlike having a bad hand dealt in poker and being so positioned in the betting to "call" before having to fold. Now I need to play my hand without revealing my "tell" or my poker face. I need to protect my own credibility in the "cool pilot" club.

"Looks like we can make it," says the 600-hour CW2 who hasn't logged 5 minutes of weather in the last year because we've been visual flight rules only in combat (that's me). In reality, the visibility was probably a quarter to a half mile at most, but at 200 feet above the ground we could see it well and maintain controlled flight visually. What we couldn't do was see hazards in front of us very well. We'd flown these sectors and corridors hundreds of times, and we knew every set of wires and all the towers by memory.

Fortunately, we made it through the fog bank and into the city, which was already starting to heat up enough to burn off any trace of moisture in the atmosphere. Looking back at our conversation, one thing we never asked ourselves was if the weather below was what we were briefed and approved for. Our risk assessment worksheet had 700-foot ceilings and 2 statute miles of visibility annotated as the lowest weather in which our final mission approval authority authorized for us to conduct missions. We were concerned with what we could do and not what we were allowed to do. I don't think I had this epiphany until several years later. Having come to this understanding on how the risk management process works, my memory flooded with personal scenarios where I had made decisions outside of my level of approval.

So what is my role as a WO, a pilot-in-command (PC), air mission commander, mission briefing officer, or even final mission approval authority in the aviation risk management process? Let's narrow that down to the PC in hopes you might make it to the end of the article.

I am only the PC because a commander at some level has looked at the assigned missions for the day and done some initial risk mitigation by pairing me with another pilot and crew members. At this point, I don't know what the reasoning is, but a safe assumption is that my commander expects me to operate the aircraft to standard and to conduct the assigned mission inside of the acceptable risk level as will be indicated on the risk common operational picture, or R-COP, and/or their commander's intent. That intent may be written out in a standard operating procedure (SOP) or on a slide in the air mission brief.

The only time I get to interpret my commander's risk tolerance level is when contingencies arise. Even then, a well-written SOP or mission rehearsal can provide guidance. Armed with those and possibly more information, I can conduct what the Army has coined Real-Time Risk Management. Effectively performed, I'm identifying new risks as they present themselves and devoting the proper amount of decision-making to that risk based on the known (or perceived) risk tolerance of my commander.

Ask any seasoned aviator and they'll tell you that the secret to making good risk decisions in contingencies is rehearsing those contingencies on the ground. My mission-planning heroes and mentors grew up planning the most complex missions our nation conducts with helicopters. They plan to capture our nation's most wanted terrorists and strike the most heavily guarded targets in the world. Anytime I approached one of those flight leads to ask how they solved problems or planned missions, they all had one consistent approach. They had exhaustive lists of requests for information, and they spent the bulk of their planning efforts talking about and rehearsing contingencies. None of them walked around spouting off cheesy slogans like "everyone is a safety officer" but you can guarantee they were looking to survive and accomplish the mission with everyone coming home. They intimately knew their acceptable risk like they knew their commander's intent and it was the first question at the after-action review; "was the mission accomplished to standard?"

The bottom line is that there is no better recipe for success than anticipating what can go wrong and rehearsing the possible solutions. During the conduct of rehearsal, the risk level should be identified and discussed with the commander. Typically, a commander's risk tolerance changes based on the mission's phase. A commander's tolerance will likely increase after key events, such as a border (phase line) crossing or infiltration to the objective. Every mission hits a point of no return, and risk decisions have to be made reflecting that mission's phase. It is not often that we get to experience risk decisions during a mission that would be elevated to the extremely high level if the hazard were known about in pre-mission planning. It is possible to reach the level that subsequent risk increase will significantly reduce the likelihood of success. Then, the mission is aborted no matter the phase. Those risk levels exist for every mission. You may encounter unpassable weather on a medical evacuation mission and have to turn around. The enemy threat on the objective may be so overwhelming that not only will our ground force be overrun, but any exfiltration attempts will also be engaged and eliminated. What is the emerging risk, and what is my commander's tolerance for this risk? Commanders are making hard decisions that weigh mission success tonight against our future ability to conduct missions.

Our ability as PCs to know our commanders' risk tolerance and execute a mission inside of their intent is key to not only our survival but mission accomplishment and continual building of the sacred trust between the commander and their expert technical advisor…the safety officer.