The PAVE and IMSAFE Checklists: Preflight Risk Assessment

PAVE is an FAA preflight risk-assessment framework that sorts the hazards of a specific flight into four categories: Pilot, Aircraft, enVironment, and External pressures. It is a structure for judgement rather than a pass/fail test — the point is to make a crew look deliberately at four areas that accident reports keep returning to, instead of forming a single overall impression of whether a trip feels fine.

It is pilot-facing and deliberately short. A Flight Risk Assessment Tool (FRAT) is the operator-facing companion: PAVE structures the thinking, the FRAT records and scores it so somebody other than the pilot can see the result. Confusing the two is common and matters, because only one of them leaves evidence.

Pilot: is this specific crew fit for this specific flight? Recency and currency in type, recent experience in the conditions expected, and fitness for duty — which is where IMSAFE below does the detailed work.

Aircraft: is this aircraft suitable and serviceable for this trip? Airworthiness status, any open discrepancies and deferrals under the MEL, equipment required for the route and approaches planned, and performance against the actual runways and weights involved rather than the typical ones.

enVironment: weather at departure, en route, destination and alternate; terrain; runway condition; day or night; airspace and NOTAMs. The capital V is only there to make the acronym work, which is worth saying because it is a common source of confusion.

External pressures: the reasons a crew might continue when they should not. A passenger with a connection, a crew scheduled to end duty at home, a charter client who has waited, a maintenance slot booked at the destination. This category is the one operators most often leave undocumented, and the one that appears most often in the causal chain.

IMSAFE is the FAA's self-assessment checklist a pilot runs on themselves before flight, and it expands the Pilot element of PAVE: Illness, Medication, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue, Emotion.

Illness — any condition affecting performance, including one being treated. Medication — prescription or over-the-counter, and whether it is approved for flight. Stress — work, financial, or personal load that will consume attention. Alcohol — against both the regulatory limit and the longer recovery the body actually needs. Fatigue — acute and cumulative, which is not the same as having met a rest requirement on paper. Emotion — significant recent life events.

IMSAFE supports the fitness-for-duty and duty-time limits an operator sets; it does not replace them. A pilot can pass IMSAFE and still be outside a duty limit, and can be inside every duty limit and still fail IMSAFE. Both checks have to happen.

For a charter operator these are not private pilot habits, they are inputs to a risk-assessment programme. In practice PAVE and IMSAFE sit at the front of a flight risk assessment: the crew works the categories, the FRAT turns the answers into a score, and the score routes the trip — accept, mitigate, or escalate to a named person with authority to decline it.

The part that decides whether this survives scrutiny is the escalation threshold and who owns it. A risk tool with no threshold is a form; a threshold with no named owner is a suggestion. Both should be written into your general operations manual rather than left to habit.

This is also where a safety management system draws its data. Under 14 CFR Part 5 the safety risk management and safety assurance components need evidence that hazards were identified and controls were applied — completed assessments are some of the most routine evidence an operator has of exactly that.

Neither is a regulation. PAVE and IMSAFE are FAA-published guidance tools, and no rule requires a particular form of them; what a Part 135 operator is accountable for is the programme it has written into its own manuals and whether it follows it.

They are also self-assessments, with the weakness that implies: a fatigued or pressured person is not the ideal judge of whether they are fatigued or pressured. That is the argument for a threshold and a second pair of eyes above a certain score, rather than for a longer checklist.

Navlyt does not ship a flight risk assessment tool, and this page is not selling one. What it does is map your operations manuals against FAA Part 135 requirements clause by clause and show, with your own wording quoted back, where a procedure you rely on is missing or has drifted from the requirement.

If your risk-assessment programme is described in your GOM, that description is exactly the kind of text it reads — see Navlyt for FAA Part 135 compliance, or the Part 135 audit checklist for where these records tend to be asked for. AI-assisted analysis is a starting point for your compliance officer, never a substitute for their judgement.