Definition
The instructor's ongoing responsibility to identify, assess, and mitigate hazards during all phases of flight training, while simultaneously teaching the student to do the same. It includes maintaining the safety of every flight, modeling sound aeronautical decision-making, and progressively transferring risk management skills to the learner so they can exercise pilot-in-command judgment independently.
Plain English
Keeping training flights safe by spotting problems early and dealing with them, while showing the student how to do the same so they can eventually handle it on their own.
Context Anchor
Seen in instructor training, lesson planning, preflight decisions, and in-flight choices when an instructor must balance teaching goals with safety.
Derivation
Manage comes from an older word meaning to handle or control. Risk means the chance of loss or harm. Instruction means teaching. Together, the phrase points to actively handling the chance of harm while teaching someone to fly.
Why Pilots Care
Instructional flights carry elevated risk; structured risk management lowers accident rates by addressing hazards that appear only when teaching.
Grounding Statement
In a training flight, safety is not decided once before takeoff; it is checked again as the student, airplane, weather, and lesson change.
Intuition Check
Do not read this as just “being careful” or avoiding difficult lessons. In this FAA context, it means a deliberate, ongoing safety decision process before and during instruction.
Example Sentence 1
Managing risk during flight instruction meant the CFI scrubbed the cross-country lesson when ceilings dropped below the student's comfort level, and used the time to brief weather decision-making on the ground.
Example Sentence 2
Managing risk during flight instruction means adjusting the lesson when the student shows signs of overload.