Definition
The art and science of managing all available resources -- both inside and outside the cockpit -- to ensure the safe and successful outcome of a flight when operating as the sole pilot. It covers the gathering of information, analysis of that information, and decision-making by the pilot, including risk management, task management, automation management, controlled flight into terrain awareness, and situational awareness.
Plain English
When you're flying alone, you're the only one making decisions, so you have to deliberately use everything available to help you fly safely -- the instruments, the autopilot, charts, ATC, your training, and your own attention. Single-pilot resource management is the skill of doing that well.
Context Anchor
You meet this term in flight training when discussing how a pilot flying alone stays organized, makes decisions, and handles changing conditions before and during a flight.
Derivation
Built from 'crew resource management' (CRM), a concept developed for airline crews after accident investigations showed that crashes often resulted from poor use of available resources rather than lack of skill. Single-pilot resource management adapts the same idea for pilots flying alone, who must perform the work of an entire crew themselves.
Why Pilots Care
It compensates for the lack of a second pilot to share workload or catch mistakes, directly reducing the chance of errors in solo operations.
Intuition Check
Do not read “resource management” as managing money or supplies. Here it means using every helpful thing available to one pilot—tools, information, people, and judgment—to conduct the flight safely.
Example Sentence 1
Good single-pilot resource management means briefing the approach early, before workload gets high near the airport.
Example Sentence 2
During an unexpected instrument failure, single-pilot resource management guided the pilot to cross-check the backup instruments and request vectors from ATC.