Flight Risk Assessment Tool (FRAT)

A Flight Risk Assessment Tool, universally abbreviated FRAT, is a form or app that a pilot or dispatcher completes before a flight to identify the hazards that apply to that specific mission and convert them into a numeric risk score. The FAA promotes the FRAT concept through the FAA Safety Team (FAASTeam) and FAA Safety Briefing magazine, and the General Aviation Joint Steering Committee (GAJSC) has recommended broader FRAT adoption as one of its loss-of-control safety enhancements. The FAASTeam's own FRAT is built directly on the PAVE checklist, posing weighted questions about the Pilot, the Aircraft, the enVironment, and External pressures.

Mechanically, a FRAT lists a set of risk factors and assigns each a point value that reflects how much it raises the danger of the flight. A pilot who has flown fewer than a set number of hours in the preceding 90 days scores points; so does a departure into a low ceiling, a night leg over unlit terrain, a passenger with a fixed arrival deadline, or an aircraft dispatched with an inoperative item. The tool sums the answers and compares the total against pre-set numeric thresholds. Most FRATs use a traffic-light banding: a green total means the flight may proceed as planned, a yellow or amber total means the flight is a caution case that requires specific mitigation, and a red total means no-go unless the risk can be brought back down. The thresholds and point weights are set by the operator, which is what lets one form serve a low-time student and a seasoned commercial crew differently.

The distinguishing feature of a good FRAT is not the score itself but what a high score triggers. In the caution band, the tool should require the pilot to name a mitigation — delay the departure until the ceiling lifts, add a second crew member, choose a longer runway, refuse the inoperative item — and re-score. In the red band, many operators require escalation: a flight cannot launch on the pilot's own authority and must be authorized by a chief instructor, an operations manager, or a designated safety officer who reviews the assessment. That authorization step is what converts a personal habit into an organizational control.

A FRAT is a specific instrument within the broader discipline of risk management, not a synonym for it. General risk management, described in the FAA Risk Management Handbook (FAA-H-8083-2) and taught through aeronautical decision making, is the whole cycle of identifying hazards, assessing them, mitigating them, and reviewing the outcome. A FRAT is the standardized, repeatable front end of that cycle — it forces the identification and assessment steps to happen the same way every time and to be written down. Within a Safety Management System, the FRAT is the everyday, flight-level expression of the Safety Risk Management pillar described in AC 120-92, feeding the same hazard picture that an operator's formal safety risk assessment process addresses at the fleet level. Because the completed form is a dated record of what was known and decided before departure, it also serves as evidence after the fact that risk was assessed deliberately rather than by feel.

For a flight school, a FRAT is the practical tool that makes a go/no-go culture consistent across many instructors and students who would otherwise each judge the same marginal morning differently. When every pilot completes the same form and the same score triggers the same conversation, dispatch decisions stop depending on who happens to be on shift. A school can also tune the point weights to its own risk appetite — heavier penalties for low recency, gusty crosswinds, or night operations — so the tool encodes the school's standards rather than a generic template.

The FRAT is especially powerful for student solo authorization. A school can set the thresholds so that a solo student is held to tighter limits than an instructor-accompanied flight, with any yellow result requiring an instructor sign-off and any red result blocking the solo outright. That gives the chief instructor a documented, uniform basis for releasing a student to fly alone, and it gives an insurer or a regulator clear evidence that solo dispatch is governed by policy. Retaining the completed forms turns each flight's risk decision into an auditable record that supports the school's Safety Management System.

Aviatize's Safety Management module lets a school build its FRAT as a structured, scored checklist rather than a paper form that lives in a binder, so each completed assessment is captured with its date, the pilot, the flight, and the resulting risk band. Because the scores are stored, the Safety Management and KPI Reporting & Dashboards modules can surface trends — which factors most often push flights into the caution band, whether certain conditions or students cluster near the threshold — feeding the same hazard picture the school manages through its wider safety risk assessment process.

Aviatize's Smart Planning & Booking supports the dispatch side by letting a school attach currency and stage-based limits to bookings, so the pilot and environment factors a FRAT scores are also enforced when a flight is scheduled, and a red-band solo can be held for the escalation and authorization the school's procedures require.