A Participants Safety Briefing must be conducted before every Show Day— that requirement is in FAA Order 8900.1. It is not optional, and it cannotbe skipped because the performers have flown this show before. EveryShow Day gets its own briefing.

Who has to be there?

All performing pilots, crew chiefs, and essential personnel. Off-siteperformers can be covered by phone briefing, but the FAA must benotified and all required elements must still be covered in that call. TheFAA IIC should be invited and typically will ask for a recap if they can’tattend in person.

The physical setup of the briefing room matters.

Every attendee must be able to see the briefing materials — the aerialdiagram, the schedule, whatever is on screen. If someone in the backcan’t see the site diagram, the briefing is not reaching them effectively.One speaker at a time, non-standard items walked through line by line,and noise-making devices off for the duration.

What are the core briefing tools?

Aerial site photos — Google Earth or equivalent, from multiple angles — soperformers understand the spatial layout. An airport diagram showingrunways, taxiways, crowd line, show center, and Category I, II, and IIIdistance lines. The current version of the schedule, with every slot walkedthrough including all performers involved. And weather data: currentMETAR, TAF, and winds aloft, updated within 45 minutes of brief start.

That 45-minute window is firm.

Weather data that’s an hour old at brief start may not reflect what’sactually happening outside. Update it within that window and present thecurrent picture. If conditions are changing quickly, note that explicitly soperformers understand the situation is evolving.

The briefing opens with introductions: Air Boss, event director, narrators,IIC, and the airport operations representative. These are not formalities —performers need to know by face and name who holds each function.Then a time hack: synchronize watches and clocks before any schedulediscussion. A one-minute discrepancy on show time compounds acrossevery act transition.

The altimeter setting item is one that catches people. Walk through that.

Performers may set their altimeters to zero on the ground so that theinstrument reads AGL height directly during the performance — which ishow all separation distances and minimums are expressed in the CoW.That requires a CoW waiver of 14 CFR 91.121. If the waiver is in the CoW,cover it explicitly. If it’s not, performers use standard altimeter procedures.

Then airspace and site.

ASDA boundaries, FDA location and dimensions, TFR boundaries andaltitudes and effective times. Read all applicable NOTAMs aloud — do notsummarize or reference them; read them. Walk through show center,show line, crowd line, and Category I, II, and III positions. Cover alternateairports and divert fields.

Weather is the last element in Part 1.

Current METAR — ceiling, visibility, and winds. Winds aloft at 3,000, 6,000,9,000, and 12,000 feet MSL. The TAF covering the show window, and thetrend it shows. And the trigger conditions: what ceiling or visibility willcause a delay, what drops you to a low-show program, and what suspendsor terminates the show. Every performer in that room needs to leaveknowing those thresholds.

Because they may be airborne when conditions change.

And they need to understand what that means for their act and for AirBoss authority, before they ever start the engine.