wrote in message
oups.com...

What are we trying to prove? Can't we re-define 'good pilot' to mean
one that has the guts to tell everyone else to 'put a sock in it, I
a-ain't a-goin'?'

Maybe my take on this is a little more cynical. I tend to think that the
people like this fighter pilot are simply unrecoverable. *Maybe* if they get
into a real close call, or a good friend of theirs buys the farm doing
something stupid, the shock will wake them up. But, if they were amenable to
reason and logic, they probably would have found it on their own long before
you got there. Like motorcycling, skydiving, rock climbing, etc., flying
attracts a certain percentage of daredevils who will take the dare too far.
Perhaps the best we can hope to do with them is limit the damage they cause.
JFK was certainly part of this group, something his mother seems to have
recognized far better than he did.

However, I find cases like this one to be much more interesting, in that you
have pilots who have displayed good decisionmaking for perhaps decades, and
one day take off, VFR, into 1/4mi viz. These cases seem to me far more
interesting in that these are presumably people who can actually be helped,
because they are willing to listen. I look at these very closely because if
my research has taught me anything, it is that I am not too good to make
this kind of mistake. In this case though, I really wonder whether this lady
didn't have something physiologically bsuted in her brain. I'm
instrument-rated and current and I wouldn't take off into those conditions,
even 1mi viz. is tighter than I prefer given my skills and equipment.
Continuing VFR into IMC on a cross-country I can understand. This one simply
defies rational analysis.

-cwk.