"Ron Lee" wrote in message
...
Matt Whiting wrote:

Ron Lee wrote:

The real cause was he was an idiotic and inept pilot that day who
left his wife without a husband and kids fatherless.

Fortunately, being an idiotic and inept usenet poster is more forgiving...


Matt

I suppose you would fly with a pilot like him? Would you let your
wife or kids fly with him if he were alive and just narrowly missed
the building?

Maybe you would like to fly with the pilots who crashed at LEX?

There are idiot pilots and we have seen a few cases lately.
Unfortunately they take people with them instead of just themselves
sometimes.

Ron Lee

Ron;

Let me explain to you how this works in the real world.

Even the most highly trained pilots in the world screw up from time to time.
Trust me, I know quite a few of them :-)
Flying is an endeavor where you operate in an environment that is constantly
trying to kill you and everybody in the airplane with you. Its that simple!
The "trick" as we say in the business, is to get yourself to the point where
you can handle this environment on a constant basis. This means that a
pilot, from the beginning student to the long time ATP and CFI, has to be
constantly up to the task.
A pilot's level of competence changes from day to day; actually minute to
minute really. You can be sharp and on top of things one minute and off your
edge the next minute just long enough to kill yourself.
Keeping this edge sharp as a pilot is really a full time job, and even then
there's no guarantee that you won't have a 2 second lapse and forget
something that will kill you.
Flying an airplane is controlling a moving object that includes you and the
people with you in a 3 dimensional area that exists at very high speed. This
can be likened to having someone throw random knives at you from twenty feet
away while you constantly try and duck out of the way and not get hit with
one. Given those conditions, you can get some idea of how long one could do
this without dodging the wrong way and taking a knife right in the face.
All this doesn't mean a pilot can't prepare for, and be able to function
properly in the midst of all this potential danger. It does mean however,
that all of us....and I mean ALL of us, have those moments in flying where
we do exactly the wrong thing. If we're lucky, and what we screwed up on
wasn't at the exact wrong time, we survive, learn from what happened, and
truck on trying never to replicate THAT mistake again.
These two guys in the Cirrus had one of the moments I'm talking about here.
They weren't stupid, and I'm sure they didn't want to die. They screwed up,
and the numbers played out against them. Instead of having one of those
"experiences" I'm talking about, they didn't make it.
What we have to do as pilots is learn from their mistake so that WE become
just a little bit safer and our edge gets just a little sharper.
This preconception some people have about pilots having to be perfect just
doesn't wash in the real world. I've seen pilots with thousands of hours
flying the hottest airplanes in the world that I knew to be the best of the
best killed right in front of me; the result of an instant of distraction.
It happens.
Instead of putting these guys down which doesn't bring them back or enhance
the flight safety issue, just realize they were two guys who made a mistake.
God knows they paid for it.
Just learn and move on. Concentrate just a bit more on sharpening your own
edge and at least something good will have come from this accident.
Dudley Henriques