Knee Jerks

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
This all said, I'm not sure I'm following your train of thought here. By
saying "s*it happens" are you implying that I survived these challenges
through luck?

Minimizing the risk through good training is great. And there certainly are
some idiots out there that I don't want to share the sky with. However, I'm
not so quick to categorize all non-mechanical, non-medical accidents to
pilots being idiots. I don't judge a pilot until I have all the facts.
Sometimes circumstances are beyond the control of the best pilots. I also
don't believe NTSB accident reports to be gospel.

In my younger days, I was quick to judge other pilots. I was 10 years old
the first time I saw a crashed airplane. It was a C-150 with 2 bodies still
in it. They were the victims of a mid-air collision. I wondered how they
could have let that happen. What was wrong with them? In the years since
then, I've had some close calls of my own. I quit judging others quickly.

I check that my landing gear is down and green 3 times before landing. Want
to guess why I am so paranoid about it? I haven't yet, but I've come close.
If I do land with the gear up one day, would that make me a bad pilot? Some
of my friends with over 10,000 hours each have landed with the gear too
short. Does that make them bad pilots?

In 2 cases mechanical discrepencies were discovered after the investigation
was
over. One of those helped spawned an AD concerning Mooney's electric gear.
People sure were quick to judge that pilot before the switches were found to
be at fault. None of them apologized afterwards.

Here's another angle. Last fall, I went into the Mexican desert, put some
air in the tires of Navajo, put some gas in the tanks, and flew it to
Florida. It was a drug confiscation that had set there for 16 years. The
instrument panel had nothing but bullet holes. One wing leading edge had a
dent nearly back to the spar. The paint and interior was long gone. The
airplane looked like crap. The risk of me needing to fill out an NTSB report
was somewhat higher than when you fly Atlas. Does that make me a bad pilot?

Some may think so, and I have been labeled a cowboy. And yet I have 10 years
of airline management and the Administrator's blessing to give checkrides on
3 families of aircraft. Who's right about me?

One other lesson that took me many, many years to learn is to not hold
others to my standards. Most won't be able to meet my standards, including
some airline pilots I have flown with. I have to respect the ideal that even
the idiots have a right to fly, and a right to crash.

D.