If I die...

Crash Lander wrote:
"Paul Tomblin" wrote in message
...
If I should die while diving at least I didn't die in bed.

Poignant words indeed.
The last line makes for a fitting replacement for the ever clichéd "He died
doing what he loved!", which always seems to rub people the wrong way for
some reason.
Crash Lander
The reason for this is complex and is much more deeply rooted in
professional aviation than it is in general aviation as that relates to
pilots who fly for pleasure.
In the professional community, many pilots don't like this sentiment.
First of all, it assumes that the person stating the sentiment knows or
knew the pilot in question well enough to make such a statement and in
almost every instance, this couldn't be further from the truth.
The truth is that most professional pilots, although we love to fly,
live in a world of intense competition and self discipline where just
doing the job right and keeping our necks in one piece takes up much of
the time we could otherwise be spending on "feeling" how wonderful it is
to fly.
If and when one of us buys the farm, it's due to something that went
wrong either with ourselves, our flying environment, and/or our
equipment. In our world, what we do when this happens is come together
like all normal people in aviation do, but you will seldom hear
sentiments like "at least he died doing what he loved to do".
What you will hear as we speak of a crash among ourselves are sentiments
like "Damn shame. What went wrong?"
If you are around professional pilots when a crash occurs, you should
notice an air of silent respect interfaced with straight forward and
pertinent questions.
In our world a crash means something went wrong that needs correcting, NOW!
The "he died with his boots on" thing just isn't our cup of tea, at
least for the pilots I know and have flown with anyway.
I've often said that if something went wrong and I dug a 10 foot hole in
the ground during one of my displays, my friends and associates would be
standing at the rim of the hole in about 30 seconds discussing what
might have gone wrong..and that's the way I would want it to be. I'd
want them to find out ASAP what happened so it didn't happen to someone
else the next day.
That's the way it is in the world of professional aviation.....at least
in my little corner of it anyway. :-)

--
Dudley Henriques