JFK Jr.'s mean ol wife

: Rather than dispelling pilots who crash as fools (which admittedly many
are,
: read the NTSB reports), let's learn from their mistakes, place ourselves
in
: their scenarios, and ask ourselves what we'd do in similar
circumstances.

Most of the deadly accidents can be attributed to some form of
poor pilot decision, judgement, competence. It's pretty rare that a wing
falls off, or even that an engine quits outright. Much more often it's
VFR in IMC, fuel starvation, or overloading that gets people killed. It's
unfortunate that arrogance and hubris are typical pilot personality
traits, as these really have no business in aviation.

True, unfortunately those people are rarely the folks introspectively asking
themselves what they would do in a difficult situation beforehand. The
unfortunate thing about safety seminars are that the people who need them
most will never attend.

Speaking of pilot personality traits, someone on some thread mentioned that
certain personality traits that make people succeed in business are the same
traits that in some cases, kill them in the air. CEOs didn't get to where
they are now by avoiding risks. While good CEO's take calculated risks,
many successful people, with the money to buy more plane than they can
handle, are likely to overestimate their ability, underestimate the risks at
hand, and overestimate the reward of satisfying their passengers and getting
to their destination at a particular time. I'm not insinuating that JFK Jr
fell into this category, but there are plenty of high profile fatalities
were this was a contributing factor.