Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity, or neglect. — Captain A. G. Lamplugh, British Aviation Insurance Group, 1930
Tuesday night, in the middle of a rainstorm, a small airplane returning from Georgia crashed onto the runway at the little airport two miles from my home. The pilot, an engineer and former university professor who founded an international electronic-sensor company, died either in the crash or in the fire that subsequently destroyed the airplane.
Wednesday afternoon, as I watched the maintenance vehicles working on the runway, I asked the old man of the airport what had happened. Did he suppose the airplane had caught a downdraft in the rainstorm, or maybe some wind-shear as it crossed the tree-line? Or perhaps the pilot cheated, flew too low and too slow, and a simple gust kicked the sky out from under him?
'That could be,' the old man said. 'But I do know he shouldn't have been flying in that weather. He won't do it again.'
That does sum it up, doesn't it? The pilot was in such a hurry to get home that he flew into weather that no small plane should challenge, trying to land using a high, steep non-precision approach at an airport with short runways surrounded by tall trees. He ignored a dozen better options in order to get home as planned, and arrived on-schedule and dead.
* * *
This mistake is so common that it even has a name, beaten into the head of every aspiring pilot and harped on again at every review of his flying skills: Get-there-itis. We need, for some reason, to get to our destination as planned, no matter all the better reasons to the contrary. Never mind that bad weather can overwhelm the pilot and even tear a jumbojet to pieces. Never mind the maintenance issues on the airplane, or our own exhaustion, or the better airport ten or one hundred miles away. Never mind all the reasons to cab it to the nearest hotel and try again later: We must get there and so we press on. Sometimes we are lucky and we arrive at our destination in one piece, but all too often, like the good professor, we turn our little airplanes into flaming lawn-darts with our tender selves trapped inside. Because ... nothing.
To see this happen again, to an otherwise excellent fellow who clearly had the experience to know better, and despite all the warnings that shouldn't even be necessary, is sickening to a pilot. Hubris and small aircraft are a terrible combination. A pilot must know when to say: Too much. He must have the discretion to admit that the reasons to hold back are greater than the reasons to go, and he must have the valor to say no, especially to himself: Yes, reality applies to me, too. No, I am not special. The pilot who cannot do this is an accident in search of a grid-reference. It is only a matter of where and when.
* * *
This lesson was driven home to me before I had gotten quite arrogant enough to bend my airplane or my body. One night, before I had the training to fly an airplane on instruments alone, I blundered into an advection fog that had not been predicted although I should have suspected it. For several, horrible seconds, I had no idea which way was up, much less north, south, east, or west. But I rallied my wits and my autopilot, turned around, and asked Air Traffic Control for their wise advice. With the help of an overflying United Airlines captain who kindly relayed our radio messages (bless you, Sir!), we found an adequate alternative runway where I landed and stayed for the night. A pilot's-lounge couch has never been so comfortable!
My pilot-reports that night essentially re-wrote the weather briefings, and I took the lesson on prudence and the dangers of excessive trust deeply to heart. Had anything else gone wrong that night, had things been any worse, they could have been much worse. I still go cold when I remember how perilous that situation, the result of a simple rookie mistake, had been. But I had blundered only into an unpredicted overcast, not a violent rainstorm, and I had plenty of fuel to take me to an unplanned alternate. This and my willingness to get on the radio and confess my predicament are probably why I am still here to regret my mistake.
There have been other teachable moments over the years from which I learned again the lessons of carelessness and neglect, that reality cannot be denied, and that flying, more than most things, does not forgive big mistakes. Neither does it forgive too many small mistakes. Nature knows all the cards, and gravity always wins.
