As I type these words, I am looking out the window across the ramp of the Brisbane, Australia airport. I have spent the last 16 hours flying on American Airlines over the Pacific Ocean enroute to my final destination of Papua New Guinea. For those of you who are the curious type, I’m headed to PNG on a mission trip. It will be my first time in the jungles of PNG and I’m hoping to catch a ride on one of those MAF missionary airplanes that fly into those extremely treacherous mountain jungle landing strips (I don’t think those classify as a runway; see YouTube for examples).
Anyway, during the leg over the Pacific, it was dark the entire time since I was heading west and chasing the sunset, instead of chasing the sunrise. It’s a little odd being in the dark for 16 hours. Plus, my body didn’t really know what time it was since we were crossing many time zones, plus the International Date Line. I managed some sleep, some movies, some book reading, and some reflection to pass the time.
One of the things I reflected on were the 2 recent, terrible aircraft accidents. The first, the Army helicopter midair crash with the American Airlines regional jet in DC, was the worst. The second was the medical Lear Jet that stalled shortly after takeoff in Philadelphia and crashed less than two minutes into flight. Both accidents are awful.
I am not going to analyze, speculate, or postulate on the myriad of reasons why the accidents happened. That’s the NTSB’s job, not mine. What I do want to bring our attention to is the simple fact that both these accidents were caused by mistakes.
Mistakes happen. Mistakes happen numerous times a day in our every day, ground based lives. We are human and by no means perfect (even those of us who are perfectionists, present company included). We make a wrong turn, write someone’s coffee order down wrong, contradict ourselves when we give our kids instructions because we forgot what we said 5 minutes ago (hand raised here). Thankfully, our ground-based mistakes are rarely life and death mistakes. Exceptions being mistakes in a car, which can be life threatening.
Mistakes in the airplanes we fly happen too. Again, not one of us is perfect. We hit the wrong button on the GPS, we read back the wrong heading on a radio call (usually, ATC catches these), we hit the autopilot button too many times and it goes into ROL mode instead of NAV mode. These things happen. With little mistakes, the key is not to freak out, rush through trying to do the right thing, and ending up making more mistakes.
The mistakes that can get you killed in airplanes are usually aeronautical decision making mistakes. Go/No Go decisions when it comes to weather (if there is convection in your way, best to wait; if there are thick layers of ice, best to wait), decisions to continue flying when you have a nagging voice in your head telling you to land due to fatigue, uncertainty about a squawk, or anything (always listen to the voice!). Decisions to take off with a known maintenance issue because you don’t want to get stuck. Not to mention, decisions that must be made in an emergency.
The point to all this is, it’s hard to teach aeronautical decision making from an instructor’s standpoint. We try, but we can’t be sitting next to you all the time. We are always here to bounce weather decisions off of (I wish that pilots who crash because they flew into a thunderstorm would have thought to call their instructor when they looked at the weather before they took off!). We are always here to ask maintenance questions to, as well.
When it comes to good aeronautical decision making, always utilize as many knowledgeable resources as possible before departure (Google doesn’t count, but the PMOPA, COPA, or TBMOPA forums are a good starting point). Call your instructors when you’re not sure. Call your maintenance shop when you aren’t sure. Always ask yourself, am I really safe (IM SAFE reference here). Most importantly, have your own personal minimums for weather and do not break them.
The DC accident and the Lear Jet accident are both awful situations where mistakes were made that were led to because decisions were made. Work on making good decisions with flying and we’ll certainly cut down on the general aviation crashes we see each year.