I think you have a much stronger sense that you are master of your destiny than many of us. I've certainly read the stall-spin stories of pilots in benign-handling trainers on a clear, windless day simply misjudging the turn to final by getting too low and ruddering the turn until they depart the airplane. It happens and it's about as close to 100% pilot error and poor airmanship as you can get. There are a number of those in the public record. I just think many cases are more complex than that and sit at the end of an accumulation of decisions where the pilot estimates wrong on which is the less-risky choice to make. I think this is particularly true if you are pushing for performance - you make risk-reward tradeoffs all the time and many of those are based on a sample of experience that is just insufficient for the range of situations that randomness can throw at you - but they work out 99.9% of the time - you just don't know if it's 99.9% or 99.999% and over time that matters.

Example: The Ethiopian 737MAX flight crew, faced with runaway trim and control forces too high to hold the nose up elected to re-engage the MCAS system to get electric trim back. It turned out not to help and lot of people died. It is possible that if they'd made the exact right choices at the exact right time they might've saved the aircraft, so is the fact that they failed '****-poor airmanship' or something more complex? They knew that MCAS-induced trim runaway was possible from the prior accident only weeks before. There was a much-criticized NYT op-ed that basically called the Ethiopian crew bad pilots. Most other experts said the situation was one that put so much stress on the crew that it's not reasonable to expect airmanship should be the correct solution to the problem, even if airmanship could've saved it. With perfect airmanship Sully could've gotten his A320 back to Laguardia, so was landing in the Hudson ****-poor airmanship? After all, he destroyed an airplane. I see more gray out there than you do and it give me pause..

Which brings me to one final thought. There is also a human factors aspect of all of this. My personal experience is that there are a number of pilots with an extremely strong "internal locus of control". In their own estimation, they know exactly what the airplane will do, are excellent at reading the weather and always keep perfectly sufficient margins. Many (not all) of this personality type are hostile to feedback or thought that challenges that internal view. It's more than a handful of pilots I've encountered who, when confronted with feedback that they cut another pilot off in a thermal (or other similar behavior) responded with what amounted to "I'm fine - if you don't like it get out of my way". This, too, has given me pause, and in more than one case individuals have been encouraged to seek other forms of entertainment - particularly in the racing community. So, what happens to the pilot who is absolutely certain that his margins are good and he's read the weather right, configured the aircraft properly, etc. when a flying situation gets outside of their rock-solid belief system of what might happen? Do they go into denial or are they flexible in their view that they may have miscalculated something? Since many accidents are based on accumulations of decisions, the ability to re-estimate one's assumptions is a critical personality trait in breaking the potential accident chain.

Skill certainly counts, but so does attitude. It might be more humility than skill that saves your life.

Andy Blackburn
9B

On Friday, November 29, 2019 at 9:41:14 AM UTC-8, 2G wrote:

One point I will agree with you on is that you can't reduce all of your risks to zero - for example, if someone comes at you from your blind position with tunnel vision, it's damn hard to avoid a mid-air (it's happened to me, but I did avoid him). Nonetheless, the accident reports are replete with examples of ****-poor airmanship that are totally avoidable, including Masak's.

Tom