About Good Pilots and Bad Pilots

Dudley, a few comments...

I doubt that the current discussion of 'good' versus 'bad' pilot is
really about an arena where a half a second controls life or death...
The vast majority of us GA pilots will never fly in that arena... I
don't know the chain of events for Mr. Stricklin... Military flying is
fast and dangerous... They are mostly flown at high angles of attack,
pulling significant G
loads... These machines have the glide ratio of a pregnant rock when
the arabic incense burner flames out... They have unstable flight
characteristics and complicated control
systems with computer interfaces, etc., that generally makes them
uncontrollable when anything goes wrong... They are often stuffed with
high explosives and rocket fuel... Their only purpose is to snuff the
life of an opposing pilot, tank commander, etc... So flying them in a
normal fashion for them is a dangerous maneuver under the best of
circumstances... Doing low level aerobatics for the thrills of the
unwashed masses multiplies the risk exponentially, as proven by the
follow the leaders controlled flight into the ground that wiped out a
team...

Next, the discussion of low level civilian aerobatics for crowd thrills
is a hot button for me... There simply is no reason for LOW LEVEL
aerobatics to exist in general aviation... Its' only purpose is to
draw a paying crowd of drooling, mouth breathers, who hope to see
carnage and death... In a rational world the inverted ribbon cut would
be flown directly over the heads of the crowd so that the risks taken
by the pilot are shared equally by Billy Bob on the ground... Darwins
law at it's finest...

And, in the original discussion of "no excuse", I specifically
exempted the mechanical failure that cannot be predicted or
prevented... Yes, there are true accidents - the magnetos crap out, a
fuel leak in flight, a control cable breaks, the crank breaks, a jug
fails, electrical fire behind the panel, etc... You are to be commended
for discussing with your students the necessity for preparing and
preplanning for these problems... I suspect that your students do very
well when taking their check rides and later on... but we need to get
back to basics here...
The vast majority of GA accidents happening today are not
'accidents'... They are chains of cause and effect that could have and
should have been prevented... They would not have happened for the
most part in military aviation... They would not have happened for
the most part in the aerobatic community... They would not have
happened for the most part in the airlines..

These are basic issues...
Do you have enough fuel for the flight? Are you cross checking your
fuel consumption versus time and distance left to go at regular
intervals during flight? There is simply no excuse for running out of
fuel - yet in GA it is almost a daily occurence... Military pilots
routinely go to bingo fuel, but it is not a cause of a significant
percentage of military crashes... Why not? Because it is carefully
planned for, every flight, every time..

Did you get a weather briefing and are you making good judgements -
versus the old, 'well, let's go take a look'... Continued VFR into IMC
followed by a crash is almost daily in GA... Weather is not as
controllable as fuel load, yet simply doing the basics would decrease
VFR into IMC accidents dramatically... It is an insignificant
percentage of the crashes in the airlines, military, and aerobatic
community... Therefore it is imminently preventable...

CFIT - flying a functioning airplane into the ground because you don't
know where you are in relation to the terrrain... What can I say about
this... jeez...

Running off the runway during takeoff or landing... A local at my
field just last week on takeoff, no less, ran his plane off the runway
at an angle, across the grass, across another runway, into the weeds
and put it on it's back... He said the sun blinded him... This is his
6th airplane crash that I know of, there are probably more... Does a
solution suggest itself here?

I could go on, but this should be enough to get foam at the mouth crowd
nicely lathered up...

denny