6 SEPTEMBER 2019 ÇPlane&Pilot
GOING DIRECT
By Isabel GoyerI
sometimes hear non-aviation folks asking aloud
why pilots “like reading about crashes so much?”
We don’t.
In late June, a Beechcraft King Air 350 crashed on
takeoff at Addison Airport, seven miles north of Dallas
Love Field. The two pilots and all eight passengers
perished in the crash. The NTSB is investigating and
is months away from issuing a statement of probable
cause. But accidents of this type—an apparent loss of
control on takeoff—are most often the result of the
loss of power in one of the engines at a high angle of
attack and resultant roll into the good engine and into
the ground, or in this case, into the side of a hangar.
On the day of the crash, I covered the story on
planeandpilotmag.com and for our eNews twice-
weekly newsletter. Many thousands of people clicked
on the link to read it.
All of this is to say that, yes, we report on aircraft
accidents. Like us, competing magazine brands do, as
well. I know the numbers on these stories, too. They’re
historically the best-read articles in the magazine,
and they’re closely followed on digital media, as well.
But why are they so...popular, though I use the
term advisedly. We pilots don’t “like” reading about
accidents. In fact, the extreme opposite is true. We read
them despite the fact that they’re often very hard to
read. It’s virtually impossible to explain to non-pilots
just how devastating it can be for us to read about
aviation accidents. Even if we didn’t know the people
involved, and we seldom do know them personally,
we have hundreds of friends just like them. It’s a good
bet, in fact, that we’re very much like them, as well. We
read these stories in part to honor the experience of
the pilots who were lost or injured in these accidents.
There’s another, arguably more important reason.
It’s hard to articulate it to non-pilots, but here we go.
We read about accidents in order to come to a better,
more nuanced understanding of the potential or likely
causes, so we might formulate and update a personal
safety plan to cut our risk in this inherently risky activ-
ity that we love so dearly.
From personal experience, I know this works. Many
years ago, shortly after I went to work at a large aviationpublication, I started flying a lot, 150-250 hours a year,
in single-engine piston planes. I was a new instrument-
rated pilot, and most of my flying was for one of two
purposes—for business transportation or family travel.
At the time, I was working with legendary aviation
journalist Richard Collins, and I had gone down to visit
Richard for a story we were doing on used airplanes.
He knew a guy with a beautifully restored Cessna 170.
As we were pulling Richard’s Cessna P-210 out of his
hangar at Hagerstown, Maryland, to go meet his friend
at a nearby grass strip runway, we got to talking about
how my flying was going. I told him that I was doing
pretty well with it, but I had two big concerns: icing and
thunderstorms. In his famously laconic way, Richard
replied simply that, “Those are pretty good concerns
to have.” The message was clear. Keep your ears open
and keep learning.
And I did. Over the past many years, my understand-
ing of the web of safety, for lack of a better term, has
changed continuously as I’ve read, watched, listened
and learned. And I’ve been lucky enough to have some
of the best mentors in the business, in the history of
the business, really.GA SAFETY CULTURE
Around the same time that Richard validated my
concerns about my personal flying, we were also at
the beginning of a much-needed sea change in the way
we looked at aviation safety, focusing on how we can
prevent the kinds of accidents that made up most of
the FAA docket on any given day.
Over the years, the FAA—chief regulator of all things
with wings—has viewed safety chiefly from a punitive
perspective. Its operative mission was always to find
out who did what and, once that was determined,
arrive at how best to assign blame and punishment. Of
course, it also worked to educate pilots, but its efforts,
as well as the best attempts of general aviation educa-
tion organizations, did little to move the safety needle.
A few years ago, I had the chance to visit with the
people with the United States Air Force Safety Center,
headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The
command isn’t well known. In fact, before I visited,
I was only remotely aware of its existence, and even
then only because of its accident investigation lab,
an outdoor site with multiple aircraft crash sites that
the USAF put together in order to teach its personnel
how to investigate mishaps. Every week, a new class
of investigators arrives in Albuquerque for training
in mishap investigation. The use of the lab is only
a part of the training. The larger part is coming to
understand the mission, a mission, I should add, thatWhy So Many
Plane Crashes?
The widespread coverage of aircraft
accidents is for a good reason.