The Human Factor

Specifically:

Of the accidents listed, 43 pilots were killed, 21 seriously injured. Co-pilots were killed a total of four, and three dual students lost their lives, as did one check pilot. Worst of all, 28 passengers were killed.

The NTSB list breaks down pilot classifications and causes; many of the causes read identically to some Australian GA accident statistics:

• Attempted operation with known deficiencies in equipment; attempted operation beyond experience/ability level; became lost or disoriented; continued flight into adverse weather conditions; exceeded design stress limits of aircraft.

Sound familiar? Here are some more:

• Improper IFR operation; spatial disorientation; inadequate preflight preparation and/or planning; failed to obtain/maintain proper flying speed. All the above causes were under the PILOT heading. Here’s what the Board’s report had to say about dual student accidents:

• Improper operation of flight controls and/or brakes; premature liftoff; improper level-off; misjudged speed; failed to maintain directional control. Flight instructors? Some of the causes include inadequate supervision of flight. And then of course we have the all-too-familiar other causes of some US accidents in the past few months. Things like hitting wires on finals; flipping aircraft over after heavy braking; inadequate maintenance and/or servicing; and selecting the wrong runway for landing on a windy day. There is, unfortunately, much more …

The Pilot’s seat was unlatched and slid back on take-off roll; one instance where the pilot in command failed to check wheels UP in a floatplane before alighting on water; several stall/mush incidents; stall-spins, some of them during unauthorised low flying.

It’s a sorry, sad story. But it happens and keeps on happening.

One begins to wonder if some pilots have a dinosaur’s death wish instant syndrome when they climb into their aircraft …

And we wonder how many pilots or students reading this item are potential accidents, simply through their own ego? Surely the thing to remember AT ALL TIMES is that an aircraft can kill you quite effectively if mishandled. It is a piece of complex machinery that, if correctly maintained, does exactly what you make it do.

The saddest thing of all is that many of these accidents can kill, mangle, maim or disfigure innocent people who have put their lives in your hands or are going about their business on the ground and hurting nobody.

Perhaps the most incredible examples of how to become an accident statistic are contained in the small matter-of-fact tables in the Report. Just read some of these and wonder how intent some people are on demolishing themselves – and in some cases other people:

Case 1: A Mooney M-20E slammed into a field after wiping off wires and a pole during a low pass over a California property. At the controls was a 46-year-old PPL with 1200 hours in his logbook. During the post-mortems on him and his three passengers, it was found the pilot had a blood alcohol level, but there wasn’t enough blood left to take a proper reading. Two of his dead passengers had readings of 0.21 and 0.22 per cent …

Case 2: Near South Bay, Florida, a Beech 65 wiped off its undercard on landing. Nobody knew where the aircraft had started from or where it was bound – but when investigators found the empty aircraft, there were obvious signs it had been used for transporting marijuana …

Case 3: Another “grass” smuggling run, this time in a Cessna 310. The aircraft hit a stump during take-off from an unprepared field, near Fellsmere, Florida. Naturally enough, nobody was home when the investigators got there.

Case 4: A Hughes 269C crashed near Andytown, Florida, on a rainy, dark night during a local flight. When the body of the pilot was examined – he had been a healthy 2 3-year-old with a Comm ticket and 684 hours in – medics found 0.3mg of methaqualone (the drug known locally as Mandrax) drug level in his blood. The pilot took with him to death one passenger …

Case 5: One for the “Silly Things” book. Two flight instructors on a local flight in a Cessna 152, out of Stormville, NY, were last seen doing hammerhead stalls TWO HUNDRED FEET above ground level before they killed themselves.

Case 6: The body of a pilot was found 10 days after he disappeared with his Cessna 182 on a transit flight in Oklahoma. He had been 51 years old with 1675 hours in his logbook before he splashed himself over the countryside near Granite, Oklahoma. He had said researchers, had been doing a low pass when the impact. He had also been drinking – even when searchers found the body, they assessed a 0.143 per cent blood alcohol level in the corpse …

Case 7: Perhaps the classic in a sad procession of stupid incidents … the pilot of a Cessna 150, and his passenger, died near Bristol Tennessee, when the 21-year-old pilot let his little Cessna’s wheels hit the surface of a lake.

Observers saw him trying to scare the feathers off a flock of ducks swimming on the lake … chalk one up for the ducks!

Case 8: The pilot (58 years old with more than a thousand hours in) of a Beech V 35A died, along with his copilot and one passenger, when his aircraft smashed into the ground in a stall-spin maneuver near Chesapeake, Virginia.

He was in the initial phase of the approach, prior to landing in rain and a 200ft cloud.

What happened? He had tried to couple his autopilot to the ILS, but had dialled 109. 15 into his receiver instead of 109.10 …

And there are many more others like this, in the NTSB Report.