Originally Posted by
Bell_ringer
The insurance company would probably think that those who haven't crashed are better, that's how the system works.
I'm not sure that's empirically true. I know a relatively low-time ag-pilot who hit a wire he knew was there and had been flying around all day. The FAA wanted him to take wire-avoidance training, but he said to them (words to the effect of), "Trust me, there's NOBODY who's more current on wire avoidance than me right now!"
It is easy to say an accident can happen to anyone, this much is true. However accidents only happen to some people not to everyone and there are various reasons for that most which have been documented in your preferred human performance manual.
Those that stick within what is permitted and choose to operate within their abilities tend to avoid accidents.
The trick is realising if you avoided one due to luck or discipline.
But again I fall back on the fact that all the rulebooks and manuals in the world can't cover every situation a pilot can get into. No amount of training (or even first-hand experience) can prepare a pilot for every circumstance he'll encounter "out there." Accident avoidance is sometimes just good dumb luck. Accident occurrence is sometimes just bad dumb luck. If it were solely clinical and scientific we'd never have any accidents because we'd all be well-trained, experienced and we'd all do it "by the book" and make the correct decisions all the time.. Obviously we don't.
One day I was trying to get the boss up to his hunting camp in his 206. The wx was bad enough when we took off, and got progressively worse as we went along. But we knew the weather at the camp was good, so it was just a matter of getting through this "little area of low stuff." Show of hands: How many of us have ever said/done that? Well it got REALLY bad.
Slow-down-and-hover-up-the-road bad.
Dry-mouth-butt-clenchingly bad.
I'm-stupid-and-I-deserve-to-die bad.
Holy-cow-I-hope-that-wasn't-an-FAA-guy-in-that-car-down-there bad. You get the idea. It was bad. But sometimes when you're really in the sh*t, you think it's better just to keep going. The boss and I knew the area, knew there weren't any antennas or powerlines along our path...just follow this road and we'll be into the river valley soon and...sure enough we crested a hill and suddenly it got a lot better and I was glad I hadn't turned around. Pressure? Yes, both self-induced and some from the boss. Could it have ended badly? Oh yeah. It is those times when I sit there thinking to myself, "Eleven-thousand hours, huh? Gee, what a super pilot you are...NOT!" I was the happy recipient of some good dumb luck that day.