At the risk of inflaming passions with the first point, there are a few underlying considerations ..
(a) a successful pilot necessarily needs to have a strong ego to do the job. A consequent risk is that of believing excessively in one's inherent knowledge base and presuming technical competence where such a presumption is not entirely justified
(b) traditional pilot training regimes don't address all sorts of things - including obstacle performance strategies (although one readily can learn all about energy climbs, manoeuvring performance, etc. etc. ... )
(c) most airlines don't train beyond the generic (and some don't bother to train anything) so the old wives' tale network sometimes runs rife with various interesting beliefs coming to the surface
(d) as one very experienced ops engineer was fond of saying, when he was still with us, "why do they hassle us so much when the end result is the same if the wing falls off ... ?" (ie why don't pilots berate the structures people as well as ops engineering). I guess that, as pilots, we are much more interested in the rocky bits we see regularly during our flight operations... perhaps we should take as active an interest in many other areas of the technical aspects ..
(e) some airlines, in my view, don't address all reasonable considerations in analysing and determining RTOW and departure paths.
... and, it is a brave pilot who heads off down the runway, hoping that nothing untoward is going to happen ... and trusting to luck and good fortune to thread his way out of danger if something does go awry.
My views are aligned with Old Smokey's ... blood and guts on the ground is the end concern .. my one foray into accident investigation left me with a distaste for burnt bodies ... but the routine significant concern is the legal impact of poor decision-making at the inquiry. More disquieting is the oft-observed tendency for the operator to abandon the pilot to his/her own defence at said inquiry. Pilots who choose not to have a healthy respect for this aspect of the real world live in fairyland ...
And, certainly, there are no guarantees ... only probabilities and risk levels. Aim is to juggle the odds as much as one reasonably can to maximise the chances of survival.
Last edited by john_tullamarine; 16th Nov 2004 at 20:52.