PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Piper Cherokee ditches off Kingscliff (Merged)
Old 22nd Mar 2007, 00:31
  #35 (permalink)  
Brian Abraham
 
Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: Sale, Australia
Age: 80
Posts: 3,832
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
J430, To explain. Some 35 or so years ago a very good friend of mine lost his life in an accident. No one observed the accident and the wreck was not found for some two days. I had dinner with him and his not long wife a week before the accident and he spent the evening enthusiastically and with great passion talking of his ambitions in the aerobatic competition arena of aviation. He had a competition coming up and hoped to do well. Someone, somewhere for some reason floated the story that it was suicide, and that rumour pervades today in some areas of the aviation family, indeed it was even mentioned in a thread here on proon a few months ago as being suicide. I can assure everyone with all the certainity that a friend can muster that it was not suicide but merely the outcome of the same cause that brings us some 80% of our accidents - pilot error. Is someone in 35 years time going to be talking of this twin accident as being suicide with some authority because he read it on a professional pilots website many years ago? Mud sticks (unfortunately) and once the horse has bolted............ You should have learnt by now to treat anything in a paper and things observed by non aviation people with some scepticism. Indeed, if you get into accident investigation even well credentialled aviation people are not always reliable witnesses you'll find.
Brian Abraham is offline