A good friend of mine died in his aircraft a few years back.
He died with his partner, who was also in the aircraft.
Every year since, I have flown a slow roll over his grave so I don’t forget. This was the last year - time to move on. I still miss him.
He had family, he had children, he had close friends.
He was a very good pilot.
I gave as much help to the AAIB investigator as I was able. They were unable to establish the cause of the accident.
His family read PpruNe. They read PpruNe every day for a week.
They understood our desire to discuss what went wrong.
They took solace from the thought that another pilot might take away a lesson from the discussion that could save his or her life.
They were distraught by the ill informed speculation about the pilot’s competence.
They asked how people could question his handling of the events of that day when they had no idea what happened.
They wondered how we could be so needlessly incentive about a fellow pilot.
It is for that reason I believe we should restrict discussion about accidents to demonstrable issue or factors.
We may question whether a pilot was adequately trained, experienced or qualified for the flight, but unless we know what training, experience or qualifications he had, we might do as well to keep those thoughts to ourselves.
Lest we forget, the best pilots make mistakes - we each dance on the head of that pin - hopefully with experience we just make fewer mistakes.
The trouble is in our world it need only take one mistake.
Last edited by Fuji Abound; 19th Nov 2008 at 07:52.