It was with a mixture of sadness and irritation that I read about Mr Hagedorn’s apparently highly avoidable accident.
People who simply refuse to accept responsibility for their mistakes, people who refuse to listen and to learn will forever remain a danger to themselves, and more importantly, to the wider public. Choosing as he does, to bask in the limelight with stories of heroically ‘saving the day’, he shows no sign of taking even the first vital steps to becoming a safer pilot.
For some on here to blame his instructor or examiner is not fair. Many people present themselves for both flying instruction and indeed for examination for grant of PPL (or NPPL) who are of marginal ability. However, an examiner can only judge what is demonstrated on the day. Neither the instructor nor the examiner have any control over any possible degradation of performance, or their growing propensity for risk taking after the grant of a licence.
Possibly there is an over ‘inclusive’ attitude in some flying schools, demonstrated by a ‘we can teach anyone to fly’ attitude, which can give false expectation to some. A more realistic assessment at an early stage of flight training might well help to minimise later accidents by over ambitious pilots of marginally ability. By contrast, it was refreshing to hear in a Safety training lecture at a very early stage of my commercial helicopter fight training that “helicopters are not for everybody”.
Mr Hagendorn’s woeful tale and his manner on TV remind me of two particular students that I have at one time tried to instruct. They shared distinct similarities; being ‘older’, ‘intelligent’, of a somewhat ‘bumptious’ manner, having a distinct preference for talking rather than listening, and being apparently incapable of accepting any responsibility for their mistakes. Indeed the two in question never, to my recollection, ever felt they had made a mistake. It was always “because of this, that or the other factor” beyond their control.
The fact that they are intelligent sadly does nothing to help these people to learn, and thereby to become safer pilots. Quite the opposite. Their intelligence has allowed them to cruise through life being the ‘instructor’ not the ‘student’, and changing roles in later life is not something that comes easily to them. They will typically spend more time in pre-flight briefings talking rather than listening to the instructor. They will usually be trying to correct the instructor, based on their long-held and invariably erroneous ‘knowledge’ gained from dubious sources such as MS Flight Sim (or in Mr H’s case, Biggles books). Blind faith in these false props rather than the wise words from an expert instructor is a poor substitute for the day to day task of flying safely, and especially so in an emergency.
Both of the students that Mr H reminds me of went on to have serious accidents. Thankfully, like Mr H, the one who did eventually manage to get a PPL survived to tell the tale. Not so the other one.
Lets hope that Mr H takes this opportunity to have a real hard look at himself, to review his attitude to airmanship and his need to listen and learn from both his mistakes and from others who are wiser. This would give him his best chance to become a better pilot before it is too late. As an airline pilot who regularly flies a jet full of passengers in the EDI airspace that Mr H apparently violated, I am appalled to know that my passengers and I are being put at such serious risk by fools like him. The saddest part is that he seems to be completely unaware of the danger he is putting so many people in.
There are none so blind as those who refuse to listen.