as running aground is to a mariner: entirely avoidable except in a tiny minority of cases
Hmm. Wonder if this one counts: we chickened out of continuing the planned journey due to weather, and ran for the nearest (and only available) harbour, arriving dead on low tide. Fortunately as we were trying to nudge our way around a mudbank using two echo sounders and a (theoretical) display of the mudbank on the GPS screen we saw someone waving a radio at us from the harbour wall, and he was able to explain the harbour's leading marks to us (which weren't in the book we had despite it being the most recent edition). So we got off the mud and into the harbour with no further trouble (thus giving the lie to the book's assertion that nobody could get in within two hours of low water).
I'm sure the skipper wasn't doing anything wrong - she had a perfectly good Plan B, which was just to anchor in the channel for a few hours until the tide came in, with the disadvantage of not getting to the pub before closing time - but I was struck by how differently we do things around aeroplanes, like the out-of-dateness of the best available documentation for example.