Valuable advice. As most of us know and concede it's a time worn subject, one that has been aired over and over again. Still, to have a look over that aforementioned abyss and survive is an experience equalling no other in terms of making the deepest and most lasting impression as to one's mortality.
Not a learning or teaching method to be put into the syllabus. The safe way advocated today is to lead the would be intrepid birdman through a course in Human Factors so as to shield him and anybody else from the risks inherent in subscribing to the school of hard knocks and the prospect of death by misadventure.
The skipper of a square rigger or the hard bitten old DC-3 skipper showing the new to the game, cocky whippersnapper the ropes, ( a la Gann in "Fate is the Hunter"), men who've seen it all and come through scarred and so much the wiser, are entirely relics of a past age. Only in books can anyone get a taste today of the era and of the lore, the absorption of the latter being once essential to getting anywhere before the mast or into the left seat of those wondrous round engined machines.
Ossie Osgood, up in Darwin, used to require and charge his every new pilot recruit to read through a prescribed list of books written by those pilots who had sat down and recounted in graphic detail how they survived the odds. If they were slack about following Ossie's credo and failed to answer a few questions from Ossie as to how Chichester found Lord Howe for instance, then their days with Arnhem Air Charter were numbered.
Thinking of Des, though a considerable remove from those pioneers that Gann sought to immortalise, as in his long list of those who perished that others might learn and endure, and as other posters here have touched on, the lessons to be learnt, the message to be interpreted, is cogent, perennial and essential, and one that many tied up in aviation in Australia today have undertaken to conscientiously pass on in any way they can.
There was a missionary aviation chief pilot once upon a time in PNG who knew all this, in his bones, in his head and in his heart. Any new arrival about to be inducted into the ways of survival in the unforgiving work environment ahead of him, was first taken to the cemetery where he would be shown sundry head-stones and told in graphic detail the circumstances that entrapped the deceased. In this there is a parallel in those attempts to get through to kids and others on dangerous driving charges being taken into the mortuary to see first hand what carnage really looks like.
You can train a dog by shock treatment to modify it's behaviour. You can teach a lion to jump through a hoop. You can lead a horse to water, but . . .. .. . (Thinks . .. . . there were quite a few old sky pilots of the genus aviatus who wore the 'dog collar', but whether of the order of Saint Zapper or not, F Nose.)
Last edited by Fantome; 9th Oct 2012 at 23:41.