There is nothing like an accident to make you think about changing your flying ways. After Martha and I had our accident, we urgently wanted to avoid another one, but we didn’t intuitively know what to do differently. We did know that somehow our attitudes about risk-taking had to change. It was pretty clear that we should quit doing “stupid stuff,” but those things never seem that stupid when you are doing them
As “experienced” pilots, we had begun accumulating a long list of things we weren’t going to do anymore. Each scary experience gave us a new lesson. After our accident, we felt especially lucky to have survived that particular test in order to get the lesson. The problem was that we were learning a lot of individual lessons, but we kept putting ourselves at risk to learn each new one. And even a super-long list of things we weren’t going to do anymore didn’t prepare us for something we hadn’t thought of or tried yet.
