I’m going to go out on a fairly stout limb with this statement: No pilot ever plans to become an accident statistic. Instead, we all approach every flight in the firm belief it will be successful or we don’t fly. Too often, of course, events conspire against us—or we screw up—and the flight’s outcome isn’t as we planned. So…what are some of those events? What can we do to minimize the risk of becoming a statistic? One answer lies in the NTSB’s voluminous accident investigation reports and its own statistics, which help highlight how and why accidents occur.
The chart below is much more than a simple infographic. Instead, it can and should be used as a road map (flight plan?), as guidance on how most accidents occur and what we can do to avoid being involved in one. Of course, we already know most of this, thanks to our training. But it can help to discuss some of these “greatest hits” with an eye toward emphasizing what we can do to avoid creating a new entry in the NTSB’s records. While the number of categories in the chart preclude us tackling from each of them, we can take on a few of the most prevalent and avoidable defining events leading to a fatal accident.
