Most pilots who have been flying for a while know pilots who scare them. My husband, John, and I were two of those pilots. We were so wrapped up in using our airplane as a personal, fun traveling machine that we would not let anything — inexperience, nighttime, bad weather, even a rough-running engine — get in our way. We had one close call after another until we had our inevitable accident.
It’s not that well-meaning pilots didn’t try to counsel us — like the guy in Albuquerque who suggested that rather than taking off for a night trip over the mountains in a snowstorm, it might be wiser for us to wait until the morning. Or the multiple pilots, including John’s uncle, who felt we should have more time before we moved from our Cherokee to the higher-powered and complex Comanche, or at least we should get some more time in it before we set off on a one-day trip from California to Indiana. In each case, we not only ignored them, we were offended. What seemed to annoy us was that they told us what we were doing wasn’t “safe.” They even said we were exercising poor decision making and judgment.
