Airplanes are mechanical contrivances. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn they sometimes break. The object, of course, is for them to break on the ground, preferably right in front of a maintenance shop at which you have a credit on your account. It rarely works out that way, of course. Instead, airplanes can and do break while we’re flying them. But even when they let us down, they usually have been signaling in some fashion what’s about to happen.
A worn tire blows out after a firm landing; the radio that’s been getting progressively worse finally gives up with a loud pop; that hard-to-start engine finally won’t wake up; the magneto that barely makes it through a run-up finally doesn’t. Ideally, we’d recognize the signs for what they are—the airplane is trying to tell us something—but we frequently ignore them. Perhaps the airplane isn’t speaking to us loudly enough; perhaps we’re not listening.
