Fate Can Be The Hunter

Kudos to Robert Wright on achieving 50 years of accident/incident free flying and receiving the FAAs Master Pilot Award (On Getting To 50, September 2016). I too have reached that milestone, but not without accident nor incident in my 6100-plus hours of private pilot flying, most of which has been recreational. My incidents occurred despite what I believed to have been reasonable risk management.

Editorial Staff

Monday, January 30, 2017 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

A pilot recounts multiple accidents and incidents over 50 years of flying, arguing that "fate" or "bad luck" can lead to mishaps despite reasonable risk management efforts.
The editor acknowledges that while fate may play a role in aviation incidents, the pilot's survival of these events also demonstrates significant skill.
An engineer critiques a previously published "Energy state" equation, pointing out its dimensional inhomogeneity as it incorrectly adds a force (drag) to energy quantities.
The engineer suggests a more dimensionally consistent approach for energy dynamics, proposing that the *rate of change of energy* should be expressed as the difference between thrust and drag multiplied by velocity.

See a mistake? Contact us.

Kudos to Robert Wright on achieving 50 years of accident/incident free flying and receiving the FAA’s Master Pilot Award (“50 Years a Pilot,” September 2016). I too have reached that milestone, but not without accident nor incident in my 6100-plus hours of private pilot flying, most of which has been recreational. My incidents occurred despite what I believed to have been reasonable risk management:

As a student pilot with approximately 20 hours, I landed a Cessna 150 four minutes behind a DC-6 on a calm evening on a runway too short to land beyond his touchdown point. I was caught in the DC-6’s reverse-thrust vortex, striking the prop and both wing tips.