Picking Up The Pieces

I spend a lot of my flying in the Idaho backcountry, where there are a lot of challenging but worthwhile airstrips. But it's not a forgiving environment since go-arounds can be problematic and density altitude means pilots may not be accustomed to the reduced performance. After decades in the business, Patrick has a lot of lived experience seeing a wide variety of crashed planes, especially in the backcountry. As a window into answering the eternal question "Why do pilots crash?" I felt his insights would be valuable.

Mike Hart

Thursday, October 03, 2019 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

The majority of aircraft crashes are human-caused, often stemming from a unique combination of poor decisions, emotional factors, and lack of proficiency, rather than a single mechanical failure.
Crashes in challenging environments, such as the backcountry, frequently involve pilot inexperience, high density altitude issues, and a reluctance to execute timely go-arounds.
Pilots can significantly reduce accident risk by prioritizing continuous, challenging training to maintain proficiency, regularly practicing basic flying skills without automation, and making prudent go/no-go decisions.

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Since he was a youngster helping his father in the family business, Andy Patrick of SP Aircraft out of Boise, Idaho, has retrieved and salvaged aircraft. The workload varies. In a slow year, there may be a half-dozen aircraft to recover. In one particularly busy recent year, there were 24. There’s no real way to predict a given year’s activity.

I spend a lot of my flying in the Idaho backcountry, where there are a lot of challenging but worthwhile airstrips. But it’s not a forgiving environment since go-arounds can be problematic and density altitude means pilots may not be accustomed to the reduced performance. After decades in the business, Patrick has a lot of lived experience seeing a wide variety of crashed planes, especially in the backcountry. As a window into answering the eternal question “Why do pilots crash?” I felt his insights would be valuable.