Every VFR pilot who has flown long enough to have gotten himself into and out of a few tight situations knows how insidious the onset of trouble is. He knows, too, that your state of mind when you are in the airplane, especially as you near your destination and the weather starts to go bad on you, is different from the one you are in when you read about such events in this magazine or discuss them with your pilot friends. The inflight decision-making process contains an element of what you might call goal addiction — the emotional momentum that makes people at an auction bid beyond the value of a thing — that displaces caution and calm deliberation. Our zeal to attain the goal grows in proportion to its proximity.
Airplane accidents that illustrate this phenomenon are not hard to find. Here are two that happened to occur on the same day — Nov. 26, 2011 — in two patches of sticky, but not really very bad, weather in different parts of the country. Both involved single-engine airplanes flown by noninstrument-rated 200-hour pilots, and both ended with the airplane careening into a tightening spiral until it met the ground and was instantly smashed to fragments. These two accidents took six lives, but it’s safe to say that the purposes of the flights were not matters of life and death.
