Over the course of the 18 years that I have been writing for Flying, I have received a couple of indignant letters from pilots who for some reason thought an article I had written was directed at them personally. They firmly stated that they would never make the kind of mistake I had written about. To me this is one of the most dangerous attitudes in flying. We are all human. We are all subject to pressures, temptations and distractions, and we all make mistakes. As I am reading an accident report, most of the time I am thinking, “There, but by the grace of God, go I!” If I had been in that same situation, under the same pressures, I very well could have fallen into the same traps. In some cases I can think back to a specific flight when I actually did start down that same path, but from some combination of good fortune and skill, I managed to live to fly another day.
Flying safely from our first introductory flight to our last minute in the cockpit is a matter of making thousands of difficult decisions, sometimes in a very short amount of time with no prior warning and based on limited or even inaccurate information, often while we are tired and feeling pressure to get to the destination. It takes a pilot who is current, competent and fully focused on the flight to accomplish this task, and for this reason fatigue and stress are often involved when an otherwise safe and competent pilot makes a mistake that leads to an accident. While it can be hard to decide to turn around or to proceed to your alternate due to weather, perhaps the most difficult decision of all is to decide not to fly because of stress, fatigue or other personal factors.
