Unwarranted

One special category of pilots are those for whom going fast is important. Why? Because speed is relative. At altitude on a severe clear day, there's little sensation of speed. We have to get close to something before our speed becomes apparent. And the risk with getting close to something is we might hit it. While untrained pilots who engage in such risky behaviors aren't the norm, there's enough of them that the practice has its own term: unwarranted low flying. Its use apparently has fallen out of favor, but the phrase "unwarranted low flying" has populated numerous NTSB reports over the years.

Joseph E. (Jeb) Burnside

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

Verified

Key Takeaways:

"Unwarranted low flying" is a dangerous practice in personal aviation, frequently cited in accident reports for its high risk of collision with obstructions.
A fatal 2017 accident illustrates this danger, where a pilot with a known habit of "reckless" low-altitude flying along a river struck power lines.
Such incidents are often exacerbated by environmental factors like sun glare and terrain features that reduce hazard visibility and reaction time, and involve a disregard for FAA minimum safe altitude regulations.

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Pilots fly for different reasons. For some, it’s a living. For others, it’s recreation or personal transportation. Some want to go fast to distant destinations; some want to go slow because they’re not going anywhere anyway. It’s not uncommon for pilots to want to do all of these things at one time or another.

There’s no question that personal aviation can be exciting. But the ways we make it exciting can be problematic. For example, launching into a thunderstorm qualifies as exciting, at least for a while. If you survived, you’d certainly have a story to tell. The same is true for, say, attempting aerobatics without training or depending on the autopilot in lieu of an instrument rating.