[mdip]

Without reviewing your profile, I'm just going to guess you're a pilot or you know pilots -- just from this:

  > Or—to rewind the causal chain just a little further--pilot hubris, impatience and/or ignorance, which leads to weather being a factor in the first place. The choice to wing it and hope bad weather in the area will not affect you is the pilot’s.

My Dad says "it's always pilot error" and backs them up with statements like this. And he accepts that fault on himself. These are obvious things, too -- in the case of this crash, the pilot was VFR rated and as my Dad harshly put it "had no business being where he was in that weather".

But he really meant everything is the pilots fault. I heard him explaining to someone that there's ultimately no other valid excuse. When his engine failed over Lake Michigan, it was pilot error because he didn't have the necessary instruments to detect a common engine condition that would have prevented him from taking off had he known it was happening.

I think it's a little extreme, but frankly, I want the person flying my plane to have that attitude for themselves!

[7952]

I think you would still feel guilty if passengers were hurt even if you were completely blameless. And part of your responsibility is to understand the risks. Risks that passengers may not fully understand. It is more like a risky sport like horse riding or skiing.

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Completely agree. My thinking was simply: I know my Dad held himself to that standard. And the only way that I'd be willing to fly a plane is if I was willing to hold myself to that high of a standard, but as I'm not a pilot, I don't feel that I have enough knowledge to pass judgement on pilots (or others) who feel that there are circumstances to many crashes that should not be blamed on the pilot.

I think my Dad applied that to small plane/private pilots, rather than commercial, as well. While it might make someone with that absolutest thinking feel good to say "The pilot should have known someone's phone battery was nearing explosion before it blew a hole in the aircraft and required an emergency landing", I think my Dad would land somewhere in the territory of "If the pilot had a reasonable way of preventing the problem and didn't, it doesn't matter if it was negligence or lack of creative thinking". Me, I define that "reasonable way of preventing" as "it's in the checklist". I think my Dad would expect a whole lot more.

And even though I'd be more forgiving in my judgement of pilots, I can't fault him for his thinking. Every time something unexpected/dangerous happened in the air to him, he wouldn't get back up in the plane until he had figured out how to eliminate/greatly reduce the risk. When telling the story of what happened, he'd point out why it was his fault[1] and I don't doubt that he believed that when nobody was looking.

Over the years, he added a device to monitor the exhaust temp after the pipe blew threw the front of the aircraft and made the plane into a fireworks show of ignited exhaust. He added these strange (very inexpensive) rubber wire-like things to various parts of the wings after being struck by lightening which broke his radio, resulting in an interesting problem with getting clearance for landing[0]. He owned the plane with a partner who used it on the weekends, occasionally (they paid the company to use the plane), and they both had this same philosophy, so by the time he sold it, there were more gadgets attached to the dashboard than built into it. They had a weather radar gadget that was hypnotic to watch.

I can't think of a single incident my dad encountered in the air that would have fallen anywhere near the category of "skill-related/irresponsible failure". It was always a mechanical fault where the plane lacked any way of detecting/alerting the pilot and there was no other way for the pilot to confirm, before take-off, that the condition would not occur. And weather at Romeo airport can switch on a dime in the winter[1], which he managed with radar on his plane. Outside of the small explosion and an occasional hit from a bird, the plane was never damaged/crash landed or even had a non-runway emergency landing[2] despite losing the engine a few times and having many, many other problems.

Often these things just sat and monitored things that should never fail -- in the case of the exhaust heat, a separate fault caused the excess heat, which caused the (very small) explosion -- it should never have gotten that hot, but were it to get that hot, it didn't have to result in a fault or even an unscheduled landing. For the lightening, adding the $3 wires, apparently, eliminates the threat entirely. And despite all of the flying he did, I don't think he ever encountered the same kind of (or even related) problem more than once. That's about as perfect a score as you can get, in my opinion. :)

[0] I was told this as a kid and probably have most of it wrong, but he had these extremely bright flashlights as part of his emergency kit (strange, ABS plastic, four C-cells, not mag-lite, but these were damn bright); they were for Morse-code signalling (had both an on-off switch and a button that turned it on when depressed and off when released). He somehow had to notify the tower and receive a reply using the flashlight -- I imagined he flew the plane past the windows like in the movies, but it was probably less dramatic.

[1] He frequently ended up landing/having to get a ride from Oakland County International because of weather he wasn't willing to land in -- I don't know how the licensing works with that, but after he got his IFR but before he got the remaining (something related to a Loran-C and weather), he'd enter his flight plan and find out he wasn't allowed to fly due to weather. That stopped after he "leveled up his license a few times" over an expensive 3-year period.

[2] The closest he was to that would have been nearly having to do an emergency landing at Selfridge ANG. This was the early 90s, so who knows what this looks like today (and my recollection is lacking) -- IIRC, it would have been illegal for him to land there, but in an emergency, they'll accommodate. I remember him saying something about losing his license/having it suspended had he done it but I don't know the details.