An introduction

Before we begin

I've made mistakes in the cockpit and lived through them. The worst thing that can happen to a pilot is to survive a hazard and think there was never any real risk.

One of the things that makes my life as a flight instructor hard is trying to frame the dangers of flying so that my students can understand them without having to live through them. You can only continue to survive if your recollection of the hazard that didn't kill you is accurate enough for you to learn to never do it again.

If you're like me, you pour your mind into NTSB reports that capture your attention. You read ASRS reports and see all of the patterns of danger that are alive and well behind the veil of clouds, or in the breakdown of our thoughts as we are surrounded by distraction.

How hard it is to read time and again of someone who we did not even know perishing doing the thing we love to do. If we knew them from the hangar down from us, we would likely be good friends. And we would speak for hours telling each other stories of our own failings in the sky, when things went wrong but we didn't die.

How hard it is to receive a dozen or so phone calls from friends and family when an airplane crashes near your home field. Whatever the reason, the worry of it being you takes a little sobering toll on my heart when I say that I am ok, and no, I don't know for certain what happened.

So I will be honest here too. We are ok, and in all these reports we will read, we do not know for certain what happened. But maybe if you and I could carefully walk down this quiet row of hangars, and speak to our friends with respect and care, giving them the honor that they deserve, we could move closer to a day without those phone calls.

If you don't believe we can bring the accident rate down without giving up flight itself, why hope at all? Thousands before us faced more danger and more risk than we do. Each one of those men and women doing what was then needed to allow the prospect of human flight to not be lost in dismal statistics. Each one learning and crafting a better way.

I'm asking you to learn with me. I don't have all the answers. I'm asking you to think through this series, and wonder at the stories of fellow pilots we cannot speak to anymore.

We cannot afford to go around these stories. We cannot afford to consider ourselves less vulnerable than these pilots. We cannot just say it wasn't lucky, or wasn't smart. Here there can be no blame. There can and should only be mercy as we listen, because each and every one of us needs the same mercy.