Subject: Re: Dag Hammarskjold redux in Minnesota
From: Kristopher Barrett <kbarrett-AT-cotse.com>
Date: 26 Oct 2002 19:16:24 -0700


On Sat, 2002-10-26 at 17:12, Sandi and Scott Spaeth wrote:

> who knows how to crash and survive).   Small planes are the devil, and then 
> if like Missouri's own dumbass Mel Carnahan, you have to fly small, don't 
> do it in a storm at night.   I mean dammitall, these states are big, but 

As possibly the list's only pilot, I can tell you exactly what the
problem was ... get-there-itis.

John Kennedy Jr. was killed because he felt he absolutely had to get to
his wedding on time. Aylia (sp?) was killed because she wanted her whole
damned entourage and baggage there right now. And now a politician
wanted to get to an event on time.

All of these were lapses in flight discipline. In two cases, a pilot who
should have known better and said no was pressured by an employer to fly
when he damned well shouldn't.

You see this same pressure with ATP's... it just manifests in different
ways. An airline pilot will rarely go around... it costs too damned much
in fuel and he'll catch hell for it... yet the proper procedure for an
incipient bad landing is to shove the throttles forward and go around.
So they are tempted to do stupid things like steep turns on final to get
lined up if they are off.

And these same cost pressures, combined with a large aircraft, will
encourage an ATP to bull through weather that would scare the pants off
of anyone else... and then the passengers get to watch the stews, heavy
food carts, and unsecured passengers bounce all over the damned
cabin...I watched a food cart hit the ceiling in a KAL 747 I was a
passenger in on a trans-pacific flight. By some miracle it landing in
the aisle, instead of on a row of occupied seats.

I was also a pax on a united turbo-prop flying to Cody WY... and sat in
horror as the pilot executed the wildest damned abbreviated landing I
had ever witnessed... I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing
as I was leaving the aircraft... he explained that he had gotten reports
of hail in the area...  we both learned in the terminal building that
three funnel clouds had been spotted that evening... at that point he
finally grew a pair and told management that he was not going to fly out
of there that evening. As I was driving from the airport, they were
desperately trying to shoehorn that turboprop into a GA hanger to hide
it from the oncoming hailstorm.


All of these things ( except the Kennedy twerp ) have one thing in
common... financial pressure overcoming the pilot's flight discipline.


-- 
Regards,
Kristopher Barrett            http://www.cotse.net/users/kbarrett