Fear And Loathing On The Aviation Trail

Alan Shepard: Dear Lord, please don't let me eff* up.
Gordon Cooper: I didn't quite copy that. Say again, please.
Alan Shepard: I said everything's A-OK.
From the movie The Right Stuff (*he did not say "eff")

Aviation is one of those human endeavors that can result in getting yourself seriously killed if you do it wrong. There are many other non-flying things that people do to kill themselves and others. Still, no activity catches the imagination and attention of a stimulus-addicted consumer of mass media than a good old airplane crash or mishap.

The past few weeks have been replete with examples of inflight fires, shootdowns from apparent SAMs and one very heinous disaster in which all but two people on the aircraft were killed right when it looked like they had made it and were going to be OK.

Of course I have an opinion about what happened in these cases but I have learned to keep them to myself. This has led to a complete shutdown of calls to me from CNN about aviation accidents. Honestly, they did call me a few times in the past hoping I would fill their airways with my utterly incomplete conclusions about air disasters in which the wreckage had not even cooled. 

They went away without their sound bite from me. Not because I did not have an opinion. Hell, I'm an old retired airline captain. Of course, I have opinions. I just refuse to poop on pilots who can't fight back. There is a reason that we have the NTSB to do investigations. Short-term self-aggrandizing blatherings from self-appointed aviation experts are vile and, in my opinion, evil.

I have been flying for a long time, and of course, I have had my share of scares and situations that brought on checklist reading and sweaty palms.

Various inflight fires, engine failures, severe weather encounters and other incidents have led me to a few conclusions I can share.

First, no matter how experienced you are and how many people say you are an expert, you and nobody else has any idea what those doomed flight crews went through or precisely what they were thinking. 

Investigations will lead us to certain conclusions about how they handled things, but unless you are sitting in that seat when your world turns upside down, the flight controls don't work and you smell smoke, you have no right to second-guess the crew until the facts are clear.

Second, while it is true that the "system" might sometimes, though inattention or outright stupidity, result in wrecked aircraft and dead humans, nobody in the world started with the intent to mess things up. Nobody wants these crashes or shootdowns to happen.

Finally, here is the only clue I can give you about what these crews were doing and thinking based on what I was doing and thinking when I dealt with the fires, flight control malfunctions and dead engines I experienced.

In the heat of the emergency, I was never scared. That is not bragging. After each incident, I was frightened to the point of crying. I would get the shakes, feel ill and have all of the post-stress symptoms people talk about. 

I was no hero because I was not frightened in the moment. My flight crew and I were too busy working on the problem. We were focused on what was in front of us, and when the bad things happened, I had the advantage of being one of the best-trained airline pilots in the world and flying with first officers who were most likely better qualified than I was.

What really scares pilots is not that they might die—it is that we might screw up and die. Nobody wants to be remembered as the pilot who did it wrong and killed people, or to misuse a phrase a copilot I flew with who retired from the Marines once told me: "It is better to die than to look bad."

I didn't want to kill passengers because I was stupid. Not only would that look bad on cable news, but I can only imagine the crap and ridicule I would have to endure at the Pilot Pearly Gates.