The NTSB prelim report said the “probable” cause of Steve Fossett’s fatal accident was that he encountered downdrafts. Now the question people ask—particularly nonflying people—is “How could a man so experienced, the holder of many records, have made such an error?
How many times have we heard these questions?
Remember when famed pilot Bevo Howard went down during an air show? Pilots were confused by that one. The great Bevo Howard killed in an airplane? Surely there must be a reason. It couldn’t have been his fault. Not Bevo Howard. Some people even claimed that Bevo had been bitten by a black widow spider while in flight. Finally, Bob Hudgens, high-time pilot, aviation businessperson and great admirer of Bevo Howard, told me, “I guess I just have to accept the fact that Bevo Howard probably made a mistake.”
Remember when Scott Crossfield—one of the world’s most respected pilots—died in an encounter with bad weather? Many people stated flat out that something went wrong with the airplane. Scott Crossfield couldn’t possibly have gotten himself trapped in bad weather.
My theory is…
After every fatal accident many of us (all of us?) set out quickly to find something, anything, that could have caused this accident. We are comforted when it was a pilot with little experience doing something that WE would never have done. We would never get killed that way.
Ah, but the situation is different when it is a truly great pilot. That worries us. We can’t live with the idea that this pilot, who was more experienced and, as one pilot put it, “A helluva lot better pilot than I will ever be,” made a mistake. That implies the unthinkable—we might even die in an airplane ourselves, and, perhaps worse yet, it might be our fault.
We’d love to post your comments. Please click the comment tab at the top.