Bill Crawford’s Flightlab Blog

There was a time—most of human history, actually—when people did not regard safety as a formal, conscientious practice, maybe because they didn’t think it would do much good. Not so long ago, most sober folk thought that tragic accidents were a form of judgment, an indication that God was getting annoyed. The Pilgrim Fathers—fairly sober founders of my home base, Plymouth Airport—believed that if you fell off the Mayflower the hand of the Almighty probably gave the shove. Spiritual intervention has supplied a convenient explanation down the ages, and I’ve come to suspect that the Evil One is indeed the reason my hangar door still leaks. But such arguments are not yet accepted by the National Transportation Safety Board, which so far has resisted any pressure to include “God’s wrath” among the contributing factors listed at the end of accident reports. The NTSB will say “slippery deck,” and leave it at that. Let’s hope the NTSB refuses to cave.

You can go with Divine Retribution, but I think that if you take out the mechanical and design risks for which the pilot deserves no blame, and then read accident accounts as stories about human nature, you can’t help but conclude that risk taking reveals not so much an acquiescence to the Devil as an absence of creative imagination. Maybe their threshold for anxiety is just set too high, but I’ll bet that people who willfully get into trouble in airplanes—say, by buzzing, or by flying into weather, or neglecting to confirm their fuel load—are just basically lousy at imagining scary stories in which they play the leading roll. They like scary, admonitory stories about other pilots, but in their own unfolding saga they don’t anticipate the connections between the dots—or the “arc of the story,” as they say in Hollywood, or used to. It’s not that they accept self-evident risk; it’s more that their imagination fails to run risk interference in a timely manner. They don’t extrapolate vividly enough to a hypothetical point in the near future when things could really begin to suck.

But a safe pilot constantly imagines the risks ahead, and indeed doesn’t feel righteous unless he has a catalog of risks and alternative strategies in mind. He can’t turn his imagination off. He’s always a little apprehensive. An unsafe pilot behaves differently. He doesn’t imagine his flight so much as he assumes it.

Although avoiding risk takes an apprehensive imagination, you may still need to flirt with the Devil to learn what to be apprehensive about. This is certainly the case in learning to handle weather systems in cross-country VFR. Flying toward deteriorating weather from already not-so-great weather, and finding out for the first time what the low end of marginal VFR really means, is a rite of passage that awaits all new private pilots. The problem is that you have to get yourself into minor weather trouble in order to recognize what major trouble will look like sneaking your way. It’s one thing if there’s an obvious corridor to better weather ahead, or at least a clear retreat back to conditions known to be acceptable. But what if the visibility suddenly drops and the ceiling descends? Although your flight instructor told you always to have a way out, you usually have to experience for yourself how quickly that reassuring band of light on the horizon can go dim.

When you’re first learning weather, before you get your IFR ticket, you skim along the edges of dread. You probe and retreat and blunder, until you’ve given your imagination something genuinely cautionary to work with. Afterwards, you don’t simply tell yourself that you never want to get into that sort of mess again, you tell yourself that you never want to feel that way again.

Yet our waywardness is such that we often talk ourselves out of caution when we should know better. We refuse to acknowledge what the muse of gloom imagines is in store, and we make a spurious calculation. It looks like scrap metal ahead, but what if we’re wrong and we could get through to good conditions? The best reward that can happen then will happen—we’ll get home. But if we head for the spot of clear sky to the north, where our out—although diminishing—still remains, the best that can happen once we find a place to land is a rental car, a motel, and the decision between Wendy’s and Taco Bell. We don’t consider that the worst that can probably happen if we head north is also a rental car, a motel, and the decision between Wendy’s and Taco Bell. Whereas the worst that can happen if we press on through iffy weather is that we never get home. You’d think the decision would be easy. Just compare risks. It’s not easy, because we cling to the chance for the most-tempting reward and resist a decision that brings us anything less. The guy in the red suit with the pitchfork and halitosis knows this as he whispers in our ear. So we usually let the risk level rise, until our mounting anxiety or the increasingly predatory weather conditions finally force the issue. Most of us aren’t very good at assessing and comparing risks. We prefer to choose among rewards. The risk only begins to warn us off when that unpleasant feeling starts growing to an unacceptable level.

Sometimes the right decision can only be made after optimism surrenders to fear. You just don’t want that to take too long.