Waypoints

Our ability these days to access information instantly can be, quite literally, scary. We can now sort, store, and retrieve data so easily that it's easy to lose perspective. When it comes to reviewing aircraft accident reports, for example, one could quickly become convinced that flying is unsafe.

Here at AOPA, we have a building-wide computer network that gives us amazing access to data. Each morning over the E-mail system I get an executive news summary of all the aircraft accidents from the previous day. If it's a major accident, I'll hear about it even sooner. In addition, the system daily delivers the latest preliminary accident reports from the NTSB, a service provided by the AOPA Air Safety Foundation.

As you might imagine, it's a rather grim way to start the day, sitting at my desk, sipping a second cup of coffee while perusing a day's carnage from the sky.

Occasionally, however, the news service delivers something to chuckle about. Such as the time a fellow and two young women — all of whom had imbibed rather heavily — climbed naked into a single- engine Cessna and went out to do who knows what over downtown. Imagine their surprise when upon safely landing they were greeted by police officers who had seen the erratic flying. Such activity brings a whole new meaning to the term safe flying. What you do and wear (or don't wear) behind the yoke of your airplane is your business, but please don't drink and fly.

Another day brought the report of an aviation university student who stole a Cessna 320 in Illinois and headed east. He called ATC, claiming the aircraft had been hijacked and requesting headings to the East Coast. Police in Parkersburg, West Virginia, had a few questions when he landed there with no hijacker on board. En route to the clink, he told police he was suffering from hallucinations.

A Wisconsin pilot made the news when he used a "cheesehead" to quite possibly save his life. Like other Green Bay Packers fans, the pilot — who was a passenger this day — never goes to a game without his foam cheesehead. Just before the Cessna 172 in which he was riding crashed, the fan put on his cheesehead. The foam cushioned the blow his head took in the accident.

And then there was the recent case in which a mechanic was working inside the Number 2 engine of a Lockheed 1011 when the powerplant fell off the airplane. Fortunately, the trapped mechanic received only minor injuries, but he had to be extricated by airport rescue workers. No report on the fate of the engine.

Unfortunately, the news on most days provides little to laugh at. Instead, it's a constant stream of reports on the same kinds of accidents. Just change the date, model of airplane, and location. As Bruce Landsberg notes in "Safety Pilot" on page 128, many of the accidents are of the "dumb and dumber" type.

Read this barrage of data day after day and you can quickly scare yourself into not going flying, unless you recognize that thousands of airplanes take off and land safely every day for every one that makes the news. It helps me to be able to see the runways of Frederick (Maryland) Municipal Airport from my office window and to watch the endless stream of successful — though sometimes entertaining — takeoffs and landings and touch, touch, touch and goes.

And while most of us learn to keep it all in perspective, not everyone can.

A friend of mine is a good VFR pilot, but he is uncomfortable flying, particularly in weather. He attempted to earn his instrument rating for some time and finally gave up, to the frustration of himself and several instructors who had worked with him. As a result of his reluctance to fly in instrument meteorological conditions, he almost seems to condemn those of us who choose to do it. His concerns about instrument flying often peak for a period of time after a local weather accident or one spectacular enough to capture national attention.

If pilots have difficulty grappling with the aviation safety issue, imagine how nonpilots must view it — particularly nonpilots whose loved ones insist on utilizing general aviation.

Within seconds of answering a telephone call from my parents last fall, I knew something was wrong. I could tell that they were distressed and concerned even before we'd exchanged the usual greetings. They quickly began a sad tale of seeing an airplane crash as they were on a Sunday afternoon drive on that pretty autumn day. They observed that the airplane — a mid-1960s Piper Cherokee with a very nice paint job, my father noted — passed low over the highway and then, nap-of-the-earth-like, it descended over a rise. As my parents crested the same hill seconds later, they saw a couple of cars pulled over to the side of the road. They feared the worst and pulled over, too.

The eyewitness reported that the airplane had clipped a couple of high-tension wires and gone down in a cornfield. My father and one of the witnesses trudged through the corn to find the airplane lying on its back. The passenger in the right seat was dead. The pilot was alive but barely able to speak.

My father and the others tramped a path through the corn for the rescue trucks that arrived minutes later.

The preliminary NTSB report carried the too-common cause: Flying too low to ground, struck power lines.

Would not the view be even better from 1,000 feet agl than 100 feet agl?

From the unfortunate but typical, to the unfortunate but bizarre:

The telephone rang cruelly at 7 a.m. on a morning right after Christmas when we were visiting my in-laws in northwestern Pennsylvania. The call delivered news of an airplane crash a few miles away. A Cessna 182 had nosedived into a frozen reservoir, a lake that I often used as a landmark when I was in flight training. The pilot, Daniel Rivers, was killed as the nose of the Skylane burst through a foot of ice, leaving just the tail and crumpled wings above the surface.

Over the next couple of days the rest of the story unfolded.

According to newspaper reports, Rivers had spent part of the evening before the crash shoveling a 20-foot path in deep snow from the hangar to the ramp at the Akron Fulton Airport in Akron, Ohio. It was his thirty-eighth birthday, and who could blame him for wanting to take a celebratory flight? But even as he shoveled, he must have known that this would be his last birthday and last flight.

At about 8 p.m., he took off and meandered eastward. Over the course of the next five hours, according to ATC radar data, he coaxed the Skylane all the way up to 21,000 feet — a feat in and of itself. In the early morning hours, he descended to lower altitudes and contacted controllers. Several times he asked for vectors, but refused to say exactly who or where he was.

He later asked for vectors to an airport, but refused to comply with instructions. "Yeah, I prefer water," Rivers responded, according to newspaper reports. "All things considered, I think that would be the best place to go," he continued, referring to the lake. "As you might have guessed, I have not had a good day.... You don't understand; I'm going swimming tonight." Minutes later the airplane plunged through the ice.

The next day, officers from the Norton, Ohio, police department showed up at Rivers' home to ask him some questions about a hit- and-run automobile accident that had occurred two days earlier. A pedestrian named Perry Lemley had been struck and killed as he ambled along a dark, narrow road. The mirror from the car that hit him was found nearby. The mirror matched the one that was missing from Rivers' car when he dropped it off at a shop for repairs the day after the hit-and-run. The police were baffled to learn from Rivers' family that he had died in an airplane crash early that morning.

Toxicology reports show that Rivers had a blood alcohol level of 0.04 percent at the time of the airplane crash. His death was later ruled a suicide, according to media reports.

Investigators can only assume that Rivers was so distraught over the automobile accident that he took his own life. Ironically, police say Rivers probably would not have been charged in the auto accident if he hadn't left the scene. Other drivers reported having to swerve to avoid Lemley, who was walking on the road and wearing dark-colored clothing.

Rivers' decision to take his life in an airplane brought to an end a series of events that touched the lives of two families and all of us who are pilots. For the families, it was a tragedy indeed. For the rest of us, the crash, like all the others, provides nonpilots the opportunity to doubt the safety and reliability of general aviation airplanes and of pilots, too.

With the exception of a few individuals such as Rivers, no one takes off in an airplane intent on becoming a newspaper headline. As the flying season kicks into full swing this month, make sure you and your airplane are really ready to go. Avoid the dumb mistakes and you won't show up on my morning carnage report.