Occasionally there might be a good reason to risk cracking up an airplane—maybe you’re evacuating refugees ahead of an invading army. They’re rare, though, as are accidents caused by factors truly beyond the pilot’s control. (When an antique airplane lost its prop during a ferry flight, the pilot had few options beyond choosing the spot for his forced landing.)
But too often, pilots take needless risks for reasons ranging from trivial to downright silly. A good example was the Ercoupe owner who took a friend on a pleasure flight one January morning. When they returned, he saw that the windsock indicated breezes from the south, but decided to land on Runway 36 with a quartering tailwind. Only half of the 2,300-foot grass runway had been plowed, and even that was still covered in ice and packed snow. The airplane slid into a snowbank and flipped over; the pilot had to call rescue crews to lift its tail so he and his passenger could crawl out.
And the reason he chose to land downwind? He didn’t want to have to back-taxi to his hangar at the north end of the field. He succeeded in avoiding that.
A crane eventually lifted the airplane off the runway with damage that included: “Spinner dented; prop strike; nose bowl dented and deformed; upper and left and right side engine cowl dented; lower cowl dented, deformed, and torn; engine and nose gear mount bent and tubes kinked; firewall deformed; exhaust bent; carburetor broken; all windows and windshield broken; top of passenger compartment structure crushed; top of fuselage aft and rear window deformed and kinked; horizontal stabilizer bent; elevator bent; left and right vertical fin deformed; left and right rudder bent; right wing skin outboard of landing gear wavy, possible spar damage; right aileron deformed; left and right landing light shields bent.”
Remember that the pilot knew the condition of the runway—he’d taken off from it an hour before. Landing into the wind was likely to be tricky enough. Why ask for trouble?
If wrecking an airplane is bad, knowing that it was entirely your fault must be even worse. You should probably think twice about taking chances without a compelling reason—or at least a good excuse.
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