The mistakes are there waiting to be made,” famously spoke Savielly Tartakower, in one of many pithy observations that came to be known as Tartakowerisms.
Tartakower wasn’t a pilot. He was a grandmaster of that other challenging and often cerebral endeavor: chess. And although he died in 1956, Tartakower might well have been commenting on the general aviation accident rundown for August 2012, when it seemed as if some pilots declared a risk-aversion holiday.
The facts speak for themselves; only the pilots’ explanation of “why” is missing from the National Transportation Safety Board accident reports. A pilot practicing spot landings in a Piper Arrow chooses the approach end of the runway for the touchdown spot—and misses short.
A pilot urges a Cessna 172 into a go-around with full flaps, with the expected uninspiring outcome. Two abuses of carburetor heat—one a go-around with it, and the other a landing attempt without it—bring down two aircraft. A Cessna 152 pilot challenges a thunderstorm in a race to the runway, and loses.
A flight instructor in a Cessna 172 shuts off the fuel—an old and sometimes tragically employed method—to give a student pilot some engine-out practice. They make a forced landing in a field when the engine restart just isn’t happening. A student pilot doing low passes in a Light Sport aircraft over a relative’s airstrip leaves a wing in the trees after losing control on the second low pass.
There were accidents from hard landings with porpoising; accidents from delayed go-arounds; and at least one accident from a hard landing with porpoising and a delayed go-around.
If a bystander was positioned alongside a runway to watch airplanes come and go last August, it was safer to be standing on the right side, because aircraft with distracted pilots were running off runways here and there. The tendency was to run off the left side of the runway. Some of those distractions barely deserved the name, because they could have been easily managed or simply ignored.
On August 23, 2012, a Cessna 172 pilot was taking off from an airport in Mississippi when a window came open. Options? You can abort, then close the window, or just ignore the flopping frame until after the takeoff is completed.
The attempt to multitask the problem didn’t work. “He reached with his left hand to close the window and simultaneously tried to abort the takeoff,” said the NTSB’s accident summary. “When he looked up, he observed the airplane departing the left side of the runway. He was unable to stop the airplane before it collided with perimeter trees.”
Probable cause: “The pilot’s loss of directional control during takeoff as a result of his attempt to close an unsecured cockpit window.”
Two days earlier, fixation on fixing a fixture caused undetected damage when a Piper PA-28 pilot in McMinnville, Oregon, tried to close a window vent during a takeoff run, and the airplane veered off the left side of the runway.
“He aborted the takeoff and taxied back for takeoff; he examined the airplane before takeoff and did not see any damage,” the NTSB said. “After landing, he secured the airplane in the club hangar. During a flying club meeting four days later, the pilot observed damage to the right wing; subsequent examination revealed substantial damage to the wing spar.”
Two more August accidents raised the risk of damaged aircraft being flown again. In one, a tiedown ring punctured a PA-28-181’s fuselage during a runway tail strike, damaging an aft bulkhead. In another, a Piper Arrow’s wing spar was damaged, probably in an unreported hard landing—only to be discovered the next day, after it had been flown again.
Old themes with new variations—which brings us back to Tartakower, who observed that “an ounce of common sense can outweigh a ton of variations.”
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