With due respect to T.S. Eliot, April isn’t “the cruelest month” for aviation accidents. It’s actually right in the middle, averaging about 60 percent more per day than January but nearly 30 percent fewer than in June, July, or August. But while it’s not unusual in terms of volume, April can claim some prominence on the level of sheer weirdness. Consider some recent examples:
The private pilot with a new multi-engine rating and no aerobatic experience who succumbed to the impulse to try to roll a Beech Baron made that catastrophic decision on April 22. He’d gotten a little too excited after an airshow performance at Sun ’n Fun. At the opposite extreme of both mechanical sophistication and flight experience was the 4,500-hour commercial pilot who insisted he had to fly his 315-pound kitplane to an airport a mile and a half away rather than trailer it there. The machine wasn’t registered, although it didn’t qualify as an ultralight, and was not equipped with a seatbelt. The pilot was ejected when the left wing hit a tree climbing out. The date was April 18.
April 28 marks the anniversary of two particularly spectacular examples. A South Dakota pilot returning from a Texas cattle show tried to run below 400-foot ceilings at night. His Piper Lance hit a wind turbine just 10 miles from his destination. That airport had no instrument approaches, but two others nearby did, and the pilot was qualified.
Five years earlier, a Cirrus owner with business in Cleveland missed three ILS approaches because he couldn’t get his autopilot to capture the glideslope. After making it in on the fourth try, he could have decided that he’d done enough flying for one day. Instead, after the meeting he took off into a 200-foot overcast—with the autopilot set to Altitude Hold instead of Altitude Preselect. Naturally, it tried to fly him back into the ground. Rather than disconnecting it and hand-flying to a safe altitude, he lost control trying to reprogram the machine at treetop level.
How much of this is rust accumulated over the winter versus excitement at finally seeing better flying weather is anybody’s guess. But in much of the country, April makes a bid to be considered the strangest month.
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