Accident Analysis: Don’t be that pilot

One recent morning, a 45-year-old Cherokee 140 taxied up and carefully parked diagonally so its propwash wouldn’t blow directly over all that bare dirt. Moments later, a sharp-looking Mooney pulled up alongside and performed a flight-control check. From a distance it wasn’t possible to tell whether the Mooney’s pilot also did a run-up and magneto test, but if he did, his propwash blasted straight across the exposed earth toward the guys working the backhoes. It’s possible he never noticed the work crew because they weren’t part of the path from ramp to runway.

Awareness of your propwash is just one hallmark that separates thoughtful, experienced pilots from novices struggling to keep abreast of the basic airport environment. Thoughtfulness doesn’t require vast experience, and experience doesn’t automatically confer thoughtfulness—but if you’ve ever wanted to cultivate a reputation as a rube, there are time-honored ways to achieve it:

Start at full throttle, especially in front of somebody else’s hangar. Nothing says “newbie” like blasting assorted ramp detritus, all your neighbor’s deck chairs, and maybe a puppy or small child into the side of a defenseless parked aircraft.

Taxi fast, then jam on the brakes—risking a nose-over in a taildragger and a runway incursion (or collision) in any airplane if your timing or brakes aren’t as good as you’d assumed.

Ignore noise-abatement guidelines. True, they’re just advisory. But the fact that airports predate almost all the neighborhoods that have grown up around them never inhibits residents from trying to get rid of “noisy” airfields—or elected officials from trying to mollify the whiners. The strangulation of Santa Monica is only the beginning.

Cut off other traffic in the pattern. Enough said.

Scare your passengers, especially first-timers. Intro flights are about reassuring the nervous and making friends, not demonstrating your brilliant airmanship. A few years ago, footage of a miserable little girl vomiting in the back seat while her “mentor” did an aggressive series of steep turns and stalls was all over the internet. She’s one more person who might have become part of our community if a thoughtless “adult” hadn’t found it more fun to traumatize her instead.

If you’re lucky, you grew up knowing people you admired so much that you wanted to become more like them. Unfortunately, bad examples get quicker and wider attention. For all our sakes, please don’t become one.