I always take the most cautious of decisions which doesn't mean you don't run into the unexpected occasionally, but as far as I can, I stick to "Better to be down here, wishing you were up there, than to be up there, wishing you were down here".On Fri, 8 Oct 2004 07:11:23 -0700, David Kehoe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm with you, Chris. After listening to these guys, learning to fly
does seem like a scary proposition. But as the others have suggested,
a healthy amount of fear can be a good thing, and should keep us out
of trouble.
It does that at first, but after you've been flying for a while the fear starts to go away -- it's like when you hear horror stories about illegal drugs in grade school, then you go onto high school and see that many of your friends smoke pot and don't immediately run away from home, turn into thieves and prostitutes, and die.
In the same way, a pilot will eventually pick up a bit of ice, fly too close to a thunderstorm, fly VFR into IMC, etc., and usually there's no harm done (at least not the first time, and often not for many times after that). That's when you have to take some active steps to learn how to manage risk, rather than just counting on your fear to tell you what's safe.
Or, to take another angle, remember how safe a driver you were the first few weeks after getting your license, fresh out of driver's ed, before you decided that speed limits were purely discretionary and driving at night on an icy road wasn't that bad, and ...
I just finished working through the King practical risk management course on the Windows box upstairs, and while no one is about to nominate John and Martha for any acting awards, I was very impressed with the material. It might be an even better idea to work through it before you start flight training:
http://www.kingschools.com/PRM.asp
All the best,
David
Last night I saw a documentary on lightning and thunderstorms, scary as always. A glider with a guy on a trial flight got split and a straight smooth control rod ended up like a badly bent worm gear; the instructor and the guy baled out and parachuted down with the instructor suffering a broken ankle and the student landing on a flat roof - the thunderstorm looked some way away and they were heading away from it ready to make an approach to land. May be they would have been OK if it wasn't a composite - that's why our school got rid of the Katanas and stick with solid metal C152's and a C172.
Dumb and Dumber! - A guy (qualified PPL) flying our PA28-161 was landing away when he bounced, eyewitnesses said he pitched the nose down, bounced again, kept it held down and the nose wheel collapsed, propeller mangled into the bargain.
Regards
Sid.
-- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer =====LINUX ONLY USED HERE=====
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