{"id":6081,"date":"2022-07-12T21:46:57","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T13:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/countryairstrips.com.au\/?p=6081"},"modified":"2022-07-12T21:49:00","modified_gmt":"2022-07-12T13:49:00","slug":"is-it-better-to-be-lucky-or-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/countryairstrips.com.au\/is-it-better-to-be-lucky-or-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it Better to be Lucky or Good?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Is it better to be lucky or good? False choice. Cover the board and aim for both lucky and <\/em>good. Although this philosophical mobius strip leads to the inevitable conclusion that skill has a lot to do with making luck. I\u2019m blathering on about this because just six months ago I wrote a blog<\/a> explaining how 2021 was a bad year for me personally with regard to fatal accidents. Four friends or acquaintances died in crashes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will 2022 be a Better Year in Regard to Aircraft Crashes?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This year is not going much better. In the past month, two friends have emailed reporting the death in crashes of people they knew. Both were previously certificated pilots coming back into flying, possibly because Basic Med made that possible. I\u2019m not casting aspersions on that program. I’m noting that expansion of the pilot pool always had a price in blood and that may still be so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The video<\/a> we\u2019re running this week of an accident that occurred at California\u2019s Cable Airport in January 2022. The lucky part accrues from the fact that any pilot who finds himself in a 90-degree bank at 30 feet with no roll control survives at the whims of gravity and flat dirt that\u2019s not too hard. (The video was posted by Aviation Safety Network.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Is
Is it better to be lucky or good?<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The particulars of the accident are that the pilot of a Cessna 120 approached Cable\u2019s Runway 24. On short final, he encountered rotor wash from a Huey helicopter operated by the local sheriff\u2019s department. This caused an uncontrolled roll to the right at low altitude. The airplane struck in that attitude\u2014nose first\u2014and pirouetted into a slide that just missed the end of a hangar block. The pilot sustained minor injuries, but the airplane was seriously trashed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Learning from Aircraft Incident Reports<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I read a lot of accident reports and about one in 50 turn out to be, well, really interesting. This one was one of those, by dint of the pilot having attached his own detailed analysis and statement of what happened. His statement lends far more detail than the NTSB\u2019s minimal analysis. In toto, with the pilot\u2019s report, it\u2019s possible to learn something from this; without it, not so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Helicopters