Airplane Crashes Aviation Accidents

They Left Him Nowhere Else To Go...


As I've mentioned here before on this blog, I spent a little time nearly twenty years ago learning how to fly an airplane.

Growing up having a father that was a military test pilot and spending most of the first thirty years of my life building and flying model airplanes, I guess it was inevitable that I eventually climb into the cockpit and attempt to soar away into the wild blue yonder.

My crappy medical history ended up stopping my training several times before I ever attained official private pilot status, but I was qualified to solo a old Cessna and the logbook that burned up in the house fire had nearly eighty hours of time logged puttering around in the airspace over north Georgia.

My point in all of this this morning is to address from a pilot's perspective what I think was going through the mind of the Marine Corps Aviator who survived the aviation accident out in California this week.

First of all--and for the record--I need to qualify the meaning of "Crash" versus "Accident."

In layman's terms, when you go out driving down the road in your antique Edsel and your steering wheel breaks off the shaft in your hands, or a wheel flys off your SUV on the way to the Grocery Store causing you to run off the road into a ditch...

...you're the victim of an "Accident."

On the other hand, if you're one of these freaking morons that drives to work at twenty miles an hour over the speed limit with a cell phone in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other and you run headlong into a woman driving the opposite direction distracted by putting on eyeliner while looking in her rear view mirror--you've just "CRASHED" your automobile.

There's a HUGE difference in the two terms....It's just that simple in my mind.

Accidents--by name and definition are "accidental."

"Crashes" are almost always the consequences of behavior that's not always painful or deadly at any given moment, but will eventually catch up with you if you keep doing it long enough.

Which brings me back to this week's aviation disaster in California...

Pilots, both military and civilian, are trained to constantly look for good places for making an emergency landing as they fly along on each air borne excursion. Depending on the part of the country you fly in/over, it can be extremely easy to find a clear flat piece of cow pasture should you need it, or it could be next to impossible to find a place in the mountains or over the ocean to find a flat dry place to make an unplanned landing.

The bad news is that many if not most airports started out located out in the middle of nowhere, but the year 2008 finds most of the older ones wrapped up with shopping centers and housing projects--most of which have been built over the past twenty five or thirty years.

McCullem Field (RYY) in the north Atlanta suburbs where I did most of my flying had a single east west runway called 27 or 9 depending on which way you were going when you landed or took off. If something went wrong on take off on runway 27 you had the choice of being seen on the news sitting on the roof of a bus in your bent airplane in the middle of US highway 41 (if you could execute a 90 degree turn without stalling) or you could visit the roof and parking lot full of cars in a office/warehouse complex they built in the mid 1980's in what had been a vacant field on the other side of the highway.

(I had a long section of warehouse roof picked out where I thought I could dodge the AC units and antennas if I ever had to make a short trip to the ground outside the airport fence with a sputtering engine.)

A departure on runway 9 to the East had it's own unique pitfalls, in as much as the public was pretty much shielded from the hazards of your mistakes/misfortune because there was a 100 food deep rock quarry located just past the airport fence on that end of the field.

I liked flying off 27 and usually picked my flying days based on having the wind out of the West so I could avoid departing over "the pit."

Military bases and the associated runways are no exception today. The former Dobbins Air Force Base (now Dobbins Air Reserve Base) also located in north Atlanta used to have extensive open land on both ends of the primary runway, but again as of the mid/late 1980's the land have been filled with Wal Marts and apartment buildings, restaurants, and shopping centers.

IN Marietta, Georgia they're just one or two broken jet engines away from a similar disaster as the one which occurred in California, and the politicians and the developers knew it when they developed the land in the first place.

It's just like buying a house with a railroad track in the back yard and then complaining about the noise of the trains coming through each night at midnight.

Every few years the people living around the airports get up a petition and complain about the noise and demand changes--even though the airport was there forty or fifty years before their double wide trailer or townhouse.

And people second guess the pilot's decision to abandon his dying airframe, but the military leaves the final time and decision up to you.

Many, many men and women have been killed and critically injured by either riding their broken machines into the ground in an effort to minimize property damage and save the members of the public, else staying on board a few seconds too long trying to do same.

Looking at the map, I see little options for a pilot limping back in from an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean.

The ENTIRE area between the end of the runway all the way to the beach for miles north and south of the approach corridor is today filled with houses and swimming pools and tennis courts.

And for the most part they all look relatively NEW from the perspective of Google Earth.

Thus while I admit that this event is certainly a tragedy, it's also the result of an ACCIDENT...as far as I can tell.

It wasn't a plane CRASH, it was an aviation ACCIDENT, and it's something the pilot will have to live with for the rest of his life.

I say it's better to lose a 50 million dollar airplane and have the 2 million dollar pilot survive than to have five dead at the crash scene.

Join me in praying that this warrior's conscience will eventually give him some peace in this day of touchy feely mamby pamby world politics.