I was reading a forum thread about a scuba accident that killed a friend of my brother’s, and which my brother was also involved in finding the body after the RCMP tried and failed.
One of the thread contributors posted this thing for divers, but it made me think of Mike and Dave’s recent death in their float plane, and my own thoughts about the possibility of dying in a plane crash.
If I should die while diving.
If I should die while diving please do not hesitate to discuss the incident and assess every element with a view to furthering your understanding of how to enhance diver safety.
If I should die while diving get the facts. They won’t be readily available and will definitely not be correct as reported by the media. But get the facts as best you can.
If I should die while diving understand, as I already do, that it will most likely involve fault on my part to some degree or another so do not hesitate to point that out.
If I should die while diving some of the fault will probably belong to my buddy and that needs to be honestly assessed as well though I must admit this is one area where I hope that compassion will be in the mix.
If I should die while diving there might be those who try to squelch discussion out of a misplaced notion of respect for the deceased, family and friends. They can say nice things about me at my funeral… but in the scuba community I want the incident discussed.
If I should die while diving at least I didn’t die in bed.
I could do a search and replace of “diving” with “flying”, and it’s pretty close to something I’d like to say to my fellow pilots and my nervous but understanding wife. Well, except for the bit about buddies – we don’t use a buddy system in flying even when we should.
Dying in bed with me is better than dying flying.
Oh, wait.
OK, just don’t die. How about that? Until I do. Then you can.
That could be arranged.
Howabout dying in someone else’s bed?
Um, wait, there’s a word for this.. . “Vickification”, IIRC.
a few lines from the poem Impressions of a Pilot..:
Should my end come while I am in flight,
Whether brightest day or darkest night;
Spare me your pity and shrug off the pain,
Secure in the knowledge that I’d do it again.
For each of us is created to die,
And within me I know,
I was born to fly.
I completely agree with the intent of this. However, something that really bugged me back when I was involved in aviation forums was the contempt displayed for pilots who had died in accidents. “Idiot,” “moron,” and other such words were commonly used when describing the chains of poor decisions that led to accidents.
I think other pilots have a psychological need to distance themselves from those ill-fated pilots, and so they want to believe that they couldn’t possibly make the same kinds of mistakes that those “idiots” made. But that need doesn’t excuse the insults.
Over in the scuba community we call it “accident analysis” and try to learn as much as we can from each fallen diver (or absent friend, in the case of one of them) to try and keep the same thing from happening again.
In response to the comment from Kris, every one of us has to sit back and admit that “It CAN happen to me” and that thinking it can’t is the fastest way to losing the paranoia that keeps you watching out for the hazards. The bad attitude may be one way of insulating your feelings as you go back out there and risk your life in an arena that’s claimed others, but it’s more natural than healthy.
It may be too easy to judge other pilots who have bought their own farm when the cause is found. In most cases, I can see their fault and then learn something from it. But in some cases, it’s just plain stupidity. I still find myself angry about Bill L’s mismanagement of fuel.