Do you get affected by reading about accidents?

I was very interested in accident reports even before doing my PPL, and even well outside the topic of aviation.

In my profession, anaesthesia, reading CIRS reports is a key to avoid mistakes that happened to others and might have harmed or even killed patients. So there is, in my eyes, even a professional and moral obligation to read these reports.

In aviation, my interest is also very strong and reinforced by a sense of self-preservation. In anaesthesia, no matter how bad you screw up, you very unlikely to get harmed yourself. Not so in aviation.

I especially like the AOPA accident case study videos on YouTube. Seen all of them. I often try to think how I would have acted if I were in the same situation as the pilots in question.

Luckily, I am a pure hobby pilot, so all cases were someone has an accident due to “get thereitis” don’t seem applicable to me, nor do those were VFR in IMC happens because I am a fair weather pilot. I try to regularly practice flying an ILS at EDDV via Flight Simulator, which might not replicate the actual experience but at least gives one some theoretical knowledge for a “get out of jail card” in case one is inadvertently stuck above an overcast or similar situations.

I have been in a crash.
It 100% matched everything we are trained not to do and was competently due to pilot error (mainly fatigue, but add loads of other stuff on top and the camel breaks).

Reading about accidents makes me wiser, not afraid.
We’re crazy fools for defying our design and ascending into the heavens in the first place, so one thing that was missing for me (until I experienced it first hand) was that I didn’t take everyone else’s experience personally, and thought “that idiot”.

Now I’m grateful to read about everyone else’s experiences, good or bad, so that my experience improves and I don’t find myself sweaty and afraid behind the yolk.

I just read the very sad jgmusic crash thread and not only learned a ton, but can relate to so much of it, having flown in the mountains both in Austria and the US.

One thing that really helped me early on was pushing myself to the limits when I was learning to fly.

I once had to make a 90 degree bank turn in the mountains to escape. If I hadn’t pushed myself in clear skies and calm days, I wouldn’t have had the ability to pull out of that situation and would probably not be writing this post right now.

I feel it is a tough balance between pushing one’s limits and staying “safe”.

Watching failures would have prevented me from pushing limits at the beginning due to fear, but now it is seasoning on my steak and arrows in my quiver.
Especially with intelligent dialog as found here surrounding these reports, videos and events.

Thank you all for sharing and providing great insight over the years, I’m blessed to be alive and your experiences have made me a more competent pilot.

They are used in recurring CRM courses and are very helpful. The quality of air transport incident reporting is very high, in the case of GA more variable with perhaps a declining trend. Older reports seem to command a higher body of knowledge by the team creating them. I expect this is due to budget constraints.

The CAA could have used the body of knowledge from airline CRM to enrich the infringement courses, and perhaps they might have enjoyed a better reputation.

LeSving wrote:

They are almost always caused by pilot induced foolishness or plain stupidness, and I don’t consider myself a fool/stupid person. There isn’t all that much to learn except “don’t be stupid”, “don’t do foolish things”

I read a lot of accident reports and tend to mentally file them into three categories:

1) That was completely stupid/foolish and that person should never have been flying.

2) Ok some very questionable decisions there, but perhaps the pilot was under pressure and it is conceivable that if I wasn’t careful I could end up, if not in a similar situation, then at least in a position where I could get into it.

3) There was nothing he/she could do about what happened, and I just hope it doesn’t happen to me.

It is the second category that offers me the opportunity to learn something and mentally reinforce one’s approach to flying.

I know that a few fellow pilots have stopped due to accidents. Accidents in which they knew the pilot(s). It’s perfectly understandable IMO. When you have been “in the game” for some time, you begin to know a lot of pilots, and therefore you also begin to know those who die. When thinking back, those I knew and who has died starts to add up. In July I was involved with the bureau of investigation at a fatal accident here. For my fellow instructor, this was the last nail in the coffin so to speak, and he has now stopped flying for good. One accident too many. It’s only sailing for him now.

I have thought about why it doesn’t affect me the same way. I have no good answer, other than I can rationalize it somehow, and maybe I’m simply not very afraid of dying. But reading accident reports? They are almost always caused by pilot induced foolishness or plain stupidness, and I don’t consider myself a fool/stupid person. There isn’t all that much to learn except “don’t be stupid”, “don’t do foolish things”. Every so often the accident is a complete mystery also. But I mean, sometimes we do foolish things when flying as we do in every other aspect in life. Lightning do strike from clear blue sky also sometimes. No one is perfect, but if you have it in you to try to be better at what you do, your chance of dying shrinks, and it will shrink with experience. In that sense it may be something to learn from those reports. You get a wider and more detailed picture of the foolish/stupid things you shouldn’t do. It’s better to have knowledge about that up front, because hindsight can be too late.

Peter wrote:

But what about the pilot? Do you get more conservative in risk assessment?

It depends. People or airplanes I knew or flew on will affect me more than others. The human side of things, particularly the loss of life or bad injuries are always horrific to read about.

Or if an airplane or organisation is involved which I previously trusted. Ju Air is such a case.

Other than that, the technical side of things are read for prevention purposes.

I do think discussions amongst pilots in the aftermath of accidents are natural, important and also may unearth things you have not thought about before.

Does it make me more conservative? Again, depends. Some will, others won’t. Primarily those where experienced crews did everything “right” and still got involved in an accident because either the situation developed so they could not cope with it their skills nonwithstanding or it fooled them sufficiently that the accident became a fact.

I don’t really find myself too affected by accident reports. If we remove the ones which are effectively gross negligence, no one sets out to have an accident and all we can do is try and be as prepared for what might happen. The commercial buzzword (/acronym) for this at the minute is TEM, Threats and Error Management. Try to identify each and make provisions/mitigate as you can. Be aware of different types of threats and errors, they can be immediately obvious, latent or in between. Awareness, training and professionalism/respect for the risks are largely as much as we can do. It was mentioned above that there is perhaps little point in reading about accidents as we can not have the same time and mind afforded to us as an investigator in the aftermath and while this is obviously true, if it even so much as makes you think for two minutes about a scenario that you maybe have never imagined before, those two minutes of thought could make the difference should the worst happen to you.

The accidents that have affected me the most are a couple of separate ones which resulted in fatalities of people I knew well enough to know they were good, professional and aware of the risks. The one closest to me in particular has no conclusive evidence as to why things went so wrong. A good aeroplane with a good pilot in good weather that suddenly ends up in a wreck are the ones which put me most at unease.

Walk a rounds are interesting – in many years flying, once found some serious damage on a Chippy to the aileron where some one had hangar rashed it and said nothing – it could have been relatively disasterous to take that into the air, once had a fuel cap left off, but didnt spot it, syphoned a fair amount of fuel out before spotting the cap hanging by its chain and landing to reset it, but that I think is it thank goodness. One might have killed me, the other didnt, none of the other walk rounds have ever revealed anything especially troubling, although there has been varying amounts of water in differing aircraft coming out the drains, but whether they would have stopped the engine – who knows.

I read NTSB and AAIB reports. Mainly fatals, or types I fly, or at the kind of places I fly.
I do a carefull walkaround relevant to the two types I fly.
Avoiding cloud is the lesson I usually have reinforced.
PS I think the (4) category accident killed 4 buddies – 5 adult occupants in a 4 seat aircraft.