Student suicide - about the worst scenario for an instructor

The scenario briefly crossed my mind years back when I made aerobatic event flights in a tandem seat Bellanca, flying from the front and not even being able to see the face of the passenger/student. But in a Seneca?? Fortunately, this is extremely rare (isn’t it?) so I will not start worrying over it.

I’d call this suicide/murder. Deliberately taking someone else out like this is murder (at least attempted murder if the person doesn’t die).

I worry about this scenario with all the latest flight-sharing / cost-sharing websites – FlightUber? Flyte? Whatever they are called. One doesn’t know one’s passenger from Adam and there they are sitting in the co-pilot’s seat ready to play with the controls… Doesn’t make any sense to me. (I registered with one such site but I won’t be taking my interest forward.)

I’d be more worried about a panic attack by an unknown pax who then proceeds to grasp the controls. This, however, can happen even if you take a friends flying. I had one potential situation like this where I took an old friend and her boyfriend up. She had never been in a light airplane but really wanted to go flying – however also confessed to being super nervous. Solution: she sat in the back and loved every second of it!

Howard wrote:

One doesn’t know one’s passenger from Adam and there they are sitting in the co-pilot’s seat ready to play with the controls…

That’s not what worries me about these sites.

What concerns me about these sites is the kind of quasi-airline thing people are going to assume. The paying passenger (even if they are only paying pro-rata share) doesn’t understand that flying in light GA has roughly the safety record of motorcycling, they will assume it’s nearly as safe as flying on a proper airline (“more likely to get killed driving to the airport” will be the oft repeated myth). Then there will be a spate of crashes, and then just as night follows day, the popular press “hatchet job” on GA safety followed by so many knees jerking at the regulator (because Something Must Be Done) you better not be anywhere nearby or you’ll get kicked to death.

And it will be inevitable. Who, by and large, are the pilots most likely to be on this site? We already see in this thread aircraft owners being leary about having a complete stranger sitting next to them, so it’s generally not going to be people who can comfortably afford their flying habit.

It’s going to most likely be:

• low time pilots trying to time build
• owners who bought more plane than they could actually afford, who are also probably low time pilots.

The large proportion of low-timers will likely be less capable of saying “no” and more likely to have get-there-itis in questionable conditions when they have a paying passenger.

In the second major group, we have also aircraft with deferred maintenance to add to the list (because the owner can not quite afford to run the aircraft).

This all makes for a disquieting mixture that’s likely to result in accidents and a huge black eye given to GA followed by pointless rules that heap more bureaucracy and expense on the rest of us.

alioth wrote:

The paying passenger (even if they are only paying pro-rata share) doesn’t understand that flying in light GA has roughly the safety record of motorcycling, they will assume it’s nearly as safe as flying on a proper airline (“more likely to get killed driving to the airport” will be the oft repeated myth)

I say that, but I ride a bike to the airport. And I’m pretty sure my flying is safer :)

Re passengers, I have to admit a pilot friend and I did in the past share a couple of trips with people found off a Bloomberg Chat, but I no longer do (reason being don’t really need to and not worth the hassle, and then saw rule says Friends and colleagues, but 2 of them I’m still in touch with). Only Family / Friends / Colleagues, and generally I talk enough to these that they know, and if they want to push a bit I say that the situation might be OK if all goes well but I always want to allow for some margin of things to no go as planned, and that the reason there is a lot of training is not to land the plane, but to make decisions and judge situations.

Regarding the suicides, I’m generally optimistic, and suicide / acting crazy would not be a concern. Probably bigger chance to be killed by a gun in the US but I still go there too. One of the things that I appreciated when I used to do a lot of airline jumpseats (talking 201#) was to see that not everyone had ceded to the paranoia. With the Germanwings accident, it’s even debatable whether all these security measures prevented or caused more deaths!.

I know of an FI who actually had a student (maybe trial flight) who seemed very happy to do that but, when lifting off, froze in a death grip in the “pull up” position .
This FI actually had to punch the person in the nose to break it out of it’s death grip and regain control of the aircraft.

I had one student who froze with the yoke fully back when the aircraft dropped a wing, and off we went into a spin… he let go quickly without me having to resort to excessive violence…

And another one, when encountering a slight downdraft, let go of the controls and embraced me in some sort of bear hug… good thing aircraft fly themselves, don’t try that in a helicopter.

And once a student, having a bit of a balloon when landing, let go of everything and braced himself against the airframe and me, knocking my hand off the throttle so I HAD to land since no-power go-arounds are a bit tricky.

Of all these experiences, the last one was the only dangerous one since it was close to the ground – on the second one, I had to really control my laughter, and on the first one the main concern was to get up again and do it again properly to make sure I don’t end up with a student scared witless and then giving up altogether.

So in a nutshell – I never worried about suicides. There are other things a lot more likely to shorten the life of an instructor.