There was a story that navy pilots used to like to tell because it involved a marine pilot.  This young lad was on his first carrier qualification mission and had received an order to go out and land on the boat.  Undaunted by his failure to capture a cable, he braked his T-28 to a stop.  The good news was he was still on the boat.  The bad news was his nose gear was hanging over the angle deck.  Perceiving, correctly, that any further action would require a shutdown, this marine proceeded through the shutdown checklist, which included a runup of the engine to get the oil circulated prior to shutdown.  Miraculously, the airplane stayed on the deck and the marine, having shut the engine down, climbed back over the fuselage and jumped to the deck.  A board was convened to determine the fate of this intrepid aviator.  It concluded that he could not continue in the training program and the reason given was "no apparent fear of death."

In reading the final report on Shannon's accident, it occured to me that that was as good an explanation as any for the ultimate cause of the tragedy.  Despite obvious warning signs over an extended period of time, Shannon continued not to associate the known facts with the possibility that they could kill him.  Even after the engine had apparently given him unmistakable notice of termination, he does not appear to have grasped the possibility until a few seconds before impact.  Unfortunately, the only kind of training that makes much difference in this area is training that you don't always survive.  As far as I can tell from the report, Shannon's skill as a pilot (i.e. the stuff you can train on) had nothing to do with the accident.  Theoretical training aimed at taking risk seriously is rarely effective for very long.  (Remember the crash movies from drivie's ed?  How long did they slow you down?)

If there is a silver lining in this cloud, it is the opportunity that the rest of us have to re-examine whether we have an adequate fear of death.  Maybe we wouldn't do what Shannon did but we do similar things.  I left Oshkosh a few hours before Shannon did.  On the way home I flew within five miles of a Level 5 thunderstorm that I found out about from ATC.  Seriously dumb move and it is only a matter of luck that we all read about Shannon instead of everyone else reading about me.  How many of us have stretched fuel capacity just a bit and got away with it?  How many have flown into worse than anticipated weather and gotten through by doing things that no one in their right mind would ever have planned to do?  When you get away with this stuff, it is a lot more fun to think of yourself as an ace instead of the idiot you manifestly are.

As John Deakin says: be careful up there!