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Subject: Lancair Accidents -- Attitude or Technique
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Thread-Topic: Lancair Accidents -- Attitude or Technique
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From: "Halle, John" <JJHALLE@stoel.com>

 The ruler of a middle-eastern state was looking for a principal
adviser.  He interviewed an engineer, an accountant and a lawyer, asking
each the same question: "What is two plus two?"  The engineer responded:
"Exactly plus four, no more and no less."  The accountant answered:
"FAS 147(a)(3)(ii) requires us to record the result as 15.924 for
balance sheet purposes and as -2.89 on the income statement, except in
certain exceptional circumstances that will take us a week to research."
The lawyer answered:  "What did you have in mind?"

(The engineers are all saying: "Well that's easy, the engineer was right
and the other two were wrong.")

I relate this story because a large number of you are engineers (and I
confess to being a lawyer.)  As such, you tend, understandably, to
consider solutions to problems that involve better data (AOA Indicators)
and better technique (stall training.)  Without wishing to minimize the
importance of either good data or good technique, I do want to observe
that (I think) any pilot who flies for any length of time will find to
his or her utter amazement that data of which he or she was 100% sure is
wrong and that he or she is capable of screwing up a maneuver that has
always been easy in the past.  For that reason, I think it is also
important to add a third category to the other two: I will call it
judgment.  It is, quite simply, the state of mind in which one
recognizes that even the best of us make mistakes, some of them
absolutely astonishing to us, and that it is therefore necessary to
leave a margin for error.  Not a good engineering concept but, if you
look at historical Lancair accidents, I think a case can be made for
this additional factor having been a major missing ingredient.

I used to think that the one mistake I could never make was a gear up
landing: I'm an experienced pilot, I got great training, I fly
regularly, most of my experience is in retractables, there are all kinds
of indicators that the gear are up and yada yada,  And it's all
perfectly true.  So imagine my astonishment a year or two ago when, on
short final, a friend and fellow Legacy pilot asked, in his slow,
matter-of-fact, southern drawl: "You are going to put the gear down
before you land, aren't you?"