Guest Blog: The Hope Endures That We Learn From Tragedy

Ed. Note: A version of this blog originally appeared as a Facebook post and Paul kindly allowed us to publish it.

There aren’t many days when I’m happy to be out of aviation and especially happy to be out of aviation media. But today is surely one of them.

You can guess why, too. The horrific Palm Beach Lear 60 crash has provoked an online frenzy for the ages. Just scrolling my FB feed for a bit yesterday, every other post was something about this crash. The worst of it was the live ATC audio, which I absentmindedly clicked on and listened to, much to my regret. Mea culpa. It makes me part of the problem.

I did media accident reporting for many years, eventually transitioning to doing it online where it always pulled in the clicks for the same reason that rubberneckers can’t resist gawking at a crash that’s strangled traffic to a single lane. I always salved myself by believing it was a higher calling that saved lives by alerting pilots to mistakes they might blunder into.

Maybe it did. But mostly not, I suspect. By the late 1990s, accident rates had flattened and day after day, week after week, year after year, pilots and passengers died in crashes for the same dreary reasons they always had. Creative they weren’t. And they still aren’t.

Sometime in the early days of AVweb, I wrote an editorial essentially saying as much and noting that for all the ersatz high-minded intent, the animating force—at least in general aviation–was still voyeurism. Social media has supercharged this in ways that even I, at my most cynical, wouldn’t have thought possible.

He who’s first, gets the mostest, to paraphrase Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. He was thinking of mounted cavalry, but now it’s clicks, views and likes.

You might recall that when Icon Aircraft whipped the cover off its owner agreement—to universal howls, I might add—it required an operating cockpit camera as a condition of ownership. Were we about to get crashes live streamed? Don’t be silly. Starlink didn’t exist then.

But it does now.

Recall also that this very idea has been proposed for airline cockpits, as a safety measure. And I’d just say that for airlines, accident investigations have been instrumental in elevating airline safety, if not the media reporting we do about them. The industry responds with regulation, with training and so on. It’s a real thing.

This is much less so in general aviation, where accident investigations can be cursory and inconclusive. (Twenty nine percent of piston engine failures occur for unknown reasons, for instance.)

This Lear crash investigation will probably be as exhaustive as a crater with precious little detectable physical wreckage allows. In a stunning moment of understatement, the NTSB’s Tom Chapman said the investigation will be challenging. But they’ve done it before and I’m confident they will again, even in the midst of a squall of second-guessing by online experts and, lately, conspiracy theorists seasoned with the occasional misogynist.

If you’re like me, you probably struggle to tune out the noise, for not doing so risks a certain psychosis. Sometimes, I’m not sure I haven’t already fallen into it. But I think this is true: Given the availability of radar—both NEXRAD and airborne—thunderstorm accidents are now relatively rare.

When the contours of this one come into focus, I won’t be surprised that apart from minor details—however interesting and unusual—the root cause won’t be anything new. Which is to say if the information revealed is a revelation to anyone, this may actually be your first rodeo.

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