One More Time — Will It Never Stop?

Evidently, it has already happened this year—a teenaged student pilot took up some of his teenaged friends. The crash killed all aboard.

This type of thing first came to my attention many decades ago when my cousin—also a student pilot—also took someone up for a ride. I was a young boy at the time—maybe 12?—and don’t remember the details—but do remember that one person was severely and permanently injured.

But, hey, this doesn’t happen only to young students. Another news story shows that less than a month ago a 54-year-old student pilot crashed his airplane, killing himself and his passenger. His plane? A KING AIR!

These are sad stories and totally unnecessary. The solution is simple. We need to create an atmosphere in aviation in which nobody with just a student ticket would dare carry pax. The only way to do that is to make it a totally unacceptable behavior among the pilot community at every airport.

For one thing, we should report every such incident we see. This is kinda like flying drunk. I would report my best friend for such behavior, and am proud to say so.

A great redneck aviator once put it this way — “Student pilots and drunk pilots just don’t know what they don’t know.”

Let’s get tough on this.