Kennedy had felt a kinship with other general aviators–private pilots who fly neither commercially nor for the military–and his death put some of them on the defensive. Are small planes like his safe? Is pilot training adequate? Are federal regulations stringent enough? The new doubts came just as the general-aviation industry was looking up. The stock market has generated enough wealth for people to buy planes, and last year, shipments of new aircraft climbed to 2,220, rising from the low of 928 in 1994. And the industry’s legal costs are under control, thanks to a 1994 law that protects manufacturers from being sued over accidents involving planes more than 18 years old–a real advantage given that the average single-engine piston aircraft has been flying for more than 25 years.
General aviation’s safety record is improving. The number of fatal crashes has declined steadily through the years, from 721 in 1978 to 361 last year. Though fewer people are dying in small planes, the main causes remain stubbornly consistent. According to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, pilots with lower levels of training who fly into conditions that require instrument-only skills (Kennedy’s apparent predicament) cause more accidents than thunderstorms, icing and most other weather hazards combined.
Pilot training is always called into question after a crash, but the falling accident rate suggests that regulators and the industry are doing something right. New pilots typically go through 55 to 75 hours of training before they get their license. They spend roughly three hours of that time with an instructor learning how to fly with only the aid of instruments; typically, the trainees wear an elaborate plastic visor that blocks their vision of everything but the instrument panel. Some instructors ask students to close their eyes and try, almost always unsuccessfully, to fly the plane level for a few minutes. The lesson: never trust your senses.
The biggest key to safe flying, of course, is to avoid dangerous situations in the first place. Aviation officials often talk about their inability to regulate a pilot’s judgment. Kennedy was acting within Federal Aviation Administration guidelines to make the flight he did, though many pilots and instructors said they would not have flown on such a dark, hazy night. The FAA literature stresses that the minimum limits in its regulations are just that: “You should allow yourself to be more conservative when necessary,” says one guideline. In the current issue of the industry’s Pilot magazine, an article on ditching a troubled plane in water emphasizes that “many pilots won’t even consider a water crossing at night or on instruments in anything but a multiengine plane.’’ Kennedy’s Piper Saratoga had one engine.
Kennedy may have had too much plane for his skills. He was a relatively new pilot–with reportedly fewer than 200 hours of flying time–perhaps best suited to a Cessna 172 or Piper PA28, which are considered training planes. Nevertheless, Kennedy moved up from a Cessna 182 to his Saratoga, which aviation experts consider a safe plane that has shown no evidence of any systemic problem despite 26 fatal crashes since 1996. The cover story in this month’s Pilot magazine credits the Saratoga with “docile handling that requires lots of provocation to do anything untoward.’’ But the Saratoga is marketed as a high-performance craft, and is known in FAA terms as a complex plane because of its retractable landing gear and its adjustable propeller. Many instructors suggest that Kennedy wasn’t ready to fly the craft on his own. “In my background, I didn’t feel comfortable flying any of those types of aircraft until I had about 1,000 hours,’’ said Gary Evans, a flight instructor and president of Voyager Aviation in Titusville, Fla.
For all the complexity of flying–new pilots say it can be like trying to absorb an entire encyclopedia at once–fliers and instructors are forever reminding each other of pithy sayings to grab onto when trouble brews. “Speed is life, altitude is life insurance,’’ they say, and “Never let an airplane take you somewhere your brain didn’t get to five minutes earlier.’’ Last week the talk at airfields was about how the most difficult maneuver in flying can be the 180-degree turn back to the original airport. Too many pilots succumb to “get-home-itis,’’ flying into treacherous conditions in an attempt to get to their destination–a cousin’s wedding, perhaps.
