It’s a sad fact of life that some people will be jerks online, and when it comes to aviation accidents, they are sometimes at their worst. Thoughtless, heartless and sometimes downright cruel, commenters will occasionally weigh in with their opinion about just how stupid the pilot in the mishap was to have let such misfortune befall them. And sadly, it’s often pilots and not non-aviators who are the ones to set the behavior bar at dirt level. Granted, it’s a tiny subset of pilots who do this, and some of them are nothing but trolls, people who for some reason that’s hard for me to fathom, delight in being anything from mildly unpleasant to straight out mean.
With most subjects, such low-lifes are easy enough to dismiss with a shrug. So what if they think that pilots of tricycle gear planes aren’t real pilots or that Airbus makes lousy airplanes? It’s easy to just move on past such trollcraft to commenters that have something meaningful to say, which, I’m happy to note, comprise the majority of our online reactions.
But when it comes to accidents, the work of these people goes beyond relatively harmless rhetorical vandalism and becomes something really dark and disturbing. Honestly, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that these commenters are simply sadists, as they (presumably) take joy in the outrage and horror that their remarks inspire. How one could delight in causing emotional distress in others is beyond me, but that seems to be what motivates these cowards.
Why am on about this right now? Because I’ve just seen some of their work.
Late last week, a Cessna 182 crashed just short of Runway 12 at Los Angeles-area Whiteman Airport. By the time first responders got there, and it was fast, the plane, which had apparently exploded on impact, was gone, and it seemed clear that no one could have survived the blaze. It was tragic.
The pilot of the Skylane had reported while already cleared to land that he had lost engine power and that he was going to try to stretch the glide, which, of course, is not a thing. You can’t stretch a glide any more than you can stretch your cruise airspeed, or we’d do it all the time. Our planes have certain performance limitations, and we live and fly within those limitations, which are ruled not by convention or desire but by the immutable laws of physics.
But people often don’t speak literally. If I were to say that the weight of the world is on my shoulders, I would be using an exaggeration and a metaphor to say that I had deep concerns about something that might not be easy for me to solve. Did the pilot literally mean that he believed that he could stretch the glide (again, not a real thing)? I really doubt it. I think he was just using term metaphorically to say he was going to try to get the best glide performance possible out of the plane and hoped it would be good enough.
It almost was. But the plane came up short of Runway 12 by a few hundred feet, leaving some to speculate, and right off the bat too, that the pilot had stalled the plane, which then spun in, crashing in a fatal fashion. They went beyond mere accusations to more disturbing insinuations about the pilots’ abilities and intelligence. Some commenters got mad. I did too. I’m not sure it helps anything to call these folks out. It might be what they’re looking for. And it might do no good to point out that friends of the pilot and maybe even family members will see their vile commentary.
To top it off, the trolls were wrong, as they so often are. New surveillance video (warning, the video shows the actual crash of the 182 and might be disturbing to some audience members) has shown that such was almost certainly not the case, that the plane looked to be under control, wings level and still flying when it spun sharply, a wing dropping and cartwheeling into the ground. The resolution of the video isn’t good enough to be able to say for sure, but it seems likely that the plane hits some obstacle, a tree or wires strung across the street, that precipitated the loss of control. In other words, he did what appeared to be a great job before running into some really bad luck right at the end.
It could have happened to me, and it could have happened to you.
That is simply part of the mindset we all need in order to be prepared for such emergencies. A former colleague of mine, the late great aviation journalist Richard L. Collins, was often asked by adoring fans about his great flying skill and his level of experience, and he would famously reply that none of that matters, that what does matter is the next hour. He even wrote a book by that name. That’s the mindset I have every time I buckle in, thanks in large part to hanging on every one of Collins’ words for all the years I worked with him.
And that mindset has zero room in it for people who don’t recognize that even great pilots can run into situations that they can’t outfly, which can happen to pilots across the skill spectrum. Humility is a basic tenet of the mindset Collins described so well, a character trait that is foreign to trolls and jerks.
