Made to be broken

By David Jack Kenny 

Aviation attracts its fair share of rugged individualists. It’s usually an advantage: An instinct toward autonomy fosters the self-reliance needed to function effectively as pilot in command. It stops being helpful, though, when a natural skepticism of authority shades into outright disdain for the regulations—rules aptly described as having been “written in blood.”

The manager of the fixed-base operator at Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, arrived at work at 7 a.m. on July 24, 2015, and noticed that one airplane was missing.  The owner of the 1974 Piper Warrior, a 46-year-old student pilot, had left the airport about an hour earlier than the manager without making any mention of plans to fly that night. No flight plan had been filed, and no one reported the airplane missing. Five days passed before an observation flight by the state’s Department of Game and Fish spotted the Warrior’s wreckage—barely a mile northwest of the approach end of Runway 13, the airport’s only paved runway. The bodies of the owner and a nonpilot friend were still inside. The impact crater and condition of the wreckage suggested that it had hit the ground in a near-vertical descent under power. There was no evidence of any pre-impact failure of any flight control.

The pilot had obtained a series of five combined student pilot and medical certificates between 1991 and 2004, then a sixth in 2012. The sixth certificate—which had expired on July 31, 2014, nearly a year before the accident—had three solo endorsements. The last was dated May 4, 2014, and so had expired on Aug. 2 of that year. None of them authorized solo flights at night. The most recent entry in the pilot’s logbook was dated April 16, 2014, and his last instructional flight was logged on March 9. The total flight time recorded over his 24-year career was 65.1 hours. His experience flying at night couldn’t be determined; nor could his familiarity with the area surrounding the airport.

The FBO manager recalled a previous episode in which the same pilot had told him that he hadn’t been able to activate the airport’s pilot-controlled lighting, but “proceeded towards the airport by referencing a light at a nearby waste yard and the airport's rotating beacon until he could find the runway.” A test of the pilot-controlled lighting system found it in good working order; instead, the airplane’s radio turned out to be inoperative. The pilot then bought a handheld radio and reported no subsequent problems. A test of the pilot-controlled lighting system the day after the discovery of the wreckage likewise found it to be working properly.

The NTSB noted that the night of the accident was moonless and dark. The airport is located in an area that’s sparsely populated even by the standards of rural New Mexico, with few lights on the ground. The accident, they concluded, was caused by “the student pilot's improper decision to conduct a flight in dark night conditions without a solo night flight endorsement and his subsequent loss of airplane control.”

It’s hard to disagree with that, but more could be said about his attitude toward what most of us acknowledge as the rules of the road. The lack of any logged instructional time for more than a year suggests that he wasn’t actively pursuing a private pilot certificate, but apparently he kept flying anyway—after his student pilot certificate and solo endorsements expired, at night without that required additional endorsement, and with passengers. (Even if he’d been a private pilot, his logbook didn’t show that he met the currency requirements to carry passengers, day or night.)

None of these regulations are arbitrary or oppressive. Student pilots’ inexperience warrants regular reassessment of their skills. Night flight risks optical illusions, collisions with unseen obstructions, and spatial disorientation; mitigating those risks requires specific training. Currency requirements—and the prohibition on student pilots carrying passengers—serve to protect nonaviators who may not be capable of evaluating a pilot’s competence. Some rules are not made to be broken.