A crash I witnessed early in my career and some lessons learned.

[Sulako]

I have been very lucky so far in that (knock on wood) I have had to attend only one funeral in aviation after 37 years of being a pilot. This is the story of my friend Daryl, our friendship, and the events of August 7th, 1997.

It's been more than 25 years, but I still think of him frequently. I met him during Spring 1997, when I got my first flying job and flew to Stony Rapids Saskatchewan to start my (hopefully) illustrious career. The Jetstream 31 went to Fond du Lac first, and when we landed there, I was told that my bags would have to be bumped off the plane in order to meet the Jetstream's weight restriction due to the short runway in Fond du Lac (it was 3,800'). That meant I wouldn't have my bags for at least a day as the sked flight didn't operate the next day. Before I got on the plane I had no idea what to expect from my new home, and as I gazed out at Fond du Lac, a mass of broken-down houses, trailers, dirty diapers blowing down the street and general filth, I was contemplating staying on the airplane and going right back down south. I was pondering this as the J-31 crew were unloading my bags when a 185 taildragger landed, taxiied in and shut down. The door opened and out walked this tall, broad-shouldered, Tom Cruise looking guy wearing a heavy red plaid workshirt, a big pair of Ray-bans, and an ear-to-ear smile. He walked right up to me and said "Hi, I'm Daryl. I'll take your bags back to Stony for you" I guess he could see that I was a wet-behind-the-ears pilot type, and knew exactly what my predicament was. We landed in Stony a few minutes later, with Daryl right behind in the 185 with my precious luggage (toothbrush, underwear, my Nintendo 64, etc).

He helped me load it into the back of a company truck, and drove me to my accomodation. I had a choice between living at a trailer by the waterbase or in a cozy little red log cabin. I looked at the waterbase trailer, with it's strange stains on the walls, grime on every surface and pungent mildewy scent and opted for the log cabin, sight unseen. Daryl looked at me and grinned "I agree - this place is nasty! And you haven't even met the weasel that lives under the floorboards". Later on I met the weasel, Ghost, but that's another story. As we drove to the log cabin, Daryl said I would stay there alone for the first few weeks, then another pilot would be joining me as the summer season ramped up. It turned out to be a wonderful little house with a wood stove and oil furnace for heat, big windows and large living room with a working color tv. And it was spotless; I had won the northern accomodation lottery on my first day! Daryl dropped me off and returned to the airport, then flew back to Fond du Lac where he was based.

I was initially hired as a dispatcher for Northern Dene Air, so I busied myself with the job, figuring out how to coordinate 11 aircraft and 3 main bases so that all the scheduled and charter and medevac flights were taken care of, on top of doing the Air Sask sked paperwork and all the countless little jobs that came with the job title. It was hard work, and I put in 14-hour days routinely. I still have my time sheet and I see that in August 97 I put in 271 hours of dispatching in 22 days. I took the other 8 days off, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

April came, and the ice thawed a little more in Stony Rapids. The caribou hunts were going like gangbusters - one of our 185's on skis would fly a few local hunters out to look for caribou and when they found them, the 185 would land and the hunters would shoot as many caribou as they could. Then they'd butcher the meat, cutting it up into useful pieces. Then they'd bury the meat under as much snow as they could, placing ice blocks over it to deter predators. The 185 would fly the hunters back, then the pilot would return to pick up the meat, then fly the meat back to home base, where the locals would load the collection of steaks and hooves into their trucks to take home to their freezers. My dispatching duties kept me painfully busy; by the time I got home at 7 or 8pm, I barely had the strength to cook some food on the wood stove, then collapse in bed. But I was happy, and the boss said I was doing a good job and would be getting a plane soon.

May came, and the ice melted on the lakes. Float season had arrived, and with it a pile of float pilots to crew the Beaver, the 180 and the 185's. They would be hauling rich fishermen and supplies to remote lodges where they would spend $5k for 5 days of 'roughing it' - mostly fishing, drinking and eating steak and lobster. I remember I once did a beer run in a float plane, hauling more than 600 cans of beer to a group of 3 doctors in a lodge for a week - 2 cardiac surgeons and an anaethetist; after I flew them back to the airport 7 days later, I asked how the fishing was: "What fish?" they laughed.

Daryl was transferred from Fond du Lac to Stony in order to fly the 185 from the waterbase, and he elected to stay with me in the log cabin rather than catch some dread disease from the waterbase trailer. We got along famously - we had the same sense of humor, the same love of beer and enjoyed a similar taste in music. He also liked playing Nintendo, so we frequently would have epic battles on the Nintendo 64, playing Mario cart until the wee hours of the morning. He was a much better cook than I was, and I looked forward to the end of the workday; when I'd get home to the cabin he would usually have the hibachi barbequeue already glowing and fish cooking. We'd sit in the patch of grass behind our cabin and make up songs about other pilots, or tell stories about our lives previous to our job, or bring the stereo speakers outside and listen to electronic dance music while dancing like crazy people around the cabin, to the bewilderment and amusement of the locals. "It's Duggles, Duggles, the pilot who juggles! Don't ask him for any snuggles, it's Duggles" That was the first line to the Doug song, about a pilot we worked with. It was funnier 'cause Doug doesn't juggle (Duggles is now CP of a large airline out west). Yes we were bored, but we made the most of it. Daryl and I agreed that we would keep in touch long after we had left Northern Dene Air.

Daryl's girlfriend Nicole came to visit at the end of July '97, travelling from his hometown of Cranbrook, BC. She was awesome; she looked like a cheerleader and acted like one of the guys. She could drink more beer than literally anyone else could, and she loved to tell raunchy jokes. I took a transfer to Fond du Lac for a week to give them time together in the log cabin, and when I came back it was even more spotless than when I left. Life was good.

I came back to Stony Rapids on July 30th (I remember cause it was my birthday, and Nicole had made me a cake), and Nicole left for Cranbrook that night on the sked. Daryl was elated - they had been together for 7 years, since they were both 16, and he had proposed to her during her visit to Stony. She had accepted, and they were planning a wedding for the winter in Cranbrook.

We continued our sumer routine at the log cabin for a week - He would get up around 4am to be on the dock for 430am so he could fly fishermen to their camps, and fly supplies to the lodges, and I would head to the airport where I would coordinate the fleet of aircraft and make sure the paperwork at least resembled something approaching a legal operation. I was very envious of his job, and wished I could be in the air, but I was still putting in my dues and I wasn't going to get an airplane until the fall at least.

On August 7th, 1997 I was doing my thing at the airport when Daryl came up to the office and we went for lunch. After lunch we got a video at the Northern Store to watch after work, then I went down to the waterbase to hang out for a bit while he got his 185 ready to take a hot water heater to a local fishing lodge. The plane had just come out of inspection so he was happy to be flying again after it had been down for a couple of days. We loaded up the hot water heater in the back, and he got in. He was flying solo, just him and the cargo. After he got to the lodge, he'd be picking up some passengers and returning them to Stony so they could catch the sked flight south after their fishing vacation.

Daryl fired up VLH and taxiied the 185 down the river a little before turning around and commencing his run, heading toward the rapids of Stony Rapids. VLH got airborne and I watched him as he climbed out, wishing I was on board as I started the trudge back toward the office. The ear-splitting whine of the 185 propellor at takeoff power was a familiar sound and it echoed across the water, down the lake.

Then there was silence.

I turned around and watched VLH disappear behind the trees, in a 60 degree right bank.

Silence again.

I ran back toward the waterbase and heard the owner's voice come across our company frequency - his house was down the river a little ways and he would have seen everything through his main window.

"A plane has just crashed on the riverbank. Get a boat"

George and Bob, two float pilots living in the waterbase, came running. They fired up our aluminum fishing boat and we set off toward the trees where VLH had disappeared. We blasted up the river and went around a bend, where we saw the wreckage. The plane was in a foot of water, just on the shore of the river. The right wing had snapped off at the root, and the fuselage aft of the cockpit had bent about 90 degrees to one side. My heart was in my mouth, and I felt like I was going to throw up. We got to the plane and looked inside. The cockpit panel had been pushed forward and the engine had been pushed into the space normally occupied by the rudder pedals. Daryl was wedged in the cockpit at a crazy angle, he was facing straight ahead but his waist was twisted to the right and his legs were across the passenger seat. He had hit the dash and his Raybans were pushed into his face. We tried to remove them, but they were embedded - Bob was finally able to get them off by using his Leatherman. There was blood everwhere. But Daryl was breathing, so we were hopeful. The left door of the plane was smashed closed, but the right door wasn't attached to the airplane any more, so we decided to pull him out through the right side of the plane. We noticed gas was leaking from the ruptured wing tanks and George turned off the electrics, preventing an awful situation from becoming worse.

We were then joined by a lot of SERM guys - they are the guys who fight forest fires and they had heard about the crash on their radio and had come running from their camp a little ways down the road. They helped lift the plane and tilt it while some of us pulled Daryl from the wreckage. A van drove up close to the shoreline and opened the rear doors. We carried Daryl, still unconscious, to the van and loaded him in the back. He was going to be driven to the nursing station, where they would assess his condition and then decide if he was going to go to the hospital 100 miles away in Uranium City or be medevaced down to La Ronge or Saskatoon.

I ran back to the airport terminal along with George, and told him to warm up a Navajo while I got on the phone. Air Sask called in on our company frequency, they were 10 minutes out, coming through on their sked run. I hadn't done any paperwork on it at all, so I started on that also - filling out their weight and balance and passenger load, and trying to make sure it was complete. The navajo's engines coughed into life outside as George got the oil temps up to normal and prepared for the flight to Uranium.

I got a call from the nursing station - Daryl was too critical to make the flight down south, so we were going to take him to the hospital in Uranium City where the doctor could stabilize him before we flew him south. The total time since the crash was maybe 10 minutes, and had only been at the nursing station a few moments before they realized he had to go to a larger center for care.

Chris the Ops Manager arrived and headed for the Navajo. George had said earlier that he was distraught and didn't trust himself to fly right then - the weather was iffy at Uranium City and George and Daryl were good friends, so Chris and Bob would do the flight while I would sit in the back of the plane with the nurses and Daryl.

The Air Sask Jetstream landed and arrived just as the van carrying Daryl arrived, along with about 20 SERM firefighters who had helped remove Daryl from the airplane. Air Sask passengers milled around the ramp and it was a state of confusion and chaos. I walked up to the Captain of the Jetstream and told him what was happening and that I had to leave and he was on his own for loading up his new pax and getting airborne. I pushed the paperwork I had into his hands and left him. To his credit, he was great and he immediately rose to the occasion, deftly organising his passengers and their bags while I turned my attention to the van.

Daryl had regained consciousness, but he was in and out. He would moan "Pull up pull up pull up" and then stop for a little while, then start again. The nurses were in the van and still installing iv lines in Daryl's arms as a bunch of the SERM guys gently scooped him up and carried him to the Navajo on a stretcher. Chris and Bob were already up front, and had pulled out some of the rear seats so we could lay the stretcher flat. We loaded Daryl up along with the two nurses. I hopped in, closed the door and we were off, with Chris starting our takeoff roll from the taxiway.

I held Daryl's hands while the nurses pumped saline into him. He was more conscious now, and we managed to talk a little. I told him he had been in an accident and we were flying to the hospital and that he'd be fine. I asked him if he was in pain and he said no, he didn't feel any pain at all. I told him he could squeeze my hands if he felt scared, and he did. He wanted to sit up, but it was clear that he had suffered some sort of spinal injury and his legs were both badly broken, so I convinced him to remain laying down. He asked for water, but the nurses said the likelihood of internal injuries meant that he was to have nil by mouth until he was more properly diagnosed. They felt bad and one of them gave him a little water from a bottle. He guzzled it and thanked her, saying he'd get her a beer in return later. That made me smile. About 15 minutes had gone by, and as we flew along the shore of Lake Athabasca, we came up on Fond du Lac which was halfway between Stony Rapids and Uranium City. Another 15 minutes and we'd be landing, with the hospital only a few minutes past that. Daryl vomited, and there were things that were supposed to be inside a person in it. He squeezed my hands harder.

Now when I said before that the weather enroute was 'iffy', I meant it was about 200' overcast once we got past Fond du Lac on the way to Uranium City. The instrument approach into Uranium City would only take us down to 500' or so, but the hospital was the only decent medical care within 600 miles. I knew Chris and Bob were going to do whatever it took to get into the airport. Daryl was now slurring his words and had started to turn grey.

Chris and Bob elected to take the Navajo out over the waters of Lake Athabasca, where we could ..-run to within a few hundred feet above the lake and not have to worry about hitting power lines, etc. I knew this approach into Uranium City, we called it the "Beaverlodge 1" approach - fly west along the lakeshore until you came to an old settlement, then turn north and follow a small river which would bring you to the threshold of the runway in Uranium City. The runway at Uranium was on a ridge, and depending on how low over the lake you were, you might actually have to climb up to reach the elevation of the runway. This let you stay beneath the cloud instead of climbing up into the cloud and conducting an official instrument approach into the airport, which would often result in failure if the weather was poor. It wasn't necessarily legal, but it was effective.

We dropped down and flew toward the beaverlodge as the visibility grew worse. Daryl grew visibly more pale and when he squeezed my hands it was with less strength. We all told him to hang on, that the airport was only a few minutes away and he'd be in the hospital very quickly. He sat up a little, propping himself up with his arms. I told him to sit back and relax. He squeezed my hand, then looked at me and told me to tell Nicole that he loved her, and to tell his dad that he loved him. That really scared me - he was 3 years younger than I was and fit and strong: I had seen him carry hundred pound bags of luggage without breaking a sweat. I felt like some bundle of wiring deep inside my brain had begun to arc, filling everything with smoke and throwing hot sparks everywhere. I said he could do that in person himself, that he was going to be fine, but I think my voice had already started to crack a little. He said goodbye buddy, lay back down on the stretcher, and closed his eyes. He stopped squeezing my hands. The nurses stuck him with another huge needle and started to run more saline - he was up to 4 iv lines. They looked at me and I looked back at them and we were all helpless.

The Navajo reached the beaverlodge and turned north, ducking most of the clouds, and popping through some low .. - we were just skimming the bottoms of the cloud layer and we were maybe 75 feet above the lake. One thing I'll say about Chris the captain - we had significant differences about a great many things but he was a masterful pilot and I trusted his hands and feet. The flaps lowered and the gear came down and we were mostly in cloud now, with the occasional sight of the river and trees beneath us.

Daryl's breath grew more shallow and his legs stopped shaking and his chest raised and lowered a few more times, almost imperceptibly, and then stopped. The nurses started CPR, with one pushing on Daryl's chest and the other one pumping a little facemask that pushed air into his lungs.

I heard Chris exclaim "Yes!" up front, and I looked out in time to see us touch down on the runway. The clouds were in the trees but Chris had gotten us in. He had the plane from the runway to the main ramp in seconds, and the white hospital van was already waiting for us. We shut down and unloaded Daryl in only a few moments, with the nurses still pumping the mask over his face, and still pushing down hard on his chest while we carefully but quickly moved the stretcher into the back of the van. The doctor was inside the van and he asked the nurses for an update. They told him Daryl hadn't had a pulse for 5 minutes and that seemed to calm the doctor down. The nurses kept pumping and the doctor reached from inside the van to grab the back door and pull it shut. He saw me standing just outside the van and made eye contact for just a second before he closed the door. He shook his head and that's when I knew for sure.

The van left, heading for the hospital. Chris and Bob and I stood on the ramp, numb. We walked inside the terminal and met Jen and Bill, the employee couple who were based in Uranium City at the time. We all hugged. I noticed that I was covered in blood and went to their washroom to rinse it off my hands and arms. When I came out, Chris was standing by the door. "The hospital called. He didn't make it." I bolted for the door and the forest outside.

As I walked through the trees I thought of the last few months and how much fun we had had at the red log cabin, drinking beer after a long day and cranking the tunes while playing Nintendo. And fishing and barbequeing and cracking jokes and talking about the nature of reality while sitting outside and watching the northern lights. I thought of Nicole's visit and I thought of Daryl's million-watt smile when she first arrived and walked from the Jetstream into the terminal in Stony Rapids. And then I thought of the dumbest thing - Jerry Maguire, the video we had rented just after lunch at the northern store. I was going to watch it alone and it was an incomprehensible situation. Then I thought of the fact that Nicole called every day around 6pm, and it was 3pm already and I had to sit down on a rock and think about that carefully. I found if I curled up I could make myself smaller and I needed to be very small for a while.

Time passed. I made my way back to the terminal building and found the rest of the group sitting on the ramp with their backs against the hangar side. The nurses had returned and they both came over and we hugged and stood for a little while. Then it was time to go. Chris and Bob fired up the Navajo and we all got into the plane for the half-hour ride back to Stony. I don't remember much about the ride, but I do remember that we flew over VLH's wreckage on final approach to the runway at Stony Rapids - there was no way to avoid it. We landed and the nurses left. Bob and I stayed behind to clean the blood from the aircraft.

I walked home to the log cabin, dreamlike. Daryl's laundry was hanging from the line outside. I sat down at our kitchen table and read the grocery list he had written down earlier in the day. Then I sat and I waited for Nicole to call. At 6pm on the dot, she did. Those few minutes were the worst thing I have ever experienced. When the call was over, I phoned my parents and then went to sleep.

The next day Bob, George, Doug, and myself all took the boat out toward the wreckage to clean up the accident site. This is the north and there aren't people to do that sort of work, so if we didn't want the wreckage to just sit there forever, it was up to us to move it. We dragged the wings and tail from the riverbank to a nearby road, then loaded it on the back of a truck and took it to the airport, where we piled it behind an outbuilding. A skidder would later cut a path from the road to the wreckage and retrieve the cockpit and engine, which were too heavy for us to lift. As we cleaned up the smaller pieces of wreckage I found Daryl's pilot license but it still didn't feel real.

Two days later, Chris and I flew Daryl's body to Cranbrook and spent a few days with his family, then returned to Stony after the funeral.

It's been over 25 years since Daryl said goodbye to me and I said goodbye to my friend. It took a long time to get over the horror of that day, but Daryl was a great guy and I had a really good time in his company and what I most remember are the days we spent eating and laughing and making fools our of ourselves.

That being said, I knew that for me to have any sort of resolution with his this, it was important to me to find out why he crashed. I found that out the day after he died, when we went through the wreckage of VLH.

So what the hell happened? Why did VLH stop making engine sounds and then disappear behind the trees in a 60 degree banked turn?

The day after the crash when we were picking up the pieces of the airplane, Doug and I looked in the cockpit and there it was, staring us right in the face.

In the Cessna 185, the fuel selector is on the cabin floor, right between the 2 front seats. It's set up like a clock dial, with a single little lever. If you move the lever to the 9 o'clock position then it will feed from the LEFT tank. If you move it to the 12 o'clock position, then it will feed from BOTH tanks, and if you move it to the 3 o'clock position, it will feed the engine from the RIGHT tank.

Now here's the critical thing: This fuel selector is very similar to other Cessna fuel selectors. For example, in the Cessna 172, it's exactly the same thing, except that you can also slide the lever to the 6 o'clock position which is the fuel cutoff position - no fuel at all will be fed to the engine from either tank. In the 185, however, there is a piece of plastic that prevents the lever from moving south of the 9 o'clock or the 3 o'clock position, so you should only be able to select the left, right or both tanks for fuel.

In this particular 185, that was not the case. The plane had been rolled up into a ball a few years before, and while rebuilding it, the mechanics had used a fuel selector that had the fuel cutoff feature if you placed the needle at the 6 o'clock position. The piece of plastic that is supposed to prevent the fuel selector switch from being moved to the 6 o'clock OFF position was still there, but the mechanic had noticed that if you pull the lever straight up off the selector, you could wiggle it above the plastic piece and still pull it to the 6 o'clock OFF position. Again, none of this was mentioned in any airplane manual for VLH, and the mechanic later said he was the only person who knew about it.

He was also the mechanic who had done the last inspection on VLH, just before it took off on the final flight. He had been working on the fuel system and had moved the selector lever to the 6 o'clock OFF position to cut off fuel to the engine while he did some work on it. After the inspection was done, he had forgotten to move the fuel selector lever to the LEFT, BOTH, or RIGHT position, and it remained in the OFF position.

Unfortunately, even in the OFF position, there are a couple of gallons still in the fuel line between the fuel cutoff valve and the actual engine. In a Cessna 185, a couple of gallons is enough to do an engine run-up, taxi, take off, and get around 300 feet in the air before the gas runs out.

Because of the position of the selector switch between the two front seats on the floor, it's somewhat difficult to lean over and visually confirm the position. What we think happened is that when the checklist called for identifying the fuel tank selector switch position, Daryl put his hand between the seats and manually felt the lever. It was pointing to 6 o'clock OFF, but if he didn't know it could even point in that direction, he might have assumed it was pointing to the 12 o'clock BOTH position because the lever was in a vertical position, it was just pointing 180 degrees from where he expected it to be pointing.

In any event, he took off with the fuel selector in the OFF position. He got 300' in the air, and the engine stopped dead. This is a hard part to figure out, 'cause one of the basic things they teach in flight school is that if you engine quits and you are low to the ground, say below 500', you NEVER try to make a 180 degree turn, you land straight ahead. Daryl went for the turn. Why?

Now it's also important to know that the direction Daryl took off in was facing the rapids of Stony Rapids. We think that he saw the white water in front of him after the engine failed, and tried to make a 180 degree turn back to the safe part of the river, which would have saved the plane from flipping over in the rapids. At 300' up, he wasn't nearly high enough to accomplish that, and he hit the shoreline in the turn.

To summarize:

1. A Modification to airplane fuel system without anyone but the mechanic knowing
2. The fuel selector was left in the OFF position after inspection
3. Daryl failed to physically check position of the fuel selector, or misread it
4. There was enough fuel in gascolator line to get airborne to 300'
5. Daryl attempted to make a 180 degree turn at low altitude

So it took 5 distinct actions to cause this accident, maybe more. I have listened to many Transport Canada presentations on safety, and they all hammer home one basic thing: An accident is the result of many links in the accident chain, it's never just one thing. And this was a classic case of exactly that. If any of the following links had been broken, he would have survived the accident. If Daryl had taken off in the other direction, his taxi would have been shorter and he would have been higher up when the engine quit - or if his runup had taken longer, maybe the engine would have quit before the takeoff run. So many variables had to come together for this to happen, but eventually they did. Daryl was a great guy and he deserved better. He did make a couple of mistakes on that flight, and unfortunately he paid a really high price, as did his family and fiance. I think about him often and wonder where he'd be if the accident on August 7th hadn't occured.

How many times have you left a switch in the wrong position, like landing lights or maybe had the left mag on instead of both of them? have you ever nearly forgotten your landing gear or flaps or left the battery switch on after a flight? Stuff like that happens all the time, but the consequences are usually slight. I have had my share of missed items, but I have been really lucky in that none of them have resulted in an incident or accident. Now I'm lucky enough to be flying a fantastic machine for an amazing owner, and our entire operation is far more disciplined than the Stony Rapids operation would ever be. I wish Daryl had gotten that chance.

https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/23349

[digits_]

Pretty impressive you stuck with aviation after experiencing that on your first job

[JustaCanadian]

Thanks for the post. Amazing how vivid out memories can be when we experience tragedy. Always feels unfair when friends/family are taken from us to early in life.

[Blowin' In The Wind]

That was a very touching story, thank you for taking the time to share it.

I’ve lost a few friends over the years to this industry, but my experiences were always second hand: a phone call I had hoped to never receive, or being shocked to stumble across the news of a crash and slowly piecing together that it was someone that I was close to. It’s often the young, full of life and vigour, that this line of work cuts down all too early.

My condolences for the loss of your friend. It must be hard carrying around the memory of such a traumatic event.

Best wishes.

[yhz41]

Thank you for sharing thar painful story with us. He sounded like a wonderful friend.

[Tbayer2021]

That was difficult to read. I can't imagine how hard it must have been to experience. Thanks for sharing.

[rookiepilot]

Thanks for sharing your very touching story.

Loss is very hard.

[Big Pistons Forever]

Sad to say that is the reality of 702-703 aviation. Everybody is going to loose somebody they know if you stick with it. Almost 30 years ago I did the Multi Engine Training for an experienced floatplane pilot so he could move up to the Twin Beech on floats. Not long after he got on the line he had an engine failure right after lift off and lost cost control.

I still wonder if I had done a better job as an instructor there would not have been a wrecked airplane and nine dead......

[pelmet]

Thanks for the story. Truly a difficult experience. A fellow in one of my early groundschools, way back when, also died. I sat beside him and he was a good guy, new wife. I went to his grave site a few times, which is not far away, and left a High Flight poem. Haven't visited for years but I also have wondered once in a while, when passing the cemetery, where he would be now.

As someone else I had met, was recently added to the ever-lengthening list of people I know who died in a plane crash(both in the airline world and especially the GA world), and having read on forums how most of us seem to have a list as well.......I was wondering just yesterday if the motorcycle world is the same or is it unique to aviation.

I have known ten times more car drivers than pilots yet the death list seems to be at one-tenth for the car drivers.

[pelmet]

Found this written quite a few years ago.......

If you are involved in aviation for any length of time, you will know some
people who die. Fact of life. You look at a twisted blob of metal in which
someone you know has just perished, and it messes with your mind. Crashes
shake us up, make us wonder if we really need to be involved in an activity
that causes such pain. Eventually, we come to terms with it and move
on...older, wiser (hopefully), and sadder. We don't quit.

Because for some of us, there is no choice. Being a pilot is not just what I
do, it's who I am. My sister the lawyer will call me up (usually after a bad
crash) and say, "Bobby, why don't you quit that and come up here and we'll open
a business?" And I can't. Because not being a pilot WOULD kill me. It would
be the worst kind of torture. Every day I'd be looking up at an airplane or
helicopter flying over and say to myself, "Yeah, I used to do that." NOT being
a pilot scares me. And I will probably fly for a living as long as I can beg,
wheedle, cajole or bribe my way through a flight physical and annual checkride.
(I know, I know...I have an airplane I could fly for pleasure, but it would
not be the same.) It is the reason I probably won't go anywhere within my
company. Get out of the cockpit? Hah!

The point of all the above bullshit is that I'm doing what I want to be doing,
maybe what I was "meant" to do. If I were to die in a crash, my friends and
relatives might get a tiny bit of solitude from the fact that, "He knew the
risks." Of course, the second half of that statement is, "...But why did he
have to take them?" Because I do, is all. I fly.

And so yeah, along with the intense sadness, there is a certain amount of "Gee,
glad it wasn't me" when I hear about a crash. Mike Suldo put it very
succinctly in his post. You do the best you can. You learn as much about
aviation as you can, be the best pilot you can be, EVERY FLIGHT. And you get
right with God. And you don't let crashes and deaths get to you, or they'll
drive you nuts.

Jordan (Wingman150) had his first close brush with death. Airplane he flew,
instructor he knew. Could've been him? Who knows. Don't dwell on it. Say a
prayer for those who are gone, then get back in and fly that bastard better
than you ever did before.

Hey, the rotor blades on my ship might fly off tomorrow. That's okay with me,
I can accept that. But I'll be damned if I crash and burn because of something
stupid that I did or did not do. As much as we joke about flying, and act like
it's nothing but fun, the reality is that it can be quite deadly. Sadly, that
fact is driven home every now and then. And it always hurts. And it always
will.

In memory of Gil, and Allen, and Dan Haseloh, and... and all the others who
have gone before them. Let us not add our name to the list.

"I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall, I really don't know clouds at all." Apologies
to Joni Mitchell

[pelmet]

"A WORTHWHILE TRADE"

Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: What more could you ask of life? Aviation
combined all the elements I loved. There was science in each curve of an
airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or
the color of the exhaust flame. There was freedom in the unlimited horizon, on
the open fields where one landed. A pilot surrounded by beauty of earth and
sky. He brushed treetops with the birds, leapt valleys and rivers, explored the
cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of the
wind.

I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics on the ground
- one that was richer because of its very association with the element of
danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were
bound. In flying, I tasted the wine of the gods of which they could know
nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they
loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike
days? I decided that if I could fly for 10 years before I was killed in a
crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.

Charles A Lindbergh, P-38 Pilot, 475th Fighter Group

[pilotidentity]

This well written account of your summer with Daryl is sure to help loved ones understand why the decision was made to enter into the dangerous profession of bush pilot. Thanks for writing it, it really touched me.