I've been following the Mailing List for about six months now, since I started my ES-P.  After reading all the accounts of crashes, I've come to a couple of conclusions.  I'll be interested to see what you all have to say. 

 

First, you can not jump out of a 172 and into a Legacy or IV-P without some good training.  If you make a mistake in a 172 it will usually take care of you.  Not true in a high performance plane.  The training required is not so much on how to fly the plane (most of us can jump into most planes and fly them) but on how to adopt the proper "attitude" when flying a high performance plane.  It is far more important to fly high performance planes "By the numbers" or with more of a professional attitude as if each flight were a charter flight.

 

Second, and this one is a hard one to practice without getting a whole bunch of adrenalin going, when the whole world goes to hell on us, we must remember first and foremost, to "Fly the airplane".  So many accounts of crashes start out with "the engine quit" followed by "the plane went in nose first killing all aboard".  It would appear that in these cases, the pilot was engrossed in trying to get the engine started again instead of flying the plane.  I think many of these type of accidents would be survivable if the pilot concentrated on landing in a controlled manner as slow as possible, where ever he chooses.  There has been a lot of discussion about trying to make a 180 and land back at the airport if the engine quits.  That’s just inviting a stall/spin crash that will kill you for sure, especially in a high performance plane.  Its far better to sacrifice the plane and save its occupants.

 

What say folks.  Am I way off base or not?

 

Cliff