point taken, minty.
But do you not see the issue that zwaldd first raised, and then I commented on, in that when you engage in certain things there are inherent risks, and the consequences of those risks shouldn’t be taken out on someone who has not assumed them?
And BTW, I appreciate everyone’e input so far.
because if she’s flying just for the hobby, then it’s a matter of choice and the risks shouldn’t be transferred to bystanders, especially in the situation described in the report, that she maintined control of the aircraft until she hit the ground. when you take on a personal hobby, you take on all the risks involved. if you don’t want to take full responsibility for any harm your hobby does to someone not involved, then you need to take up a safer hobby, like one that doesn’t involve suspending heavy machinery over populated areas. however, according to the report, this was not recreational flying, although the fact remains that she didn’t follow the correct procedure for a gear-up landing, which may have caused the situation resulting in the death of the mazda driver.
absolutely. other than in a fight, i would never choose the death of another over myself if i could help it. that doesn’t mean i would donate my heart to some stranger, but i would never veer my car into pedestrians to avoid hitting a wall. no way, no how.
Question: Did the pilot know, what landing on the highway, that there was an overwhelming likelihood that she would kill someone? Or was it merely a risk? My reaction would depend on the answer to this question.
Also, another question…
Say that she had caused a bus to explode, and not a car. 100 people are now dead, not 1. Does that sway any of your opinions at all?
Try this example instead–
You are driving down a section of mountain road with a xxx foot drop on one side, and (for whatever reason) no guard rail. Suddenly you blow a tire (or other mechanical failure of choice), you have just enough control to chose between plummeting over the edge (certain death) or crashing into a parked car (possible death/injury to the occupant of the car (and also, to yourself)).
What do you do? Does it make a difference if it was a business or pleasure trip?
Isn’t moving several tons of steel at high speed inherently dangerous? I think drivers (and pedestrians) face a far greater danger from other cars than from the occasional plane falling out of the sky ;). Any volunteers to give up their cars?
I’ve followed the thread so far and I agree with MGibson - she ran a calculated risk and the odds caught up with her and her surroundings.
I don’t believe we’re in a position to judge whether her estimate was fair or not - it could have looked like a good chance to her when she had to make the decision. It might even have been a good chance - say, 1000 to one in favor of a safe landing - and bad luck just struck twice.
The issue at hand is: Did it look like a good chance with the information she had time to get, fighting a defective airplane at the time ? That’s not easy to tell from the description.
Personally, I believe that a fellow human being in jeopardy has a right to expect that I’ll accept being put at a higher risk than usual, if that’s what it takes to save his/her life. A fast-driving ambulance in traffic can be quite dangerous and still we gladly accept the risk, because it’s what it takes to save a life. When other people are in mortal danger, who am I to whine over an added risk ? It’s just that sometimes, the statistics catch up with someone.
S. Norman
The OP said that it was rush hour – so yeah, there was an overwhelming likelihood that she would kill someone. Not just one person, mind you, but multiple people.
That’s the part that I find hard to stomach.
I’m not sure how this is any different, when evaluating criminal responsibility, from a truck having a mechanical breakdown and causing an accident.
Let’s say a truck driver is driving along the highway with his shipment of bank checks, when his brakes fail. This is a mechanical error that the driver couldn’t have forseen nor avoided. Now, he must decide what to do. He might try to cross lanes of traffic in order to pull off on the shoulder, or he might try to stay in his lane and hope the truck slows to a stop when he appoaches the next incline. Either way, he might cause an accident. He has to go with whatever seems the best option, and he has to determine this in a very short span of time. There is no guarantee. In such a scenario, the driver is not brought up on criminal charges if an accident occurs.
From the link, it seems clear to me that the pilot did everything available to her to make the safest landing possible – contacting the nearest airport, and following their advice. I don’t know enough about planes to evaluate her decision not to engage the landing gear, again, from the link, it seems like she decided this in order to keep control of the plane longer. Who knows, maybe if she had tried to land in the trees, the impact would have caused the plane to spin back into the road, this time hitting a bus and killing 100 people. If the surrounding area was “typical suburbia,” maybe she was fearful of the plane falling on a backyard full of kids, rather than fearful of the loss of her own life.
Spiny Norman is pretty smart for a giant, imaginary hedgehog. The law accepts the basic principle that people whoses lives are in jeopardy are privileged, in order to save their lives, to take risks that in normal situations would possibly be criminal.
Just because I have easy access to it, here is the Texas statute on the defense of necessity:
We can argue all day about the desirability and urgency of not crashing an airplane, but we just don’t have all the details necessary for an informed judgment. How busy was the road at the time? (“Rush hour” means different things in Manhattan NY and Manhattan KS.) Was there a big gap in the traffic? Was there sufficient visibility for drivers to avoid the airplane? Were there open fields nearby? Since the pilot apparently didn’t get prosecuted, I’m guessing that these fact questions were at least somewhat in her favor.
And no, my mind is not changed by the number of corpses. What matters is the reasonableness of the risk, not the after-the-fact result of the risk.
I often find it useful to distill these sorts of questions down to the basics. Take this hypothetical:
Imagine that you’re alone in a sealed gas chamber, and you know that there’s a 95% you’re going to be killed by gas in the next 10 seconds. There’s a guy in the next room over, but he only has a 5% chance of dying.
There’s a button in the room. If you press it, there’s a 75% chance that you’ll kill the guy in the next room, but it reduces the chances of your own death down to only 10%.
Is it morally justifiable to press the button?
Granted, we can’t know how analogous this is to the plight of the poor pilot (who has my sympathy either way). As delphica points out, we don’t know that the non-highway options weren’t also dangerous to innocent bystanders.
But if you choose to fly a plane over a populated region, there’s a tiny inherent risk you’ll find yourself in the hypothetical gas chamber. When that happens, do you press the button?
If you do, as the pilot did, I think you have to be held responsible for your actions, even if your choices weren’t enviable. If someday I have to make a quick decision to save my own life by risking someone else’s life, I certainly might make the same choice as the pilot. I feel badly for the pilot, I really do.
I feel worse for the families of the person in the Mazda.
-Fezzik
Let’s think about that: what’s the aim of criminal law, or, more specifically, what’s the aim of criminal punishment? There are several; the first one cited is usually “deterrence”. So, would punishing this pilot have any deterrent effect on future pilots who find themselves in similar situations? That is, would punishing her encourage other pilots to sacrifice their own lives in favor of the lives of others in emergency situations? I think we’ll have to give that a big “no”; the self-preservation instinct is just too strong. Besides, it sounds like she tried to land in a clear spot on the freeway and simply failed; it’s not like she was aiming for people and needs to serve as an example to others who would strike cars with planes.
Another commonly-cited aim is “just desserts”; you did something wrong, therefore you must be punished. What was the wrongful act? Sounds to me like everything that happened was accidental, and it doesn’t seem right to punish people for getting into unforeseeable accidents. Hell, we’d all be in jail, probably.
There are other punishment theories, such as individual incapacitation and reform, neither of which apply; the pilot doesn’t need to be removed from the general population to prevent her from landing on another freeway, nor is it likely that she needs to be cleansed of her freeway-landing urges. In sum, putting her in jail would serve no purpose whatsoever.
If you want to blame something for this unfortunate event, blame Mazda for making tiny sports cars that provide less passenger protection than an egg carton.
**
And if you’re flying for a career it is still a matter of choice. Unless they’re drafting pilots against their will.
**
Yes, and I’m sure she was fully licensed and trained to be a pilot.
**
Who says she didn’t take any responsibility? She made a split second decision that seems very reasonable to me.
I’m sure in that split second she figured she’d be killing someone else to save her own life. I just don’t buy that. And by the way in the split second it takes to avoid hitting that wall you might accidently veer into some people, think about that.
Marc
No it doesn’t. Suppose she had been flying a slightly larger plane with a dozen passengers? Or a 747 with 500 passengers? Or how about a sleigh with 8 tiny reindeer?
You can philosophize all you want about her moral obligations or spout imaginary risk factors and stats. In the real world, during a crisis, people don’t think about “well if I land in the street, I have a 95% chance of landing safely, compared to a risk fac… KA-BLAM!!!”. They just land the damn plane wherever they can before it falls out of the sky like a bag of doorknobs.
Let me give you another scenario and you can tell me what you would do:
You’re cruising along a 2-lane highway at the speed limit of 45mph. Your car is in ok shape, you have it checked regularly, your watching the road, etc.
All of a sudden a small child chases his ball out in front of you from behind a bush. Do you swerve into the other lane even though there is a risk of hitting an oncoming car? As far as you can tell the child is too close to brake to a stop without hitting him. Lets also say that you can’t swerve to the right because the street is line with parked delivery vans and you would simply bounce off into the child anyway. Do you bother to check for oncoming traffic or do you just react? If there was a car coming, would you still swerve, probably killing yourself and the oncoming Mazda to avoid the child?
It’s easy to pass judgment when you know all the outcomes or are looking at the scene in hindsight. In the real world, we usually just have time to react and hope for the best. For most people, trying to live with the fact that they accidentally killed someone is usually punishment enough.
I stand by my theory that sometimes “shit happens” and no ones at fault.
i don’t think the op suggested the pilot committed a criminal act, but there’s no question that her decision to land on the highway was deliberate and that she was aware of the dangers she posed:
**She reported that the highway had bumper to bumper traffic and stated she did not want to land on the freeway…the pilot stated she committed to the freeway and was able to discern dark spots in between vehicle tail lights. In attempts to maintain performance, she elected to leave both the landing gear and flaps in the retracted positions, and was able to maintain control of the airplane until impact with the highway. **
if the pilot’s actions were legal and did not violate standard crash procedures, then whoever was responsible for the air-worthiness of the plane should be held at least financially reponsible for costs associated with the death of the mazda driver as well as damage to public property.
i agree that it’s arguable that both the hobbyist and the professional can be held at least financially responsible for any injuries they cause. however i think it is beyond argument that a hobbyist should incurr all costs resulting from injuries he causes.
read the report again - it wasn’t a split second decision.
**
You’ll have to explain why it is beyond arguement. I can’t just take your word for it.
Oh well. She made a decision that had to be made. I don’t care if it wasn’t literally a split second decision. IT was stressful and probably had to be made fairly quickly. I still don’t think she did anything morally wrong.
Marc
A larger plane with more passangers? Interesting. Certainly changes things. Santa? Don’t think we need to worry about that.
For starters, thanks for the permission. And you can talk about the “real world, during a crisis” how people have no time to react – but in this actual “real world, during a crisis” situation, this is what happened:
She had time to consider her options. But that doesn’t fit in with what happens in your idea of “the real world”, so i guess it’s not important.
Your example doesn’t apply here, because you are talking about making the decision between 2 random lives. What we’re considering is the choice between your life and another persons. If your point in the example was just to solidify your argument that you have no time to react, then please refer to what I posted directly above this paragraph.
She had time to make a decision. It wasn’t an accident that she landed on the road. That doesn’t fall under my definition of “shit happening”, but you’re free to let it fall under yours. **
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I simply do not understand this obsession with wether this person was conducting business or out for pleasure. You have all done things that put others at risk for your own personal pleasure unless you ahve stayed inside of your house eating tofu and watching TV for every moment outside of your work.
Have you ever driven to an amusement park?
You could hit somebody on the way.
Sat out on a high porch?
You could have fallen, causing the ambulance that comes to rescue you to kill an inattentve driver that hits the fast going ambulance.
Gone rock climbing?
You could cause rock-fall that plumets to an unprotected geologist, striking him dead.
What if the Mazda dirver was out for a cruise, fiddling with her radio, and failed to maintain her mirror-sweep that would have alerted her to the plane?
What if hitting the Mazda turned an otherwise survivable crash into a lethal one for the pilot by hitting the car?
Flying is not some sort of death wish, it is a hobby just like any other. It is not particularly risky and likely to cause the death of others.
In this particular example, the woman was not necessarily killing another person in extreme risk for her own safety, I sincerely doubt the claim that there was bumper to bumper traffic. The article seems to suggest that there were gaps in the cars that she could have landed within, probably even large ones. She may have choosen to land on the highway because, if repeated thousands of times, the highway would cause fewer deaths than killing herself for certain.
Nowhere in the link (that I can find) do I see anything about this pilot’s decision being based on the fact that the highway landing would save her own life. Let’s also keep in mind that:
a. she contacted the airport, and they were unable to tell her the location of the grassy strip, presumably a safe place to land
b. she expressed concern that there was traffic on the highway, but was advised to stay on her course (over the highway)
This indicates to me that she was in fact concerned about not endangering others, and that her options for landing were limited by the instructions she was receiving from the airport. While it might not have been a split-second decision, it was certainly a pressured decision, and I think she did the best she could in an extremely stressful situation.
I have no idea what her reasons were for not landing the plane somewhere else, in the trees or the suburbs or whatever it was that was near the highway. Why exactly is this thread assuming that her primary reason for landing on the highway was to preserve her own life without regard to the potential danger to others?
as a pilot working for a company, the company is likely to be reponsible for the maintenance of the plane, as well as the flight path and established emergency procedures. so a mechanical failure that results in injury to others could be the responsibility of the company, as long as the pilot completed all required safety checks and procedures. the hobbyist, on the other hand, does not have a company assuming those responsibilities and therefore would be liable for injuries or damage. of course it’s possible that the hobbyist had someone else maintain his plane, but that would be an issue between the pilot and the maintenance guy, not the victims and the maintenance guy. hopefully both the hobbyist and the corporation would have insurance. keep in mind too, there’s a big difference between liability and criminal negligence.