Many years ago I heard a (probably apocryphal) story about a big city (NYC?) governor who was suspected of having an affair with an aide. Since no proof was ever offered of an actual affair, the best the big dailies could come up with when she left his employ said that while employed she had “performed under him a variety of positions”.
Tonight’s news - one of those short, daily, round-up bits - included a CA pilot who bounced off a couple of garages before he came to rest on someone’s bay-front roof.
I’m wondering how incestuous the aviation community really is. When someone crashes in an unexpected way, how long does it take to find out that the pilot was good but ran into unexpected problems? Or that the pilot was an accident waiting to happen? As this most recent incident happened in CA, does an east coast pilot hear of it? I suppose, boiled down, is “How good is the Flightline Grapevine?”
I really cannot speak for the American community, but here in Canada, it’s a very tight knit community.
I’d say for all working fixed-wing pilots across Canada, there’s at most a 3-degree separation: For pretty much any working pilot in Canada, I can say I know someone who knows someone who knows that person. Every accident that happens, I can say, oh that guy’s from here, and knows this guy, who’s a friend of a friend of mine from up north.
As far as reputations go, flying skills are not included, unless it’s an extreme. If the person’s been involved in many near-accidents and crashes, when there was no reason to have been even close to involved - yeah, that may make it in to their reputation. But everybody has black marks and kudos. You can’t say “this guy’s a good pilot” or “is an accident waiting to happen”. Because it WILL get back to them, and it will be attributed to you. Reputation is everything in this industry, and you start badmouthing people without rock-solid proof, you’re going to get blacklisted and be pretty much unemployable.
One major thing up here is accident reports. A report of every single major incident is sent to all pilots at a regular interval. They don’t include names (personal or company) but if you’re in the industry, they’re still easily tracable back to the pilot. So when something happens, and it’s not their fault, that little circular keeps their reputation intact. But if it was something that was their fault (and not just a little thing, I’m talking multiple, chronic errors) that gets stuck to them.
And as far as a reputation as a good pilot goes, it’s usually just the fact that they’ve done a difficult job for many year and never had a major accident. If they’ve been in an exceptional situation, it’s probably because they got themselves in to it. Sure, they got themselves out, but it was probably their fault in the first place, so a good pilot wouldn’t have gotten themselves into it in the first place. Basically, it works out that every pilot’s got a reputation until something bad happens to them.
The ballooning community is even tighter. It’s at most 2 degrees of separation. If something happens, I either know the pilot directly or someone I know does. But that’s just a side effect of being in such a small industry (across the country there are less than 100 people who fly balloons regularly)
The US has something like 700,000 pilots, or the equivalent of a city, spread over the North American continent. There can be numerous “degrees of separation” between pilots. I suspect most, if not all, the East Coast pilots found out about the California crash through the evening news, just like non-pilots, unless they have a very direct and personal connection to someone involved.
For example, a number of years ago a pilot from my area (Indiana) flying charter crashed in Kentucky. Folks in Kentucky found out quickly. Most everyone else had to wait for the evening news. But my local circle of aviation folks found out by phone call, as news of the crash was relayed pretty quickly by word of mouth, and we all knew about it before the nightly news.
With the internet, if there’s a crash there are places I can go to get more information on both the accident and the pilot pretty much immediately, instead of taking days or weeks to go through either the grapevine or NTSB reports.
As for the rumor/reputation mill… well, of course there is one. There is always speculation about what might have caused a crash, how the pilot got into that situation, what might have been done differently, etc. Some pilots do have reputations, either for being exceptionally good or “an accident waiting to happen” - although the latter may not be what you expect. The man I referred to above, from my area, was one such not because he had a history of accidents, incidents, and sloppy flying. On the contrary, he was very highly skilled, so skilled that he got away with breaking the rules and taking risks numerous times. But it was just a matter of time before he mis-judged and got himself into a situation he couldn’t fly out of, despite his high level of skill and proficiency. This makes it very difficult to get him out of the cockpit. He was reported numerous times and had to take several checkrides with the FAA as a result, but when Authority was scrutinizing him he performed flawlessly in every sense of the word and thus never had his certificate suspended. The system is not designed to ground someone with excellent abilities who nonetheless insists on taking foolish risks when he feels he can get away with it. On the other hand, we had a crash last week in my area where a pilot crashed on take-off and the local consensus is that the problem was most likely mechanical, due to the pilot’s reputation as experienced, skilled, and at least average in good judgement and caution. In yet a third instance, another pilot from my area crashed after a series of decision lead to him running out of gas at night. He was a low-time pilot, meaning not greatly experienced, and admitted he’d made a series of choices, some of which weren’t the best, leading to his airplane attempting conjugal relations with a lightpole. He survived, and after some scrutiny and retesting regained his license, but a lot of people said some unflattering things about him and it was years before a lot of people were willing to concede he’d learned some hard lessons and regained trust in his judgement.
So while these days the grapevine usually doesn’t inform you of accidents any sooner than CNN and its cousins, it sure can affect how the aviation community views the situation and the pilot involved. Accidents, and near-accidents, are discussed and analyzed endlessly.
What does this anecdote - which I’m taking to be a joke - have to do with the rest of your question? (Not trying to sound rude - I’m honestly intrigued.)
Yeah, that completely threw me for a loop as well. At first I thought it was because I’m reading it at about 4:00AM, but the more I look at it, the more I realize the whole thing is a total non sequitur. I’d be much obliged if you could relieve my confusion.