(Again, not commenting on CMR 5191 but speaking in a very broad sense)
I hope this doesn't sound cold because it's not. And I'm going to speak a little 'stream of consciousness' so it might not make any sense.
The longer you spend in aviation, the more people you know are going to be involved in serious and fatal accidents. That's kind of the nature of the business.
Aviation is relatively safe, yes, but it's only safe because we continue to be introspective and try to use cold, hard fact to determine what happened and try to re-engineer that into our own flying. I say "relatively safe" because true safety is a state of mind like peace. You're never truly at "peace" in the world, but you can feel it, but you've got to maintain it. A flight can be safe, but that safety is maintained thru maintenance, decision making, choices you make and choices that are made for you without your input.
Since I started flying in 1987 working on my private, I've at least lost 10 friends to airplane crashes, if not more. It sucks because it's a clear reminder that what happened to them can easily happen to us -- and it does. Sadly, we've got over 4,000 members of the forums here at Jetcareers and statistically speaking, even though we haven't had a death yet in our community, it's inevitable.
But that's the bad news.
The good news is that through training, vigilance and trying to be on your "A" game whenever you get into an aircraft, you decrease the chances of getting killed or injured in an airplane. Each person I lost, I went through some deep introspection to try and determine what I can do to avoid what happened to them and their families.
Accidents don't generally occur in a vacuum. If you look at an NTSB report, you'll see the investigators publish a very long list of things that went wrong that resulted in a loss of life. We're never really 'doomed' from the begining, but sometimes there's a chain of events that if we can recognize it and make a tough decision, that we can stop the chain of events and survive another day.
I think the best way to deal with it is swallowing hard and realizing that this could have been any one of us. From the super-senior retired guys with 30,000 hours of heavy jet time, all the way "down" to the 3 hour student pilot. That's the important part. It CAN happen to us. But what are we going to do to stop it?
Learn. Introspection. Self-evaluation. Developing the abilitiy to look at your chief pilot in the left seat and saying "Whoah, I'm not comfortable, STOP" or look at your FO and say, "I think you're a great guy, but you're screwing up". Or just setting the parking brake and demanding that maintenance fix a system rather than slapping an MEL placard on it and clearing you for dispatch.
Complacency is killer. So is "ego". Newton, Bernoulli and Murphy (or Coanda, if you're in that school of thought) don't give a effing damn about your family, your plans, your hopes, your dreams, your baby on the way or even if you're brand new to the skies. They're equal opportunity killers and you have to realize that.
What are you going to do about it?
Stay sharp.
Learn from others.
Learn to close the mouth and open the ears.
I really don't know, to tell the truth, but continue to be safe, maintain it and learn that none of us are exempt from tragedy and certainly any of us can make a fatal mistake.
A good example. I'm about to go out on a training flight in a Beech Duchess with a couple of my Asiana Airlines students and another fellow instructor told me the story of how a person in Visalia doing a checkride, pancaked a BE-55 in a single engine Vmc accident.
That person happened to be the guy I took my private pilot chekride with about 10 years previous.
Did I cancel the flight? Nope, I thought long and hard about what I was taught, thought about what I could convey to my students and realized that I had become 'know it all', 'been there, done that' type of complacent CFI. In a weird way, their deaths, while tragic, actually helped me that day and it perhaps (hopefully?) got passed on to my students that day because I was extra tough on them.
Just my humble opinion(s) and your mileage may vary.
Flying is inherently dangerous, but is made safe by dedicated, focused, professional aviators.
