Mike,
Again, I don’t think you can point to anyone “wishing death” on anyone else here.
My dad called me about this accident about it in the days after it happened—he took an interest in it because because my nieces were camping on Percy Priest last weekend—and asked whether the pilot having an expired medical (if true) could be related to the crash.
At first I told him that no, a 6mo expired medical would have nothing to do with an accident, but then I thought about my time as a pilot, and how I always knew the exact date my medical would expire, and that I wouldn’t dream of flying without it. And that made me think about the type of pilot who (again, if true) would blast off without a medical, and what else they might be willing to overlook.
in a strict investigative sense, an expired medical is simply a finding, unless there’s some medical nexus to why the airplane crashed, either related to the medical certificate itself or unrelated. There’s no direct causal draw between an expired medical and what physically caused an aircraft to impact the ground (water), aside from being a possibly secondary or tertiary factor as noted above. It’s like trying to infer that because someone let their drivers license expire, that’s now causal to why they drifted off the side of the road while driving and hit a tree and were fatally injured. A situation that would be more in-line to showing that lack of a certificate of some sort being contributory to an accident, would be the pilot who does not possess an instrument rating, yet has a history of launching in MVFR or worse, for example. So like was said, unless there is a medical nexus to the factors of what put the plane into the ground, an expired medical would only be a factor-found but not causal.
Additionally, its imprecise to draw any kind of trend/conclusion from a singular data point. If it was a case of had an expired medical, had an expired pilots license, flying an airplane out of annual; then some judgement or decision making lines could be more firmly drawn; although these would again be finding that would have to have further causal correlation to the accident dynamics.
Similarly, failing to know one’s medical date isn’t any direct correlation to a crash. There’s all kinds of people who don’t remember their medical date, most especially in non-professional GA flying. Whereas you or I would know our month cold, as we use/used our medicals as a condition of our employment, that’s not always the case for someone who doesn’t use it that way. Especially since ours would be 6 months for First, whereas some GA pilot may not think about a medical for 20 months or even longer. While obviously they legally should possess a current medical, no direct judgement or flight ability (or inability) correlation tie can be drawn simply because one is expired.
To the layperson, it would sound like one would have something to do with the other, which makes your dad’s question reasonable to ask. But you are initially correct in your assertion to him that an expired medical in and of itself cannot be correlated to judgement or ability, apart from an extreme example of no medical ever possessed or one expired for 10 years for example…..that possibly being related to dismissing of regulations. And even then, it’s a singular finding that by itself, doesn’t prove anything without further directly related evidence.
I’ll even use me as an example. I have to keep a list of when certifications expire for me, month and year, simply due to the many I have to monitor, from flight medical, to EMS certs, to firefighting certs, to a CDL medical, to a CDL license, to a CFI cert. Do I always catch them all before the 11th hour mad scramble? Not always. At least some like my flight medical, those come out in a monthly email of “the following pilots are due for their FAA medical in the month of X”. And even with that, I don’t consider myself one who flaunts regs or is dismissive of requirements.
I have no idea if the folks on that plane were headed to the rally in FL. But the reports that they were got me thinking about the type of person that would sponsor an event being headlined by a guy who over the weekend said that we should have a Myanmar-style coup, and who’s overall theme is the rejection of a valid election because it didn’t turn out the way they wanted. If we are going to speculate at all, is it not valid to question whether someone would display in flying one of the hazardous attitudes we’re all taught about before we solo if they clearly have it outside of flying?
We get into a very, very dangerous area when we start to bring politics or ones political beliefs into questions of aviation judgement or ability, whatever those beliefs may be. It absolutely muddies the water with something that really has nothing to do with anything, most especially with finding the physical reason(s) why an aircraft went from flying, to a smoking hole in the ground. We need to get away from allowing politics to inject itself into everything in our lives, especially where it has nothing to do with anything. It’s not even worth remotely talking about. One political assertion being made about someone and relating that to a hazardous attitude with flying, will be some other political assertion being made that will mean some other, or the same, hazardous attitude. Let’s not even go down that quicksand of never ending muck of subjectivity and opinion/feeling, that will serve nothing but erode any investigative integrity that there is with regard to evidence gathering and interpretation.
I would never “wish death upon” anyone. I think it’s a tragedy when anyone dies, and it hits especially close to home when it happens in an airplane (and more so on a lake I spent a good pet of my childhood on). But in this case I don’t know that the acknowledgement of where they may have been headed is as disconnected from some of the possible causes of the accident as you’re thinking.
The point I was making was not to keep from acknowledging the destination of a flight as a piece of factual information, but rather the political tangent into turning this whole thread into Lav political discussion that was occurring.
Thank you Zach for the reasoned response here. Good discussion.
