At some point when you were learning to fly and were frustrated by another poor weather day keeping you on the ground, an instructor would have said, “it’s better to be down here wishing you were up there, than up there wishing you were down here.”
Perhaps you were once tempted to fly too close to cloud? Then you may have heard, “there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots.” And, after a particularly hard landing? “A great landing is always preceded by a great approach. If in doubt, go around”.
These little cliches serve a very real purpose; those little distilled bon-mots are there to remind us that every time we pilot an aircraft, we take our lives, and those of our passengers, into our own hands.
Philosophically speaking, if we were to dwell on this concept of choosing to threaten our own mortality each time we fly, we might not go at all. And so, we pepper our narrative with reminders; little flags to keep us safe.
If you were lucky enough to experience an instructor with a living understanding of general aviation safety, you would have become part of their safety culture. Part of your training would have had a focus not just on how to fly, but also when to fly. And, more importantly, when not to fly.
If you were not fortunate enough to encounter such consistency in your training, or maybe it’s
