As another poster mentioned above - most pilots tend to study accident reports to file them away in their memory for later possible reference. Any instance of crew communication breakdown or wrong decision making can happen again, and knowledge that it did happen before will lessen the chances in the future.

I see a lot of comments on Twitter today along the lines of "What is happening in aviation these days??", and the answer is really "Nothing really". Commercial flying is safer than it ever has, and it is telling that an accident such as this is garnering so much attention because they don't really happen all that often, so air crashes seem worse because they are not always in the news as they were decades ago.

You have to consider the fact that these days, at any particular second of any day, there are more than a million people who are airborne at the same time. That is a city load of people who are not in contact with the ground at any given time. Given that - the low number of fatalities is remarkable indeed.

I read accident reporting and investigations ravenously. Even a scrap or an anecdote may help me one day.

As a pilot who has been forced to land a plane off-airport, you would be amazed at how the brain, trying to save itself, can pull any tiny potentially helpful bit of information from memory and present it for your consideration and use. I collect aviation accident factoids like a magpie collects shiny folderol. :)

For a pilot, it might feel similar to how you, as a driver, feel reading about car crashes. Maybe you’re like me, car crashes don’t normally bother me, while airplane crashes usually do. I don’t know why.

I used to skydive in the US, and a subscription to the US skydiving magazine was required for an active license. In that magazine was a breakdown of every single fatal skydiving accident in the US, and an analysis of what went wrong. Those were sometimes pretty freaky to imagine, in the same way a plane crash is freaky to imagine, but at the same time, reading the reports made me feel overall safer. Seeing and understanding every single report and the specific situations that lead to them, and being aware that the community and equipment manufacturers were paying attention and taking action to make the sport safer whenever possible, knowing those things was informative and comforting.

I’ll echo the other commenter’s responses. I view accidents like this with deep curiosity. Any little bit of information that might help me not make similar mistakes or missteps in the future is worth so much.

In addition to learning about potential traps and how to react, each accident comes with a grave reminder not to become complacent. There is lots of discussion about a mechanical write up in the leaked aircraft logbook page on this accident. Some are questioning if the crew read that logpage and was aware of the earlier mechanical discrepancy. Any professional pilot will tell you that sometimes all you do is open the book and just make sure the mechanic’s signature is there signifying the aircraft is airworthy. This incident may reveal just how valuable it can be to go back a few pages and see what has been written up recently. Things that we normally do when we’re at the top of our game and have lots of extra time but will let slide when we get complacent.

Don't worry much about it, I've a 5 1/2hr flight in less than a week on a 737. The only thing that keeps me sane is that as a technical person, I know that airplanes wants to fly and that the prob/stats of safety are on my side. But then as a software guy, that understands complex systems, ha!