‘Remember your training’: teen pilot makes emergency landing on Route 66 | Hacker News Reader

‘Remember your training’: teen pilot makes emergency landing on Route 66

theguardian.com

54 pointsbookofjoe24 comments

Good job on the pilot for getting the aircraft landed in such a harrowing situation. Will spare the group and avoid the use of any route 66 or luke skywalker jokes. Flying in small planes seems so overrated (due to safety and mechanical concerns) but understand the pilot aspired to work for an airline..

> Flying in small planes seems so overrated

Flying in small planes is a huge thing, not just for fun or hobby. It has literally been going on for decades and an essential service in many cases. If it were as fraught as you make it seem in terms of actual statistics of the danger, it would not be this way, yet it is this way.

> actual statistics of the danger

Do the statistics not show this to be the case though? I only know anecdotally that life insurance premiums go way, way, way up when one flies small aircraft.

It’s worth considering that the statistics are heavily influences by demographics. GA pilots are mostly rather old dentists and the likes.

Life insurance already has a different cost by age (mainly the age you first take out the policy)

Statistically it’s roughly equivalent to riding a motorcycle.

Do note that GA pilots skew way older than motorcyclists.

Do you have any numbers? I'm riding a motorcycle, and know statistics about it in USA, but looks like that small plane is safer

> Flying in small planes seems so overrated

In the same sense as sex is overrated. Shooting a hand-flown ILS approach right down the wire to minimums; pop out and see the runway lights displayed right in front of you. I’ll take that risk.

> Flying in small planes seems so overrated

Spoken like someone who's never taken flight. Once you've flown a plane, you'll never want to not

I've only flown in a little plane once. It was pretty windy that day and the feeling from getting pushed around was pretty strange and totally unlike the normal turbulence you feel on a regular jetliner. I'd compare it to being in a small car in the highway when it's really windy out and you can feel the wind pushing you around. The pilot let me get on the yoke for a bit while we were over some water and it was nothing like what I had expected from my previous experience playing casual flight simulators. It was fun being up there but I've got zero interest in becoming a pilot, way too much for my ADHD brain to handle.

Yeah I understand the sentiment but it still seems overrated for me personally, if people want to fly I'd encourage it.

Edit: wasn't specific about differentiating between small and large planes. I'm more keen on flying a large plane but small ones seem too accident prone

If you look at the data [1], the majority of aviation accidents are caused by pilot error (poor takeoff/landing technique, not accounting for density altitude, improper W&B, improper fuel management, flight into bad weather, etc).

However, the corollary to this is that the biggest sources of risk are largely under the pilot's control and can be reduced through recurrent high-quality training. Careful preflight planning, setting conservative personal minimums, avoiding fatigue, and not accepting normalization of deviance come into play as well.

[1]: https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institut...

General aviation planes are actually pretty reliable. It’s really up to pilot training, discipline, and judgment. Even with an engine failure, you can safely land the plane.

Try gliders (without engines) then, they're very safe

> ... and trust in God

Will this nonsense never end? He landed a plane in a land-able scenario with good training. Props to him, this whole part about god tho is weird and I don't understand it - I have to assume that that "trust" gave him extra confidence to pull it off? if so, I guess I gotta give god a +1, but it seems redundant and overall full of pitfalls in general use cases.

I will offer a few points for your consideration.

First, I believe you may be over analyzing. It's a common phrase, typically someone isn't applying it in a rigorous fashion and inspect the definition of each word to apply a hyper-specific, qualified meaning.

Second, it's "nonsense" if you share the same assumptions, but not if your initial starting place is different. I assume you don't believe in God (please correct me I've misjudged), or if you do you have a conception where He doesn't intervene in the natural order, but that's not where everyone else comes from. If you believe that God intervenes in the world and you have a relationship with God then it makes sense to trust Him.

Third, from a theistic expression, I'm personally most familiar with Christian expressions in particular, one would trust in God because: one, God is a just judge, in a life and death situation where you will, to utilize a common phrase, "meet your maker," it makes sense to prepare yourself for that by entrusting yourself to "your maker". Two, by trusting in God you will calm yourself, you are able to resign yourself to do what needs to be done and be content with that because you are in right relationship with God.

I completely understand that if you don't understand the common phrases meaning or don't have the same beliefs, but then I don't think the "nonsense" would actually be the phrase used, it would be the prior beliefs that lead to it.

Belief in a god gave me far more trouble, stress, and financial loss than any nominal benefit. It's worse than nonsense, it's destructive.

I'm sorry that you've had this experience, I personally have historically had varied experiences. With that said, I'd like to offer the following points which I would kindly ask you to consider:

1. Was it merely belief in God that gave you these troubles or was it a particular religious expression? I worry, without knowing specifics but having heard similar things from both friends and strangers alike, that you are transposing a personal specific experience with an entire broad category (belief in God encompasses not only numerous specific religions but also philosophical theism, deism, etc). I say all of this because I don't see a logical, natural jump between belief in God, or even belief in common religious groups in the west, with the experiences you've experienced.

2. I am certain that certain religious expressions can be destructive, but that's not been my experience generally. Would you consider qualifying your statement in some way to reflect this? When I hear that "religion is destructive" it is so foreign to my own general personal experience, as well as when I've looked at it more broadly, that it's hard to accept. I've known people who's belief in God is something that gives them great joy, I know others who have had difficulties with various concerns (sometimes emotional or practical or philosophical), and others like myself who while believing in God don't get much positive OR negative emotional response.

I know I threw out a decent bit, and regrettably it's late so I haven't done any proof reading, so if there is anything you'd like to focus on in particular to narrow things down I'd encourage you to do so (or ask for clarifications if I wasn't clear).

Of course I was just doing it wrong. If only there had been some trustworthy authority who could have helped me navigate! Because clearly the university educated ~grifters~ [pastors], "scholars", "councilors", sacred texts, and ~imaginary friends~ [divine guidance] weren't enough.

If only some friends and I weren't born as 'abominations' then the culty religious organizations would've seemed more productive. Look even a broken clock is right twice a day. I still don't want broken clocks in my life.

Honestly I'm done with magical thinking, confirmation bias, survivorship bias, appeals to authority, and all the other tiresome phenomenon necessary to remain in any faith.

It’s possible his faith gave him calmness in a stressful scenario and allowed him to think more clearly than he otherwise would. It says nothing about the veracity of his faith, but there are some practical benefits that have been shown in terms of stress reduction and overall happiness due to the feeling of safety.

(This is coming from an agnostic)

trust in god is another way to say optimistic, choosing to believe things are more likely to turn out ok than not

it's just a different language - if you try to understand it as your own (with things being either real or not-real) it will of course sound as unintelligible as any foreign language

> While he noticed the telephone wires running alongside the highway, Peters said, he did not realize until later that there were also wires crisscrossing the highway every few hundred feet, and that somehow his small plane must have slipped between them without him even noticing.

> “Honestly, I didn’t see them. I think that was divine intervention, moving those wires away from me,” he said.

If you read the article, he explains the reasoning.

How much senators in USA are openly atheists? Several years ago I've read it was 2. In whole USA history.

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