Terry

The early picture emerging of this girl is that she doesn’t seem to really appraise the seriousness of flying and how swiftly things can go wrong and instantly guarantee one’s death. She may have very well passed all the requirements, but doesn’t conceptualize that it’s real life. She seems to have thought she was in a movie, she thought it would be a movie, and that she can whimsically and casually fly with a sprinkle of esotericism that people often do once they learn how to do something. Like they’re searching for all the “Aykshuallys” and woke tricks that the “freekarino teachers don’t teach you”. Factor in this general cool guy imagery of “I’m a heckin pilot before I drove LMAO” and you can see how what’s largely on her mind is that she’s heckarino way ahead of everyone else, or whatever preoccupying complex a young person typically has, which gives rise to lost focus and trying to be cool rather than actively and carefully flying the plane. Forgetting even the usual suspect memery of “LOL WOMAN PILOT”, how about why are we letting people fly other people around as early as high school/early 20s. Even as tough a guy and as smart a guy I think I am, I wouldn't trust me to do a lot of things in the age range of 18-24. Of course, that's not to condescend young people, I often resented that little game at the time, but on certain things you have to double check. In my limited aviation experience “flying” unmanned systems in the US Army, the more I learned the more terrified I was of flying overall. During my short tenure even there were several unmanned crashes because of seemingly minute mistakes and slips of the mind. For example, the system we used had essentially a robot that lands it, but it had to be calibrated. Someone forgot to calibrate it and thus the plane came in at a wrong angle and rolled off the landing strip. That was just one. On those tricks it particularly caught my attention that they were getting ice. Again, my experience was limited, so I'm no expert, but I distinctly remember how terrifying it is that how planes generate lift is extremely delicate. Namely, the shape of the wings and the angle they're at generate "lift" which comes from air flowing faster above the wings than beneath them, generating lower pressure above and higher pressure beneath. That pressure differential counters the weight of the plane and thus "lifts" it. If your angle is too steep for even a second you begin to freefall. If the weight of the plane isn't balanced, just slightly, it can tip too far up or down. There were crashes on takeoff because of this where cargo or luggage was not secured and thus slid back on takeoff, tipping the plane upward, sending it straight to the ground. There are literally people so fat that they have to be told where they can sit if they were to board a plane, because if they sit in the wrong spot you're all dying. Ice on the wings disrupts airflow which can collapse the whole aerodynamic system. When I looked it up (because I forgot because I wasn't all that experienced), she appears to have tried doing the right thing by climbing, and requesting deviation from their flight path beforehand. The storm reportedly grew very quickly to a point they couldn't anticipate that their deviation would still wind up going through it. Flying is le "statistically" safe, and there are tons of regulations that assure that safety like rest for days at a time even, but certain small fuck ups or even things you can't do anything about (like birds getting into the engine) warrant you avoiding it unless it's your last resort.