The aviation world isn't short of notes like this, but since my club has recently experienced two "it will never happen to me" incidents, I'm going to add to the pile.

Six months ago, while doing a few quick laps around the pattern for night currency, one of our pilots (with more than 10K flight hours) neglected to lower the gear and totaled our arrow. Our base is towered and I was on the board of the club, so I heard the tower tapes. The pain and resignation in his voice when he made the final call "I'm fine, but I'm embarrassed as hell and I've just ruined the airplane" made me realize that he'd already punished himself far more than we ever could.

Fast forward, we spend months looking for a new arrow and complete a deal on one. Someone flies it to base and lots of discussion takes place about getting the panel to look like it wasn't put together by the wright brothers. It went into the shop a few weeks ago and got upgraded to an aspen and a garmin 430W. One of our members picked it up a couple days ago and, I shit you not, wrecked it due to fuel exhaustion on take-off. Again, no injuries, so we're thankful for that, but two losses within six months due 100% to complacency. Out of curiosity I checked my Maule POH (don't have an Arrow one with me) and it has three fuel checks prior to take-off on the checklist. My recollection is that the Arrow is the same.

So, my goal isn't to have everyone pile on our two pilots. They screwed up, we know how they screwed up, they acknowledge they screwed up.

Just a reminder that the simple stuff wrecks airplanes.

Thanks for the reminder. Especially when a lot of us are knocking the barnacles off the flying skills:)

Thanks for the reminder. Seems like this bites the experienced and novice alike. Keep that insurance paid!

Complacency is my #1 concern, and flying a lot just makes it worse! No solution here other then to remind myself a lot to be on guard for it. Flying a couple times a year would do away with the concern but that would be no fun and probably just as dangerous if not more so! It gets a little hard to fully pre flight again when I just did yesterday and for years before, and never find anything wrong. Almost anyway, I have gotten to almost look forward to the , for instance, cracked tail spring leaf (one of 3 leafs) as at least then I am jolted out of my complacent pre flight habit for a while. The more reliable and simple the plane and engine, the bigger the problem is I never got complacent flying 2 stroke ultralights for instance

Skiing, flying, sailing, deep sea fishing, rock climbing, motocross...

"Keep your head in the game" I tell my my wife!

Aviate, navigate, communicate (it works).

Checklists have a bit of a social stigma in certain circles. Some say you need to have It memorized so well you never forget. I like a checklist but take crap for it sometimes.

Nosedragger wrote:Checklists have a bit of a social stigma in certain circles. Some say you need to have It memorized so well you never forget. I like a checklist but take crap for it sometimes.

If it works, use it! A pilot with no checklists is an idiot!

Memorizing them works for certain ops. Other times I need to write it down. Checklist are also always evolving in my type of bush flying.

Wow - that sucks - hard.

I don't know if a root cause analysis would put it down to just complacency, they both sound like a failure to accept the need to learn and follow standard operating procedures, which is a very common cause with single pilot GA accidents. Checklists.

Lots of guys seem to miss the "three greens" check, the fuel one it pretty damn embarrassing..... there's just one thing every engine needs to run...

The biggest complacency threat is flying at least 100 hrs per month. Spraying crops and patrolling pipeline I have taken off without helmet or seat belt or on one mag, exhausted fuel, starved the engine of fuel, and my best: flying 200 miles of pipeline with the tow bar still on the nose wheel of a 172. It never hit the prop The prop blast must have kept it pinned against the wheel pant. The starvation cost me a CallAir. Had fuel in the other tank but never switched. It is a long story.

when flying with the tow bar, did you realize it was on mid-flight or after you had landed? I've heard these types of tow bar stories and have made it a personal rule that the tow bar can only be attached if my hands are on it. What a sinking feeling it must have been once you realized what the situation was!

It was when I pulled in for fuel at St. Charles, near St. Louis, airport. Really embarrassing but then, they knew me. They didn't bat an eye. I forgot a worse one. At a grass field in Texas, I pulled up to the pump, which was on a concrete pad. I forgot that you needed to enter and exit traveling parallel to the pump the whole time. I wheeled a 180 hp 172 (heavy nose, gulped gas, no faster) around real tight to go back out and went off a four inch drop from concrete to grass. Clunked hard and i went on. They guys standing around really gave me a strange look. When I landed at my nest gas/pee stop, I saw that I had completely broke off the nose wheel pant behind the tire. Luckily it had been pipeline patrol patched for years and was an ugly, re-glassed mess anyway,

Back to rw2's original story about the really nice Cherokee crashing twice. We old crop dusters were always a bit suspicious of a recently rebuilt and repainted spray plane. They never got much TLC in between crashes, so a rebuilt one really stood out. Nobody wanted to fly it until it got stinky like the rest. Pilots with lots of experience know that it is usually the pretty ones that get skinned up.

I too think it's a little too simplistic to just call these incidents "complacency". Sounds like your club needs to seriously work on SOPs, recurrent training and eval, and adopt specific procedures for all ops.

You MAY get away without all this stuff if you're a single pilot operation, but a club without these things, and STRICT adherence to them is looking to go out of business.

Look a little deeper than just complacency....I think you'll find some other factors in play.

MTV

I agree with the checklist comments. Military pilots can't take a leak without one, and even though for demanding modes of flight they're generally memorized in single pilot aircraft they're still supposed to be backed up with the paper when time allows.

I've ridden with civilian pilots who do and some who don't use checklists. I'll always use one.

Definitely MTV. Those were not club planes. They were spray planes or pipeline patrol planes. The spray planes I owned were not pretty but well cared for. The ones I leased were the pits. One pipeline outfit I flew for kept their few airplanes immaculately maintained because of the manager/mechanic, Greg Simler. They paid $15 per hour when the prop was turning. I took a job that paid 23 cents a mile, including dead heads. I flew 3500 miles per week for them. The boss was very hard to get along with and budgeted maintenance. I flew two weeks on one mag waiting until allowed mag replacement time. I had a windscreen blow out because he was neat on cosmetics and paperwork but cheap on essentials. He wouldn't let the mechanic drill stop and sew up a crack with safety wire and that plane wasn't to budget hours for a new windscreen. If that windscreen hadn't blown out I would have burned the 172 up. The mechanic wouldn't make the illegal weld on an exhaust pipe that had a too long crack and it wasn't budgeted for a new exhaust stack. It broke loose and burned the paint off the bottom cowl. I was headed across N. Louisiana on Sunoco Mid Continent Pipeline. I landed early at Magnolia, Arkansas when the windscreen blew out. I had smelled something on takeoff from Shreveport, but it was the first time that fall I had used the heater. I needed to feed the wife and kids.

8GCBC wrote:

Nosedragger wrote:Checklists have a bit of a social stigma in certain circles. Some say you need to have It memorized so well you never forget. I like a checklist but take crap for it sometimes.

If it works, use it! A pilot with no checklists is an idiot!

Memorizing them works for certain ops. Other times I need to write it down. Checklist are also always evolving in my type of bush flying.

I'm a Checklist Pilot, too!! I've got too nice of a plane to make a mistake. Plus, I do not want to take a chance of hurting anybody including myself!

CIGARS and GUMPS check for me. Keep it simple, stupid.

gbflyer wrote:CIGARS and GUMPS check for me. Keep it simple, stupid.

Me too. For simple airplanes. I'm not going to have a 27 line Cessna 207 landing checklist in my hand, and read aloud each item for every landing, when I do 25 take-off and landings a day. I use a flow, and cover the stuff that's going to kill me.

More complex airplane, different story.

Gump

8GCBC wrote:

Nosedragger wrote:Checklists have a bit of a social stigma in certain circles. Some say you need to have It memorized so well you never forget. I like a checklist but take crap for it sometimes.

If it works, use it! A pilot with no checklists is an idiot!

Memorizing them works for certain ops. Other times I need to write it down. Checklist are also always evolving in my type of bush flying.

I'm an idiot

My list is in my head.Done in order of importance.

Preflight (CAVU IFR is different)
Gas: always check for water, never found a drop. Quantity, valve where I want it, I never turn it off.
Oil
Tires and brakes
Prop
Walk around and look at major shit, if it falls off I'm screwed.
Cell phone /charger, SPOT, 406PLB

Before take off (CAVU)
Oil pressure, fuel gauge, mags.
Check flight controls, free
Look at picture of dent in my wing.
Considerate on flying the airplane, look outside and not playing with some check list

I have flown with probably 40 pilots. My estimate is 15 used a paper check list.

G'Day

mtv wrote:I too think it's a little too simplistic to just call these incidents "complacency". Sounds like your club needs to seriously work on SOPs, recurrent training and eval, and adopt specific procedures for all ops.

You MAY get away without all this stuff if you're a single pilot operation, but a club without these things, and STRICT adherence to them is looking to go out of business.

Look a little deeper than just complacency....I think you'll find some other factors in play.

Our club is very safety focused. We go way beyond the minimum in terms of check rides (not only in terms of currency, but our CFIs use the check rides as training exercises). We have legitimate safety presentations at most club meetings. We give credits to people who even go beyond that. This is not a club culture issue.