He was flying a straight-in approach at the speed of heat and setting himself up for a classic, high-wing/low-wing midair and that’s exactly what happened 200 feet above the runway.
#Lift and shred video series
I have always defined this as a series of questions: Where am I? Who or what’s around me? What happens next? What happens if I screw up? What happens if someone else does? I think it’s clear that the pilot of the twin Cessna in the Watsonville crash lacked even minimal SA. McSpadden and Juan Browne in his analysis of the Watsonville accident rightly review the recommended procedures for reducing risk in airport traffic patterns, but I think there’s a larger consideration here that applies throughout the entire flight: situational awareness. Moving the numbers meaningfully at such vanishingly small risks with the blunt tools available to GA is a fantasy. If a subset of pilots, it’s a fraction too small to be worth mentioning. If you consider midair pilots as a subset of accidents, the number is something like 0.01 percent. (“Hey, things are going OK here, we haven’t blown up yet, so let’s press on.”) It’s also tempting to finger something in training, procedures or the ATC system that’s fundamentally wrong and must be fixed. The question is why didn’t they? What’s the mechanism that causes someone who can’t possibly escape knowing where the risks of aviation come to a sharp, painful point allows him or herself to become so utterly complacent as to literally die for being too blase to lift a finger? Psychologists have all kinds of terms for this, one of which is called continuation bias.
Not to denigrate the dead, but I find it implausible that the pilots who died in these recent crashes-four total, not counting the pax-would not have known the basic things they needed to do to avoid a collision. Back it up from there and you can figure out the two or three things you need to do to accomplish this. As far as midairs go, it’s pretty simple: Don’t hit the other guy. The idea of this coverage, of course, is to burn into your memory the details of the deceased pilot(s) errors so you won’t repeat them. Whether that’s true or not, if you’re looking for something new in all the accident coverage now available almost within hours of crash, good luck. ADS-B and/or traffic alert systems may have something to do with that. As Aviation Safety Institute’s Richard McSpadden reports in this video, the long-term number of midairs is about a half-dozen a year and that number has actually trended down slightly from two decades ago. Still, when we cover an accident like the tragic midair in Watsonville, California, last week hot on the heels of another one in North Last Vegas almost a month to the day earlier, it’s easy to believe the sky is literally falling, at least with regard to midairs.
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