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Pilot's Selfies Could Have Caused Deadly Air Crash
alphadogg writes: A deadly air crash that killed a pilot and passenger in Colorado last year was likely due to a loss of spatial awareness brought on in part by taking of selfies while in flight, the National Transportation Safety Board has concluded. An examination of the aircraft revealed no apparent problems that would have caused the accident so, based on the previous patterns of behavior, the NTSB concluded that "it is likely that cell phone use during the accident flight distracted the pilot and contributed to the development of spatial disorientation and subsequent loss of control."
The good of the many outweigh the vanity of the few....
Seriously, last thing our species need is more self-aborbed behavior.
Flying is cool in part because of the apartness and eliteness of obtaining your cert and people seeing you in the left seat at the controls, master and commander of a magical craft. There is massive ego in humble bragging flight time amongst your selfies if you are into a photo based social media.
But holy shit, camera flashing your eyes during a night flight is terrifying, it is far worse than any idiot on the ground lasing you, WTF!
Real aviation is following the checklist and rules; flying, navigating, and communicating safely, not effing around to impress your pals except in maneuvers approved for your aircraft and certification.
So, where is picture for Darwin awards ceremony?
Snapchat.
The silent, but bright, killer.
"Death by selfies", or "The Killer Selfies" or "Selfies will kill you" or something alike.
I truly miss the headliness as "Headless body in a topless bar", don't I?
As a pilot, I was always taught that my priorities were "aviate, navigate, communicate." As a CFI, I tried to always impart the same lesson.
Taking self-portraits somehow never made the list.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Unfortunately the passenger died, besides the pilot. Also the families of both people are now grieving. It's horrible to lose a loved one. I send my best wishes to the families of these two people.
Does the same thing happen when you take your selfie now at McDonald's?
"No, but understanding is not required, only obedience."
The reading of the GoPro video description is bluffing. how in the word did someone with such a behaviour and attitude made its way on a pilot seat, worse on an instructor seat.
Something is definitely wrong here. And with his experience he should have known better. From the report (emphasis is mine):
The pilot, age 29, held a commercial pilot certificate with ratings for single engine land, multi-engine land and instrument airplane. The pilot also held a ground instructor certificate. The pilot was issued an unrestricted first class medical certificate on August 29, 2013.
A review of the pilot's logbooks revealed that he had accumulated about 726 total flight hours, 38 hours in the last 30 days and 4.5 hours in the 24 hours preceding the accident flight. He had 27.1 hours in night conditions and 0.5 hours in simulated IMC in the last 60 days. He accumulated a total of 99 hours in simulated IMC and 14.7 hours in actual IMC.
That is not a huge experience, but definitely enough to know better. Using a mobile phone in flight is one thing. But using it in a critical flight phase? To take selfies?
This guy was an accident waiting to happen. I feel sad for his passenger.
Who would ever have thought... See this Dilbert Comic from 2015-01-21. Turns out a built-in selfie camera is a viable safety feature for air-borne vehicles! It could have saved these people's lives.
He took selfies before.
He crashed.
Therefore: taking selfies caused the crash ?
Or is there more evidence ?
"Would you like plummeting to Earth at 9.8 m/s/s with that?"
Crashing a positively stable Cessna requires a lot of effort. If you just leave the controls, then it will level out after a while. The crash could have been deliberate.
What right does the FAA have in prohibiting a pilot from doing selfies? The free market will solve this problem. Pilots who get into crashes due to selfies will soon have a bad reputation due to word of mouth and will be unable to find passengers. People living under the area the pilot flies should have done the proper research before buying their homes to know that a pilot that does selfies routinely flies over their homes and businesses. Therefore if the pilot crashes into them it is actually their fault for not being an informed consumer. Perhaps their next of kin could sue the estate of the pilot.
Preserve liberty! Abolish the FAA!
"During night flights, the flash on the cellphone camera was also being used."
This is wrong on so many levels:
Even cardrivers know that oncoming traffic using the bright lights are a nuisance at night.
As a pilot they ought to be aware of laserpointers and their effects. (I mean pointing one upwards is the equivalent of a batsignal for cops nowadays, they arrive faster than when u called them.)
There's a good chance his pics would have looked better without flash anyway.
Finally taking stills of the gopro he already was using, whould beat most cellcam night-time pics.
The ground still he saw a moment before due to acclimatisation of his eyes to the darkness dissapeared unexpectedly after the flash selfies causing confusion and disorientation.
I've begun to hear many TV talking heads dumping on "the selfie" lately. Anything that gets over-hyped will reach burnout. But come on guys, really? A selfie brought down the plane? Should be only a matter of hours before some politician jumps onto a soap box and calls for anti-selfie legislation. Maybe they can vilify selfies like they did vaccinations.
Remember Sarah Palin's sad story about the little girl who "came down" with autism after getting some vaccines? Well that's nothing. Take a selfie on a plane...and you'll die in an inferno of brimstone as new-fangled selfie-demons destroy your plane! This is nothing but the typical hype/anti-hype cycle but taken to a new level due to 24-hour news media. This may have influenced investigators.
Having spent time behind the wheel of a Cesna myself, I can't imagine this. This is a plane you can fly literally hands-off. It will fly straight and level. Even if you take your hands off in the middle of a turn the plane will continue that direction for a short time while starting a slow drift. A selfie couldn't cause the plane to go down unless he was fumbling with the phone to film the critical point of a risky maneuver in which case the maneuver would be the catalyst. Do we know that he was fumbling with the phone?
Peace, K1
"contributed to" != "caused" The pilot shouldn't have done that. However it's a mistake to just blame the whole accident on that single error in judgement. Many things have to go wrong for an accident to happen.
That's something a lot of organizations do. It's politically expedient and it's relatively efficient to just find a scapegoat (human or technological) but it ends in not actually fixing the problem.
At a bank I used to work at there was a problem backing up data to an off-site tape storage unit. The problem was complex, involving three sections in five locations. The internal DNS system wasn't passing the right IP to the server initiating the backup, which was set (after a timeout) to ask a different system for an alternate IP, which sometimes worked. The backup site wasn't recognizing any error because from its side it was fulfilling all requests. The server initiating the backup recognized incomplete backups but not the real cause. It took two weeks to find and fix the problem. A manager involved wanted to just blame and change the backup software at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars. It was a popular solution. It (barely) didn't happen simply because a slightly better connected manager wanted to find the real problem.
Here's the thing: Changing the software could have fixed the immediate problem setting it up would have fixed the DNS side of things) but the REAL problem was poor communication between the backup guy and the DNS guy. The solution was very easy and saved a boatload of money over the "scapegoat" solution. A one-sentence addition to the procedure for new hires. Introduce the backup guy to the DNS guy. But finding that solution was politically very hard. The scapegoat solution would have fixed the immediate problem but it would have just pushed the whole mess down the road a bit.
Finding a scapegoat, such as the title of this story suggests, is an almost inevitable mistake. How did the selfie result in an accident? What can be done to prevent that *kind of* judgement lapse from causing an accident in the future? Blaming the pilot will not answer these questions.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Why aren't his vaccinations being considered as contributing to the accident? Had he eaten any GMO food? Or posted on 4chan? Or voted Republican?
That makes just as much sense.
But there are no old, bold pilots.
while driving. One of the laws everyone ignores, including cops. Also common sense ignored.
The airspeed was allowed to decay such that the aircraft could no longer climb or maintain level flight,
then the wing stalled. At low altitude, this results in a crash.
The airspeed decayed BECAUSE the idiot who had a pilot's license did not maintain proper control
of the aircraft.
Personally I am glad this incompetent pilot is dead because now the world is a safer place. It is however very
regrettable that an innocent trusting passenger was killed.
What article did you read? The one i read said:
"It added the pilot didn’t have sufficient certification for night flight with passengers or flying on instruments alone."
I guess its possible, but ive never heard of someone getting their commercial before their IFR.
This is nothing new... the only thing new about it is that there was a phone on-board.
...Suicide by Selfie
Did the investigators find the black boxes? I saw no mention of them in the articles/reports I just read.
JFK Jr. wasn't taking selfies... He was just a VFR pilot who wasn't properly prepared for the flight he attempted. VFR at night over Water is dangerous territory for those who's IFR skills are not up to par. Doing it in a high performance aircraft is even more risky.
Personally, if I had attempted this flight VFR, I would have conducted it *like* an IFR flight, including flight following and asking for a "practice IFR" approach from the controller. I'd do this to keep it in the front of my mind that I had to stay on the gauges in this situation as much as possible.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
in related news Parents fall off cliff taking a selfie as kids watch
http://www.hlntv.com/article/2014/08/12/selfie-death-couple-falls-portugal-cliff
It wasn't night. No horizon due to weather. No iPhone last century but same effect. He was not at all good at piloting, just like everything else he tried to do - he sank.
Many of the news reports mention a GoPro and flash photography. No.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
There you go again, you dastardly robots! Blaming it on pilot error when it was your technology which crashed it!
I get it. Push the blame elsewhere! My ex wife used to do the same thing! ... hmmmm... .now things are starting to make sense. If I had only known! I might have stuck it out.
That explains the spot on Fran Drescher impersonation....
They didin't have any evidence of anything else so they just jumped to this conclusion so the insurance company wouldn't have to pay anything to the pilots family.
Where this sort of thing will happen a lot more often when relatively untrained (driving compared to a pilot) people will be in control.
There is a solution for selfie-taking flying car drivers.
What's a "selfie"?
So now not only do I have to watch for and avoid bicyclist, skate boarders, and other drivers while they text and take selfies, NOW I have to be worried about friggin' planes dropping on me too? I'm never leaving my underground bunker again.