A Plane Wreck

With all eyes focused on the Presidential election, the aviation news is kind of slow. This highlights a theme that will become important in the next Administration -- how to get aviation on the “front burner.” The dearth of aviation coverage at the moment shows how hard it is for America/Washington/The World to focus on more than one or two problems at a time. Right now, it’s all Election and Economy. After the election, everyone will want their story in the limelight.

As usual, I’m veering off course. The story today is from my friends at AVweb.

Pilots know they must always keep learning to keep safe, and one way to keep sharp is to study the mistakes made by others. To promote that effort, the FAA has created an online safety library that teaches "lessons learned" from some of the world's most historically significant transport airplane accidents.

All right ! Now this is my kind of web site. I was all excited until I clicked on the link and read this:

Each accident also contains at least one high level lesson related to a threat element, and at least one lesson related to a theme element. View each of these perspectives and their related elements by clicking in the areas below.

If you can figure out what that means on the first try, you’re smarter than me. Honest to goodness, only the FAA can turn a good idea about a plane wreck into a train wreck. I really hoped I’d have something nice to say about the FAA for once. Instead, I’m left feeling like Charlie Brown after Lucy pulled the football away -- one more time.

Oh well. It’s not a total waste of time. Skip the ridiculous home page and go right to the “site map”. I was able to find some useful information from there. Hopefully, you will too.

Don Brown
October 28, 2008