Fatal Hellcat crash in Tennessee (Revisited)

I was not a good friend of Art Vance but I did know him. I was accquainted with him through being involved peripherally with the warbird rebuilders and pilots at Van Nuys airport in California until I left for Saudi Arabia in 1997 to fly for a Saudi sheikh and his family. A 727 is the family car for some people.

Art was retired from FedEx and was also a Flying Tigers captain prior to its absorbtion by the current airline. He was a very good pilot and one of the funniest individuals I have met in 42 years of flying but so quietly subtle you might not catch the joke unless you were paying attention. He had gotten burned pretty badly when he successfully bailed out of a burning F4U Corsair at low altitude a couple of years prior to his fatal crash but, like many who have gotten the warbird bug, got right back into flying them as soon as he healed up.

http://www.warbirdaeropress.com/articles/PRS/PRS.htm

Years ago I once sat down with a friend of mine (who also happens to be a friend of Art’s) and we added up the people we both knew or were accquainted with who had bought the ranch while flying. We quit at the number one hundred, finding it too depressing to continue. What we DID conclude was that nearly all had done something that precipitated the accident regardless of how competent or clueless they may have been at the flying business.

Flying has a tacit and very strict set of rules that have nothing to do with government legislation and which often have the death penalty for even the first offense. The incentive program in flying is “do it right each and every time or you will very likely die”. I have known many who should never have even been driving a car who bought it while flying an airplane because they were blissfully unaware of the “self-cleaning oven” character of the activity that got them.

Having dodged the bullet myself several times, I am usually loath to condemn others who were far better pilots than myself but who screwed up just that one critical time (unless their screwup was so egregious it was indefensible and whose decision resulted in killing or injuring someone they were with or on the ground).

When someone with a lot of experience and a long history of making good decisions buys it through circumstances that appear to point to a bad decision, I remind myself that I do not know the situation well enough nor the particular circumstances that the pilot thought he was operating under to make a definitive judgement of his or her actions.

I hope that if Lynn is a pilot that he or she is at least as good as Art Vance was and never succumbs to the temptation to do the one thing that will prove to be career ending.