Cory Lidle

There’s a comment in a novel (either Len Deigton or Gavin Lyall, sorry, forgotten) that newish pilots face a gap, a window, in their experience. Over 50 hours solo and they are confident enough that they know exactly what they’re doing, then sometime before 100 hours some accident or piece of weather proves to them that they will never know exactly and curbs their hubris.

Looks like that little comment (both authors were pilots BTW) might have some truth to it:

A baseball star’s plane flew into the side of a 52-storey block of
flats in Manhattan’s affluent upper east-side yesterday, killing him
and at least one other person, rattling public nerves exactly a month
after the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

In an interview with the New York Times last month he said he had spent about 95 solo hours in the air.

3 responses

  1. I’m pretty sure I recall reading recently a similar aperçu about soldiers in combat; something about your second battle being the most dangerous one because coming out unscathed from the first one gives you the feeling you’ve got a charmed life. Then you see a lot of your mates, who also survived their first battle alongside you, get killed in the second one, and you realise you’ve just been bloody lucky.

  2. It’s called an inverted bathtub curve (the standard bathtub curve models failure rates to things like electronic components or cars – they either fail straight away or at the end of their normal life, with few failures in between). It also ties into the adage that there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots.

  3. It says on the BBC site that the passenger was an instructor.
    My question is why are they flying around in Manhatten anyway. Following the road? Just went for a quick spin. Even experts have accidents and when you are in a plane your insurance claims tend to be big ones.

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