Only the truly inexperienced or the very young can be so supremely confident in their vast storehouse of knowledge in all things.

You're addressing a branch of the thread that's all about training. On the contrary, increasing complexity during training is the only way to ensure continual improvement. Anybody who feels he should be given an airplane that will take complete and todal care of him under any circumstances is living in a fantasy world and is himself an accident waiting to happen.

In fact, in addition to ground handling, it would also be beneficial to take it all the way back to simulate the days when very few airplanes even had flaps and pilots had to learn the art of executing slips and cross-control landings with some degree of finesse.

At the very least, even if for whatever reason pilots develop “tunnel vision” or “freeze”, future systems will still prevent pilots from “buying the farm”. We already have “robot cars” being tested in Nevada and Florida and soon California… so imagine when technology is 1,000s of times more powerful within 10 years.

“Wrestling a taildragger on the ground, adding stress, risk, and adding nothing whatsoever to the beauty, safety and precision of flight is, well, silly to watch and useless to perform”

My comment;

You’re addressing this to one who has over 8000 take-offs and landings in Birddogs and I do think you’re a bit silly to (even) mention this as it proves, to me, that you are in need of some more exposure to flying skills.

It's just like I said. Someone will entirely miss the point.

All very to the point observations, however, tunnel vision has a way of ignoring even the best designed warnings ! Talk to military pilot who had their ass shot at by a heatseaking missile(s) ! I am sure there are a zillion examples like this, even the one involving “gethomitis”

Ah those days, of rotary phones, walking to school in 25 inches of snow, spin training, no headsets with instructors shouting at the student, everything was so much better then.

Wrestling a taildragger on the ground, adding stress, risk, and adding nothing whatsoever to the beauty, safety and precision of flight is, well, silly to watch and useless to perform. Some here probably will miss the depth of the meaning of that statement, but that’s ok. Change can be hard – and safety is not a broad reality for all, but an individual perception of varying degrees. Old fashioned taildraggers, wing warping, gyroscopic torque from the old rotary engines, spin training, these all gave way to advances in awareness to make flying safer and more enjoyable. This newest generation of kids can’t write in old-timey cursive, and that has nothing whatsoever to do with how well they write.

I’m sure I would be a more patient individual if I had to wait for the postal carrier to bring me each response to every blog post instead of instantly reading them on my computer. I don’t value looking back 5 minutes let alone 50 years, and find this old, silly idea of making flying more difficult than it needs to be rather sad. But on and on it lives, providing humor for those with the eyes to see on windy Saturdays from some fool ending his wonderful flight with a ground loop.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/111626127367496192147/posts

I’ve noticed a few comments bemoaning costs that preclude both installed technology and the ability for one to spend more time in practice. Neither the practicing of a bunch of bad habits or the purchase of a technology which tends to give the impression one has been relieved of the responsibility to think are the answer to greater safety.

There are probably a lot of people on here who will miss the depth of meaning in this statement, but I’ll make it anyway: Maybe what we need is a return to doing primary training in tail draggers. There aren’t many things that will teach you about the consequences of your actions (or inactions) and what can happen when you stop paying constant attention, like wrestling a cantankerous old tail dragger.

No, this is not about flying tail draggers. It’s about the kind of mind set one needs to acquire so as not to be made a fool of by the machine. It’s a mind set that not only affects (and improves) our flying, but also extends to our driving and probably most of our other endeavors as well. It’s akin to a situational awareness, but even more focused than the popular concept of the term. It’s about constant attention to where, what and how things are happening around you; other factors in your environment and how they may be about to affect what you’re experiencing. It’s about how, based on all incoming information, you instinctively and instantly create an accurate picture of what you can expect in the next few minutes or seconds…and maybe even what you need to do about it before it needs to be done.

And no, learning by training in a tail dragger won’t automagically put you into that mind set, but it will go a long way toward instilling in you an awareness that there’s a lot more to flying an airplane than just shoving the throttle forward and pulling back on the wheel.

Contrast todays cookie cutter training to the “old” kind of training where your flight school used to be a full service FBO that also ran charters. A lot of those charters were single pilot freight operations and every time a charter airplane left on a trip you could bet that some eager student was holding down the right seat. Close observation of a seasoned, ATP senior flight instructor on an IFR flight plan, day, night or in actual IMC and picking up tips from him over a flight of several hours can accomplish a whole lot of things that sitting in a ground school class or bumping around in the practice area can’t even begin to simulate.

Use a calculator, go to jail. This post is complete nonsense. How many hours do you suppose the average pilot spends flying over even a 50 year career, vs the number of hours spent driving over the same 50 years? For most pilots, the difference in exposure is huge – not to mention that there are many categories of aircraft accident that have a very high fatality rate. There aren't a lot of VFR-into-IMC fender-benders. Without normalizing the number of accidents to the actual exposure to the hazard (you can't have an aviation accident if you're not flying) this kind of "safety" comparison is meaningless.

And I think you're rather helping Ms. Hersman make her point about not learning: GA pilots keep doing the same "stupid pilot tricks" over and over and over, despite plenty of evidence that the consequences may be fatal. While the ability to fly like a nitwit with a death wish may be the price of freedom, it's a high price.