The death of aerobatic wunderkind Rob Holland while on a seemingly normal approach to landing hit me—and I’m sure many in aviation—hard, coming after a string of accidents that are stretching our willingness to keep going in the face of ongoing carnage. Obviously, many of us know people who have died in aircraft accidents, and we all have to figure out how to put those aside and do our best to fly safely and be prepared for the unexpected—which is, after all, part of the definition of accident.
But I feel like the mental burden is getting worse, and it doesn’t surprise me anymore when someone I know decides to give up flying well before their medical sell-by date. The burden isn’t that accidents happen; we’ve all come to accept that. It’s that so many of these recent accidents are an utter mystery, and not even the nattering nabobs on social media have any—even outlandish—clues about what might have happened.
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