I was sitting in a recliner in the Pilot's Lounge at the virtual airport, minding my own business, when Old Hack came whistling into the room and pulled the Reader's Disgust magazine from in front of my slowly-moving lips."Hey, I was reading that."Boy, I got more important stuff for you to read, right here. I'll even help you with the big words," Hack declaimed as he slapped a few NTSB reports and some other documents on the table beside me. "In that last collection of drivel you wrote and AVweb had the temerity to call a column, you said that general aviation pilots were pretty smart. This stuff here is to prove that they're dumber than a bag of hammers."Now, Hack, I didn't say they were smart; I just said that the research Dr. Dismukes did showed that pilots who had accidents, on the average, were just as smart, or dumb, to use your word, as the universe of pilots. That means that there can be some pretty foolish ones out there turning airplanes into scrap just as there can be some very bright ones doing the same thing."Hack managed to look defiant and frustrated at the same time, "Yeah. Well. OK. But, you have got to look at this stuff. Some one has got to do a study to find out if it's true that a lot of the dumb and dangerous stuff having to do with airplanes happens because some guy was a tightwad and trying to save a little money in the wrong area wound up killing him."As it was the path of least resistance, I picked up the papers and read them. While they were certainly not a scientific cross-section of events affecting the aviation community, they were indeed, as Hack had said, powerful evidence that people around general aviation can do some incredibly brainless things when money enters the equation. The first three did not involve anything more than very minor injuries, but the financial loss to each owner/pilot was eye-watering. The other four were fatal accidents involving flight for hire and the use of pilots with more enthusiasm than training or experience. All of those were fatal. One in particular struck me and made me think of the very old expression regarding British money, "Penny wise, pound foolish", although while the aircraft owner involved was pound foolish, he was not even close to being penny wise.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/features/the-pilots-lounge-107-penny-foolish-pound-stupid