And I suppose you can congratulate yourself for having the clinical distance to let anyone do what they want despite the consequence and then immunize yourself from any responsibility because the Aunt Janes are spoiling all the fun for the steely eyed adventurers who dare to be great.
Before I wrote this piece, I contacted two highly experienced ferry pilots whose opinions I respect for a sanity check. Both agreed with Brian’s conclusion above, but both also declined to weigh in as he has done publicly. The eye opener was the airplane itself, mainly, not much helped by an 80-hour, non-instrument pilot.
Day after day, week after week, year after year we write about fatal accidents after the fact, ostensibly to point to the errors to remind people not to make these mistakes, not to commit these errors of judgment, not to push their own envelope to the breaking point in the hopes of preventing another accident.
Here, we have an opportunity to perhaps do it before the broken body is pulled from the wreckage as the adults in the Dubroff crash failed to do. The only difference here may be the utterly irrelevant distinction of being the youngest person to do something, age of majority an equally irrelevant distinction.
As Brian pointed out, if you’re going to undertake a flight like this, you better have your s&^t in one sock and then some. Maybe that’s the case here, maybe it isn’t. If raising the question–which I think is fair game when something like this is placed on the international stage–brands me as a quivering Melvin, I’ll take the hit if it saves writing about another fatal accident.