When people ask me "how hard is flying?" I reply that the individual tasks are not hard but the combination can be overwhelming. “There is nothing HARD about flying, two or three hundred really easy things that will kill you if you don’t get them right.”
One of the ways to avoid the pitfalls that have happened to other aviation professionals and not so professionals is to study the mistakes of others. NTSB reports, articles in the flying magazines and the NASA aviation safety reporting system website http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
The idea “we can learn a lot from near accidents” is a great thought. The challenge was to get the people to fess up. “I failed to complete the checklist and almost killed all my passengers”…is not a likely confession if the penalty of enforcement is present. This is the thought behind the “NASA form”. A pilot, controller, maintenance technician and other personnel can fill out a NASA form and it protects them from prosecution. This allows a pilot who busts an altitude a chance to “get out of jail free” by providing the “how I did it” narration. This way data is gathered and the community benefits by learning that “the autopilot in XXX aircraft will not capture altitude when the feringy knob is in delta 5” or something similar. There are restrictions like you can not be willfully violating rules, criminally negligent and some other restrictions.
Anyway the site has a section to sign up for the ARSS callback, a periodic email that outlines a particular issue. The latest is about gear up landings. Expensive, rarely fatal, always embarrassing.
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