“Ok, let’s see if we can get this overloaded mother off the ground!” It was an open mic gaffe by a pilot at LAX unwittingly transmitted to the passengers in the plane. It doesn’t take any imagination to understand how the passengers felt about the pilot’s assessment of the situation in which they were helplessly at his mercy.

The maintenance of my venerable 1948 Stinson Voyager sometimes required an occasional visit to airplane “junkyards.” There is a glaring difference between these and auto junkyards which as an auto mechanic I frequented for years; the amount of blood to be found in wrecked airplanes. While seldom in evidence in wrecked autos the seats, control panels and windscreens of wrecked airplanes would often display a gory and copious amount of blood, stark evidence and mute testimony of how catastrophic airplane crashes are.

Safety features in autos like padded dashes and airbags are absent in most small general aviation aircraft, the crashes involving these often at too great a speed for such features to be of any use. The “plus” side of aircraft crashes is dieing quickly, rather than lingering busted up in a hospital.

As an AOPA member the first thing I would turn to in the monthly publication was stories of plane crashes. Pilots often gleaned valuable information from the detailed reporting of such accidents, and in many cases would find helpful hints in how to avoid some of the mistakes made by the pilots involved in these accidents. And human nature being what it is, in virtually 90% of the cases reported the crash was due to “pilot error.” In the cases where pilots have confessed to doing really stupid things nearly resulting in a crash, such things are made known to others as a caution to them. Unlike some other classes, pilots are a helping fraternity even to the point of often unabashedly admitting stupid mistakes.

You drive a car in a flat earthbound environment, but airplanes operate in three dimensions where if something goes wrong you can’t just pull over to the side of the road to check out the problem. So pilots spend a lot of time practicing emergency procedures, things like emergency landings. But what a pilot cannot be trained to circumvent is the human failing to do really stupid things at times.

The Comair crash in Kentucky serves as a reminder some mistakes take a tragic toll on the lives of the innocent. While 9/11 and the Katrina disaster clearly evidence politicians are never held accountable for their incompetence resulting in the loss of innocent lives and none of us are safe from such thoroughgoing incompetence from the White House on down, when you board an aircraft there really is a Pilot in Command, a person to whom you are committing your life trusting they are fully competent, personally accountable and responsible. But I have never boarded a commercial flight without knowing that pilot is just another human being, and as such despite all the qualifying factors capable of really stupid mistakes. The result is that as a passenger I have found myself kicking those rudder pedals along with the pilot up front, sensing everything going on with how the aircraft is being flown. Sometimes ignorance truly is bliss.

Unlike most federal bureaucracies the NTSB has competent people, some of whom I have known personally and most of them pilots, who investigate airplane accidents whether it is some Cessna 150 that had to land on a freeway or the most catastrophic crash of a “heavy.” While the FAA is to be faulted in many ways because of the cozy relationship that federal bureaucracy has with aircraft manufacturers, once a crash has occurred it is the real professionals in the NTSB on the scene. I have always wished other government agencies had the same competent personnel.

We don’t yet know what the events were leading to the Comair crash. We know the wrong runway was used, and on the face of it this seems a tragically stupid mistake. But was it controller error or pilot error? Who was “minding the store?” And these days we can’t entirely discount drugs or alcohol involved on the part of controllers and pilots.

Those who are not pilots quite understandably shake their heads in disbelief over how professionals like the two pilots involved could fail to notice which runway they were on. There were the required charts at their disposal clearly depicting the runways at this airport, charts clearly showing the runway they were on was not to be used by aircraft of the type they were in. But there is a lot going on in the cockpits of modern airliners, a long check list that must be adhered to religiously, the checking and double-checking of a multitude of instruments before taking off.

How was it possible for such professionals to have made such a tragic error if this proves to be the case? Still, some of you may recall reading of a recent fatal crash caused by a professional pilot failing to do the required check of his controls, something that only required his looking out the window of the plane to make sure the ailerons, stabilizer and rudder were responding properly. Undoubtedly the pilot’s complacency was the critical error resulting in his death. But not even carrier pilots, the best of the best are immune from such complacency.

It may prove the controller was at fault in the Comair crash, directing the pilots to the wrong runway or asleep at the switch not noticing the plane was on the wrong runway and advising the pilots accordingly. But if it should prove pilot error, in this case the error of two pilots, this is how it could have happened.

Many pilot errors are attributable to the kind of thing that plagues all of us. When you have performed the same task a thousand times you become complacent, and when you become complacent you are vulnerable to making mistakes, even the stupid mistakes that in retrospect declare: That was really stupid!

While such mistakes don’t often result in really catastrophic consequences and the most we suffer due to them is acute embarrassment, in the case of an ultra-sophisticated piece of machinery like an airliner such mistakes cost lives. But how does one become so comfortably complacent when operating such a complicated piece of machinery like an airliner? It happens.

But this kind of catastrophic complacency seems endemic in the field of education as well. During the years I spent as a high school teacher many of these found me teaching shop classes because of my vocational qualifications from the “world of work” as opposed to the Halls of Ivy. For the better part I enjoyed teaching such classes because the young people were self motivated to learn the practical skills like electronics, metal and woodworking, and auto repair. While it was often a chore to motivate kids in the academic classes I taught, trying to make things like algebra and trigonometry relevant to them the shop classes were a stark contrast where the relevance was learning hands on skills.

There is another distinct difference between shop and academic classes. It is highly unlikely a math, English, or history teacher is at risk of anyone suffering a catastrophic accident or blowing up the classroom. Not so in shop classes where the “opportunity” for such things abound.

So, safety instruction is of paramount importance in the shops. But even so, it is the instructor’s responsibility to make sure the kids are adequately trained in safety before ever laying hands on a lathe or welding torch. However, even the most conscientious instructor cannot always prevent the kid from filling a milk carton with acetylene and popping it into the heat-treat furnace.

Bill Cosby, America’s preeminent funny man at the time, had a skit where the shop teacher is telling the kids “Don’t put a bullet in the furnace because it will explode.” Bill Cosby knew something all shop teachers know. Kids will do really stupid things. However, it was my rather complete repertoire of doing really stupid things myself as a kid that enabled me to exercise a great deal of patience with kids as a shop teacher. Seldom did a kid do something really stupid I didn’t have a like experience when I was a kid with which to compare.

But adults prove time after time they are capable of doing really stupid things, things like putting a bullet in the furnace. I’m reminded of the fellow I read about many years ago that replaced a fuse in his car with a live .22 round. The very heat that caused the fuse to blow set off the round and the bullet hit this dimwit in the knee causing him to wreck his car. No doubt he was left wondering how he could have done such a really stupid thing?

Well, I’m no longer teaching high school or college classes, but the memories linger on, even the memories of adults doing really stupid things. Take the science teacher I knew that took his kids on a field trip into the desert. Part of his instruction was cautioning his young charges not to put their hands in brush where a rattlesnake might be lurking. He then demonstrated by putting his hand in a bush only to be bitten by a rattlesnake. While in the hospital some of us visited him asking whether he would like to repeat the demonstration for our benefit. He of course declined, and in colorful language laden with four letter words one would not expect of such a professional colleague.

I have often told people the only thing I miss about teaching is the kids. I came to despise a system of “education” that could not have been better designed for failure if it had been done on purpose, a system that seems to have little regard for children and young people, but rather a system that does not support teachers but gives authority to administrators completely out of touch with reality, and I have known some administrators that became downright ugly when confronted by this.

As an aside but not unrelated, my post to the Californian yesterday prompted a few responses by some really ugly people reminding me of the cautionary words of Jesus: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”

Still, there are things that need to be said on behalf of our young people, on behalf of families as they struggle against a system in our society that like that of education despite the many good and conscientious teachers trying to do their job against insurmountable odds seems not to care about children, about standards of dress, of morality and civilized speech and behavior. I know taking a stand for these things invites attack by those that care nothing for such standards and inveigh against them, but the “village” required to raise a child must be a village of those who do have such standards for the benefit of children.

Will the Comair tragedy be attributed to complacency? Whether or not, the dangers of complacency affecting children on the part of adults who understand the realities of life are ever before us. And those who know better have a duty and responsibility to speak up and not become complacent.