Texting and Flying

This post references the first official aviation accident in which texting was considered part of the cause. See this link.

Texting and flying sounds way worse than texting and driving, but is it really? When you drive a heavy machine with lives in your hands it matters not if the machine is an airliner with 400 people aboard or a minivan with the family in back. Different degrees of devastation is all. Either machine has plenty of energy for a fatal crash.

There is only one safety device that really matters: an attentive, competent operator.

With over 10, 000 flying hours and countless hours instructing and observing pilots in action, I can summarize flying as a series of correcting small mistakes. An airplane needs constant adjustments to hold speed, altitude, and heading. And cars? We steer constantly to stay in our lane, we operate pedals to control the speed, we look ahead to react to traffic signals and we react to the actions of other drivers.

When we stop correcting these small deviations, we get bent metal, hissing airbags, and blood on the windshield. If you wake up dead—or worse—wake up having killed someone, does it really matter whether the instrument of death had wheels or propellors?