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As long as there have been airplanes, pilots have been working hard to transform them from a noisy and inefficient means of travel to silent, smoking lawn darts. Pilots do not like to discuss this, and rarely use the word 'crash' in polite conversation. They prefer terms such as "mishap" or "forced landing". It is analagous to veering a car off the highway, through the woods and into a nearby swimming pool and then describing it to the officer on the scene as a "forced shortcut". The officer, like the FAA, will still give the vehicle operator a fine, but everyone feels better about it.

Flying ifs full of irony. (or, perhaps more accurately, aluminumny, but that is impossible to pronounce)

Consider the fate of L.C. Letur, possibly the first flyer to suffer a fatal pilot error. L.C. was one of the handful of 19th century crackpot inventors determined to build a heavier than air flying machine. Like most of his fellow crackpots, L.C. did precious little testing or experimentation of his new machine, and gave little thought as to just how it would be controlled once it was in the air. With a confidence not yet demonstrated by his inventive peers (who seemed to prefer to let other, less foresighted adventurers test their creations), Letur successfully flew his new para-glider into the trees in 1854. The NTSB, had they existed yet, would surely have described this incident the result of pilot error, as Mr Letur had absolutely no flight training whatsoever.

Another of Letur's contemporaries, Jean-Marie Le Bris, came to grief when attempting to pilot his own flying contraption in 1857. His aircraft had been designed after prolonged study of the flying habits of the Albatros, a bird notable for it's grace in flight. However, as anyone who has seen an Albatros will tell you, the bird is virtually incapable of taking off or landing without tripping over it's own feet. Jean-Marie learned this valuable lesson in ornithology when he broke his leg attempting his unhistoric flight. Clearly a case of pilot error.

In 1936, a maverick barnstormer named Douglas Corrigan applied to the Federal Bureau of Air Commerce for permission to fly his barely airworthy Curtiss Robin on a non-stop flight across the Atlantic. In a truly award-winning moment of bureaucratic confoundery, he was denied the right to make the attempt in his radioless plane, on the grounds that he did not have a Radio Operators license. Undeterred, he applied the following year, but the disappearance of Amelia Erhardt had made the Feds leery of any further trans-oceanic adventures, especially since they already had one ocean to search. In fact, the powers-that-were only reluctantly licensed Corrigan's leaky, 300-dollar Robin to fly at all, and only then as an experimental aircraft. With characteristic optimism, the redoubtable Corrigan begged the authorities to let him fly his plane non-stop from New York to California. Perhaps feeling that he could not possibly stay lost for long over dry land, the authorities granted Corrigan permission to make the cross-country flight to Los Angeles. On the morning of July 17, 1937 he climbed into his little plane "Sunshine", took off overloaded with fuel and promptly flew due east for the next two days, finally landing in Dublin, Ireland. When questioned by civil authorities, Douglas "Wrong-Way" Corrigan made the most famous lie in the history of pilot error, claiming to have misread his compass during the entire flight to Europe.

Britstol Aircraft's chief designer, Frank Barnwell, was responsible for the creation of many legendary British aircraft during both World Wars. Unfortunately, he was also a lousy pilot. So bad, in fact, that he was prohibited from flying any of the the company's own aircraft. Creative to the last, however, he independently designed his own ultralight sport plane, which he unwisely flight tested himself on August 2, 1938, thus ending a long and noteworthy aeronautical career. In doing so, he was guilty of one of the less talked about but more common pilot errors: believing you are a better pilot than you really are.

Even highly trained military fliers are not immune to the malady of pilot error. On August 24th, 1940, a Luftwaffe pilot became lost on a night bombing mission over England. With fuel running low, he opted to do the prudent thing and drop his bombs over some sparsely inhabited farmland, rather than risk hitting the then forbidden target of London. Unfortunately for the errant pilot, his bombs landed square on the blacked-out capital. Enraged by this unsportsmanlike assualt on it's civilians, the British retaliated by launching an air raid on Berlin the following week. The very next day, in one of his more famous public fits of apoplexy, Hitler noisily declared that the criminal terror bombings would be avenged tenfold. He ordered the London Blitz, giving the RAF a much needed respite from the unrelenting attacks on their airfields, and ultimately costing Germany any chance of victory in the Battle of Britain. With the gloves now off, both sides abandoned any attempt to confine their attacks to military targets, and soon bombs were raining indescriminately over every major city in Europe. All thanks to a single pilot error.

On the afternoon of Dec 5, 1945, the flight leader of a group of five Navy TBM Avengers reported that all five compasses aboard their aircraft had malfunctioned, which is not only one of the greater acts of pilot machismo ever recorded, but ultimately led to the demise of himself, four pilot trainees and a search pilot dispatched to locate the whereabouts of Flight 19. Despite spawning a slew of bestselling books and at least one really bad movie about the Bermuda Triangle, the tragic events of that day were most likely the result of a simple pilot navigational error. The region defined as the Bermuda Triangle is one of two notable geographic regions on Earth where a campass will indicate true North rather than Magnetic North. When faced with this navigational anomaly, while flying over rough seas during a thunderstorm, with low fuel and four traineees in tow, it appears as if the flight leader reacted just like most any pilot would: he blamed his instruments.

Sometimes the worst pilot errors are caused by backseat pilots. On October 8, 1947, a bored Captain in the jumpseat of an American Airlines DC-4 decided to engage the gust lock in-flight as a prank. The command pilot, oblivious to his mischevious passenger's actions, rolled in a whole bunch of elevator trim without any response. It was at that moment that the mischief-maker playfully disengaged the gust lock. The plane immediately went into a steep dive, executed part of an outside loop and went inverted. Neither the command pilot nor the errant captain were wearing their seat belts, and they accidently feathered three out of four engines with their heads as they fell towards the ceiling of the cabin. Fortunately, feathering the engines reduced airspeed enough for the copilot, who was still strapped in, to regain control of the plane...350 feet above the ground.

As the record plainly shows, and despite protestations by many pilots to the contrary, the one constant in the ever changing history of aviation is human error. Many sharp minds in aviation science have studied this problem, and concluded that the only really safe airplane is one that can fly itself without the pesky and ill-considered interference of a human being. Occasionally, a designer will be ill-mannered enough to actually attempt to design and market a product designed to minimize the workload of the error-prone pilot, generally without success. One error self-respecting pilot's NEVER commit is admitting that they are wrong. That's what the FAA is for. So innovations like the rudderless Ercoupe and the parachute-equipped Cirrus (and even the parachute itself) often find little or slow acceptance by pilots, until they are goaded into using them by rising insurance rates and their passengers' more cynical appraisals of their flying abilities. The latest trend in this direction is the plane flown by a computer, which neatly removes any possibility of pilot error by making the pilot sit quietly nearby while a sophisticated computer makes mistakes for him.

And so, at the end of a century of flight, we find ourselves back where we started: after decades of painful experimentation in aviation, we have learned that the safest thing to do is let someone else do the flying. Fortunately, there are still hardy souls out there willing to thumb their noses at both gravity and it's prisoners, go out and fly. Is that pilot error? Hell yes. Let's face it: We all make mistakes. And if you're going to make a mistake, anyway, there's no better place to do it than an airplane. After all, anyone can make a mistake on the ground. But you haven't really screwed up until you've screwed up at 20,000 feet.

Of course, I could be wrong...