The Cycle Continues  

The "problem" is that we love to fly! It beats a lot of other things we could be doing. On my first day, the Director of Training got up in front of my new-hire class and said, "You're all a bunch of underachievers.  You could be doing something else, but you choose not to."  I was highly insulted.  But it turned out to be true - he was right.  I only planned on spending five years, tops, at PHI, and then I'd go do something more interesting and fun and challenging.  Fifteen years later, I finally said, "Okay, that's enough," and left for pastures that didn't turn out to be any greener.  See, it's just too easy to do what we do once we get good at it and comfortable in it.  We see friends and cohorts die all around us and we go, "Glad that wasn't me!"  And we stop short of thinking that one of these times, it's gonna be me.  Even highly experienced, high-time pilots make stupid, fatal mistakes.  Eventually we learn that we are not immune, that it could happen to us.  Still, we stick with it.  Not because there aren't other things we could do, but because there's really nothing else that we want to do.  The bad part is, our employers know it.  And for people who love to fly, this isn't ever going to change.  The cycle continues.