alt Hacker NewsWhen I was training 20yr ago we practiced stalls, spin recovery, simulated random engine-out scenarios.. do they not do that anymore?
I was pretty confident barring some catastrophic mechanical failure I could probably get it on the ground or into the water (or trees) in one piece. The big question remains though: what now? If you're knocked unconscious (likely--lap belt, big flat instrument panel at face height) then two things can happen:
(1) if in the water, you drown before you can get out.
(2) if you're on land, the fuel tank right underneath that instrument panel or the ones up in the wings might torch you before you can get out.
It's probably about right to compare the risk profile to motorcycle riding.
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Mechanical failure and engine outs will always rely on muscle memory and training imho, but I strongly presume everything else is going to be "Push red button to survive, switching to autonomy."
Garmin Is Automating In-Flight Emergencies (Autoland, Smart Glide, ESP) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996106 - July 2026 (0 comments)
The accountability problem exposed by the first Garmin Autoland deployment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793561 - January 2026 (0 comments)
Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346214 - December 2025 (185 comments)
(Garman SafeReturn is reliant on GPS though, so unsure how it would handle loss of GPS during autonomous operations, I presume silicon photonics for precision dead reckoning as a backup nav input are the future, or perhaps relying on jam-resistant GPS services and/or multiple GNSS providers simultaneously)
> It's probably about right to compare the risk profile to motorcycle riding.
I'd say it's probably not, many motorcycle riders deliberately choose a motorcycle because it's "fun", meaning they go around speeding on purpose, so the crash stats are very negatively skewed by those deliberately behaving recklessly, just how driving crash stats are skewed by people driving under the influence.
That's a bit of a different approach than to flying a plane, and yet GA is super dangerous. That's because unlike motorcycling, flying is inherently unsafe, there's no "just stop" option if you have an issue. The default is crashing. The only reason commercial aviation is so safe is the incredible effort that's been put into engineering safety systems at thousands of layers, from mechanical to human factors, but hardly any of that applies to GA.
So IMO, if you ride as responsibly as you fly, riding should be way safer.
I'm not a pilot but as I understand it, stall/spin recovery practice is not mandatory anymore for a PPL and not all pilots do it, because it requires an aircraft designed for acrobatics and in practice a number of pilots ended up getting killed trying it. So now they learn it by the book or maybe playing with a flight simulator but not in an actual aircraft.