I subscribe to four or five aviation magazines, and my favorite articles are typically the accident reports.  I don’t think this is because I am excessively morbid (although I do have my share of that).  Most pilots I know read them, because whenever I bring up a particular crash with other pilots they seem to know as much or more about it than I do.

Pilots study accident reports primarily for the obvious reason that it is considerably better to learn from someone else’s mistakes than your own.  But there is much more to it than that.

I also think that pilots read accident reports for the same reason adults read morbid fairy tales to children.   G.K. Chesterton, who GB Shaw called a “colossal genius,” said famously, “Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist.  Children already know that dragons exist.  Fairy tales tell children that the dragons can be killed.”    In that sense, they give us all a sense of mastery, a way of knowing that our adversaries can be defeated.

Fairy tales typically involve some character defeating a foe through cleverness, courage, or other attributes that we want to transmit to our children.   While some accident reports end up with the pilots and passengers walking away from their planes none the worse for wear, many of them don’t, and yet as we read them we imagine what we could or should have done differently in the same situation.

That is one way accident reports, similar to fairy tales, build resiliency.   It takes a certain amount of courage (if not ignorance) to step into an airplane just after having read how someone your age with your number of hours in your type of airplane inadvertently killed him or herself.

When pilots read accident reports, they typically do so with mixed emotions.   There is often anger involved: how could you be so stupid and incompetent to do such a thing to your self, your passengers, and your loved ones?   But there is also compassion, in that there but for the grace of God go all of us.

Accident reports also invite the guest of grief.  On that subject, another initialed Brit, CS Lewis, said “I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”  Lewis was Irish of course, which explains much of that viewpoint.   Grief, when it doesn’t become indulgent, eventually becomes sweet as it sets the table for the gift of renewal.

And while it is certainly true that life itself inevitably gives us plenty of opportunity to grieve, the ability to cry out loud and express grief fearlessly under the right circumstances keeps us from transforming grief into depression.

Just like fairy tales, accident reports teach pilots how to handle potential problems (typically by understanding what NOT to do), help pilots build resiliency, teach us critical problem-solving skills, and sometimes even reinforce moral lessons (such as the question of taking a passenger along on a potentially dangerous flight.)

Perhaps this is why, when sitting for long bouts of chemotherapy, I was comforted by my wife reading me accident reports.  She could just as well have read me adventures of pilots ferrying airplanes over Africa, but what I wanted to hear most were the accident reports.  Surely, I was already in the middle of my own ordeal, one that I felt as though I could not control.   Yet, imagining disastrous situations faced by others and how best to respond may have given me a slight taste of mastery in a situation where I had none.

I can assure you, dragons really do exist.   And when they come, it is possible that no amount of preparation will help.  But in the situations where one does retain bits of control, the Boy Scouts and Chesterton had it right.   It’s good to be prepared.