Safety Topics

A US Army copilot has told of a near disaster in which he was involved. For this particular operation, some courier material had to be delivered to an airfield 50 miles away as soon as possible. There were only two pilots available at the airfield, including the copilot himself and although they had both been on duty since early that morning, the individual who was to be the pilot had not flown that day and the copilot had flown only 4 hours that afternoon. While they were not in danger of passing out from exhaustion, they had put in a long day's work and were irritated at having to perform this relatively simple flight at such an inconvenient time. The weather forecast was good and the flight would be ‘a piece of cake’ — 20 minutes up, 5 minutes on the ground and 20 minutes back.