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It's very easy to write this comment when you're not the one getting behind the plane in the middle of the night with multiple simultaneous challenges (speaking from experience; I can feel the anxiety writing this comment from similar "white knuckle" experience), and I agree, keep flying the plane. Systems fail, that is the point of investigating incidents to improve systems. Humans are always the weakest link. I agree that an experienced pilot should be able to safely land on an approach assuming a loss of GPS.

(General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel, tracking at roughly 1.0 to 1.1 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours. Statistically, GA's per-hour fatality rate is about 14 times higher than driving a car, carrying a risk profile comparable to riding a motorcycle)

Edit: My hot take is more communication and training needs to go into "As the pilot, you should be prepared to lose GPS at any time at critical moments in the flight lifecycle." Are we letting folks fly in potentially adverse conditions leaning too heavily on GPS leading to potentially avoidable accidents? I don't know, the NTSB is likely better informed to say so or not. If I was a flight instructor, I'd probably include loss of GPS during instrument approach at night and/or in weather as an experience to cover.

3 comments

> General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel

Since I've been paying attention from the peanut gallery, watching Blancolirio videos, etc. I would never fly on a small private plane. Seems like once a week there is a crash of a small GA craft somewhere, often with fatalities, due to loss of control (i.e. nothing wrong with the aircraft). Pilots seem to become overconfident or complacent, make bad decisions instead of "gettimg out the credit card and booking a hotel" as Juan likes to say -- if you can afford to fly your own plane you can afford a night at a hotel. They can't handle loss of visual flight conditions. They don't recognize when they need to ignore their inner ear and trust the instruments. They can't recover from stalls or upsets (and actual practice isn't required, because that too caused a lot of crashes). Worse, they often take family and friends with them.

There's a reason a lot of life insurance policies specifically carve out private aircraft operation or travel as an exception to coverage.

When 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.

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)

As I understand it, most GA crashes are not due to mechanical problems. Human things like loss of situational awareness, loss of control, controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), flying into bad weather, and improper fuel management are much more common.

The problem is things like regulation and litigation have pushed the price of those modern technologies up outside the reach of everyone who isn't filthy rich, meaning the average GA pilot is tooling around in a clapped-out rental C172 from the 80s.

There's nothing inherently unsafe or unreliable about old airplanes. Aircraft maintenance and inspections are very rigorous and evidence based as compared with almost any other mechanical systems you might interact with. I flew a 1949 Piper PA-16 Clipper with a fairly anemic 108hp Lycoming O-235 with auto gas STC. I'd say it was every bit as safe as any other light single engine airplane, so long as you pay close attention when the wheels are touching ground and mind your density altitude.

In some sense it felt safer than the 172 because I could fly a higher, tighter pattern. It was easier to lose a bunch of altitude on final by putting it sideways in an aggressive slip. The 172's small rudder didn't let it get as sideways, so it was a little more constrained. The 172 did have functioning instruments and dual radios, not just a handheld. It also had flaps. I think it was probably 10-15yr newer? Still a relatively "old" airframe. I probably had 5x or more as many hours in the Clipper so all that could just be biased towards familiarity.

Point being, old plane does not mean unsafe plane. It's not like you're riding around in some rusted out hooptie in the sky. There are rigorous mandatory inspections and maintenance schedules for every single component, which results in mechanical failures being really rare even in aircraft that are nearly 100 years old.

None of that obviates the need to know what you're doing, of course. The pilot in command needs to have control of the plane. I'm pretty skeptical of systems that kind of try to smooth over that sharp edge, I can understand the altruistic motivation behind it, but there's likely a side effect of reducing the perceived risk. That's a problem, because it makes people complacent. So in terms of overall safety, it might not be a win? You're trading on average higher complacency and lower situational awareness for maybe some better outcomes in rare situations? Probably not the best trade.

That stuff just seems awfully gimmicky to me. I'm glad it worked and saved some lives. I don't think I'd want that system in my plane, though. I just wouldn't be able to trust it.

But I also wouldn't want anything to do with the new glass cockpit stuff, way too easy to just lose all your instruments at once. I'll take properly maintained, independent mechanical or electromechanical systems over digital ones every time for things that actually need to work.

Digital systems always seem to accumulate tons of complexity ("features") rendering them extremely brittle. Until we can figure out how to stop doing that, I prefer to avoid depending too heavily on them for important stuff.

The Cirrus parachute system seems pretty simple and trustworthy, that approach feels more directionally correct. Not much more complex than an automotive airbag.

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.

Stall recovery is absolutely required to be instructed and demonstrated in the private pilot checkride. These are demonstrated to a full aerodynamic stall, not merely to stall warning.

Spin recovery is no longer required to be instructed (and was not previously required to be demonstrated during the practical test either [as many aircraft are placarded as "intentional spins prohibited"]).

CFR for the instruction requirements: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...

Airman Certification (Practical Test) Standards: https://www.faa.gov/training_testing/testing/acs/private_air...

Not a pilot either, but it's my understanding that accidental spins almost never happen at altitudes where they're recoverable. Preventing the spin is the only way to avoid most crashes involving spins.

Stalls, on the other hand are part of standard instruction. Recognizing the beginning of a stall early and preventing it will prevent the spin.

Weird things can happen with big downdrafts and wind shear, but those aren't terribly frequent and probably a spin is less critical to practice than stall recovery. But it's a very different experience to actually feel the forces and see the world spinning than you get in a sim. Also it's a lot of fun.

> 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.

There are classes of motorcycle accidents that are not a function of rider speeding or otherwise being careless. The one that took the life of a coworker is described as follows: the motorcycle is travelling on a country two-lane road, trees alongside, sunny day, and a vehicle comes from the other direction and turns left across the path of the motorcycle. At closing speed over 160 kph (80- 100 kph in opposite directions) the gap is closing at over 45 m/s and dappled lighting makes it hard to see the motorcycle even with a daytime headlight. Years after my friend's death I read a chapter in a book on forensic engineering which covered the situation in detail (not my coworker's death specifically, but this class of motorcycle accident as a recognized pattern).

This is extremely common in urban areas as well, at lower speed. Not necessarily less fatal. The thing that seems similar between flying and riding motorcycles is that even a "small" crash is likelier than you want to have extreme consequences. Airplanes and motorcycles are not made to crash. Cars are.

There's also the out-of-cockpit pressure from both the patient needing medical transport, and the employer who may retaliate against a pilot who refuses to fly. Apparently most of these pilots are trying to build 1500 hrs to be eligible to fly for the airlines, so they are feeling pressured from that angle too.

> Apparently most of these pilots are trying to build 1500 hrs to be eligible to fly for the airlines, so they are feeling pressured from that angle too.

Fixed wing, maybe, I'm not familiar, but around here, I know most of the pilots for the two HEMS agencies (I used to be a paramedic). HEMS is considered the most lucrative of the post-military pilot careers for rotary. You fly high end machines, in all sorts of scenarios, and see all manner of things.

And as it is, often times fixed-wing EMS doesn't actually fly that often. Long range transport that can't go ground (and providers and insurers will go to some lengths, depending on the patient - one employer of mine was contracted for a ground transport from Seattle to Las Vegas).

I've been in this situation too. But I was trained for it and had a mental checklist to follow. I never had a GPS, though. It seems from the details of the article, which you rightly highlighted, that the pilots were using their GPS as a crutch and had no ability to fall back on basic dead reckoning. It seems they didn't know where they were. That's pretty inexcusable, like embarrassing even.

I don't fly anymore, but I see similar behaviors developing on the water. People who use chartplotters for navigation don't have a very good understanding of what's going on around them. If you're just interactively following a computed lay line or a plotted course you don't really need to know what the currents are doing. You don't need to know what the hazards are. You're not actively engaged in navigating the boat.