Lionel:
One thing I learned from this experience, as I looked at the wrecked airplanes AIG is offering up for bid... many (maybe 90%) showed the contributing factor for the accident as "fuel starvation" as was the problem associated with this particular Cessna 150.
To me, seeing such reports (and seeing a wrecked airplane) makes many of us more aware of the hazards of not watching or managing the fuel.
I frequently read accident reports on some other websites and it is never pleasant to learn that someone was injured or killed in an accident, but reading such and ocassionally seeing pictures associated with the accident can result in something positive and I try not to focus entirely on the negative.
One of the articles I read from time to time is entitled "I Learned About Flying From This..." and it relates mostly to pilot error...
Every time I have gone to Air Salvage of Dallas, they typically have several wrecked airplanes in their large hanger, roped off with yellow barricade tape for the NTSB investigators. Sometimes, blood is evident in the airplane. Although it can make some folks queezy, for others, we have to ask what happened and why. That always makes me a tad more cautious as I learn what happened.
On my very first airplane accident I covered as a news report for the ABC station in El Paso during the early 1970s, I learned a great deal about the importance of making certain you fly with the correct altimeter setting.
A Beechcraft Baron owned and operated by the USDA impacted Mount Franklin as it was working it's way to ELP International. I won't go into details of what I saw at the crash site near the top of the mountain, but when I told my father (28,000 hour commercial pilot who flew out of El Paso, he immediately knew what happened.)
When the NTSB report came out, sure enough, the pilot (they said) was flying instuments in the clouds and didn't reset his altimeter from the time leaving Phoenix (flying from a sunny high pressure place to El Paso where a cold front had just passed with low pressure)...
This wreck was nasty and I saw everything up-close and personal, but through all my years of flying since seeing this wreck (and others I reported on), just an hour after the Baron accident happened, only 500 feet shy of the top of the mountain, I am "religious" about keeping tabs on the barometric pressure as as I fly cross country. The Baron accident made me a better pilot. And now that I own a fuel-intensive 150/160 with tiny gas tanks, I suspect I'll be "religious" about making very short hops looking for gas.
