A wise pilot said that the most useless things in aviation were runway behind you, altitude above you and air in the fuel tank. Perhaps another might have been: a ny thought that begins “I should have…”.

Read any humorous stories about aviation and you’ll find that 80% of them are in some way connected with crashes, disasters, near-misses, emergencies, and so forth. As much as we all accept the statistics that show aviation is the safest mode of travel by far, we just can’t stop thinking about crashes.

As an aviation insurance practitioner (sounds less tacky than “broker”, don’t you think?!), I and my colleagues have devoted our working lives to preparing our clients for the day that things go wrong. I never get a call to say “Hey, Graham, I had a great flight today, beautiful clear weather, great scenery, smooth conditions and I really greased the landing!”

Instead, the calls I get are to report that things have gone wrong. Hopefully not badly wrong, but just wrong enough to ruin my client’s day and to give us an opportunity to validate a decision he took when he bought his insurance policy. The calls we dread are from friends or family members, because our client can’t make them himself. We’ve had a few of those recently and it feels like someone just stuck a knife in you.

When I settled down to write this article, I intended to regale you with stories of amusing claims we had dealt with, which illustrated just how daft pilots can be. I’ll give you some of those, but I cannot keep my mind from moving to the tragic losses which have occurred recently and which have left families and friends bereft. There’s nothing amusing about those, I assure you, and yet so many of them appear to have been avoidable, given a bit of thought and a willingness to acknowledge that the converging lines of circumstance and ability were about to meet and cross over.

Please, guys, remember that no-one ever got sued for admitting he couldn’t do it and turning back or carrying out a precautionary landing to wait for the weather to clear.

One amusing loss we dealt with many years ago involved a client who landed his aircraft fast and deep and ended up in the trees at the end of a remote airfield. We got the call and were asked to bring an Assessor “and an axe and don’t tell a soul”. A couple of hours later, we arrived at the airfield in our own aircraft, assessor and axe on board, and found our client, looking like he had gone three rounds with a hungry leopard: clothes in tatters, scratched to pieces and covered in blood. The aircraft had hit a mound of sand and had leapt into the air…straight into a massive thorn tree and had become firmly wedged (hence the need for an axe). Our client had managed to get out of the aircraft and his wounds were caused by his efforts to climb out of the thorn tree. He had then walked 3 miles to find a phone (this was long before cell phones were invented).We were about to start hacking at a main branch, which would have allowed the aircraft to shake free, when we heard a whimpering coming from the aircraft. That’s when everything fell into place. Seems our friend had planned to take his secretary on a business trip and her husband would not have understood, any more than our client’s wife would have. As far as I recall, his wife was told the aircraft had been sold on the spur of the moment and he showered in the dark for the next 6 weeks!

The problem with insuring an aircraft is that the time you know you’ve made a mistake is about one-tenth of a second after it’s too late to do anything about it. So we always try to encourage our clients to look at insurance a bit like they looked at their ante-nuptial contracts. In other words, try to imagine that the unimaginable has already happened and then decide what you would have liked the insurance to have covered had you been able to turn the clock back. As the Boy Scouts say: “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”.

One client, years ago, refused point blank to insure his aircraft against malicious damage, which is one of a number of perils covered under a “War Risks” policy. No matter how we tried, we couldn’t convince him that he had any sort of exposure. After all, he argued, his aircraft was kept in a secure hangar in a remote and peaceful part of the country, where there was no “trouble”. Foolishly, we followed instructions and arranged only the coverage that our client wanted. Some months later, a local businessman (unrelated to our client) became involved in a dispute with the trade union that represented his employees. Whatever it was they wanted, he wouldn’t give it to them and so it was decided to “teach him a lesson”. The employees knew that the boss owned his own aircraft, which he loved dearly and which he kept securely locked in a hangar at the local airfield. That night, there was a fire, and an aircraft was completely destroyed. It was established beyond any doubt that the hangar had been broken into, the aircraft had been doused with fuel, both inside and out, and braai firelighters had been lit and thrown through the hangar door in order to set the fire. Problem was, it was the wrong hangar and the wrong aircraft. The aircraft belonged to our client and…he had no malicious damage coverage.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending…but that will keep for another day.

When it comes down to it, there is nothing amusing about aircraft accidents. Even if the only injuries are to a pilot’s pride, a broken aeroplane is a sad sight. Having said that, perhaps it’s the ability to find humour in tragedy that helps us to cope with it.

With the summer fast approaching, I daresay that someone reading this article is going to find him or herself in marginal weather conditions before too long. Please remember that to acknowledge your inabilities as a pilot is a success, not a failure. Don’t become another “he pushed on” statistic. Don’t allow yourself to be pressured by thoughts of not wishing to let your passengers down by arriving late. Far better late, than not at all. If you don’t believe me, ask them what they’d prefer!

And to finish on a lighter note. A young B747-400 co-pilot mentioned to the grizzled captain, while they were waiting for pushback clearance, that he was carrying out a survey on sexual habits of airline pilots as part of the Human Psychology degree he was studying for part-time. “Do you mind if I ask when you last had sex?” the co-pilot asked. “Around 1958”, replied the captain. “1958?!”, says the co-pilot, “that’s a bit tough, isn’t it?” “Oh, I don’t know” said the captain, glancing at his watch, “it’s only 2035 now!”.