I know very little about those single engine planes, other than I never felt very safe while being a passenger. I know many responsible pilots that have flown these planes for years and are extremely safe to fly with. I also know a few pilots that like to mess around while flying and on one occasion I was talked into going for a ride in his new plane.
Being an experienced pilot on big jets myself, I know that when you are used to flying one series or size of plane and then get moved to a different size plane, it takes time to make that transition. I asked him how many hours he had flying his new plane and he told me 10 hours. I really didn’t want to take the ride, but I have always been a bit of a risk taker, so I took the ride.
The first 20 minutes went well, but then he wanted to show off by putting the plane into a dive and then bringing it out of the dive and took the plane from 200 feet up to 900 feet. Scared the B-Jesus out of me and I swore I would never ride with him again and I haven’t.
Two weeks later, he didn’t crash the plane to the extent that it was demolished, but while landing at a small private airport, he set the plane down too late and too fast and ran off the end of the runway onto grass. This caused the plane to spin and break his right wheel. Another 22 feet and he would have ran into the chain link fence that was put there to keep any plane going off the end of the runway to not enter a main highway.
