I recently joined both the national and local chapters of the Experimental Aircraft Association. The following chilly Saturday morning, I drove to Manassas Regional Airport, where the EAA’s local Chapter House is tucked neatly into the end of a row of T-hangers.

Nestled within, warm and toasty and out of the weather, was a small group of people affectionately referred to by the club’s president as the “Liars Club.” The liars club apparently is comprised of those pilots with nothing better to do than sit around every Saturday morning regaling other members with closet wisdom and aviation fantasies such as how they once safely landed an airplane on only one wing, on a sloppy mud strip, in a fifty-knot gusty crosswind.

I immediately began chatting to another club member about, of all things, aviation. A brief reference to his life as a pilot in a South American air force quickly evolved into a listing of all of the airplanes he has owned as a civilian, beginning with a Lance, then a King Air, and currently a Super Citation. Apparently, he uses the jet mainly for his business. For my part, I still dream of the Champ I plan to own someday. Yet, the way he talked, not only is aviation obviously a major part of his life, but he apparently has the money to buy pretty much anything he wants, which leads me a little further along the path toward my uncomfortable point.

This man and I seemed to get along well, so he felt at ease confessing that he has been flying in the IFR environment for so long he is nervous about flying VFR, especially in and around the DC Special Flight Rules Area. His long history flying at flight levels and on autopilot, the flight director plopping him neatly onto final on a nasty, IMC night, has him now longing for the mystique, the connection, the thrill once again of basic flying.

To this end, immediately, my thoughts wandered to something along the lines of a Cessna 172 or 182, perhaps even a 310. Now, prudence, at the very least, would dictate he march across the field to a certain flight school that owns the very 1946 Aeronca Champ I myself practically lived in, that I used to fly hither and yon, propelled into the heavens by all her wild, brave, snorting, galloping sixty-five horses. Once there, he could rent the airplane and an instructor for a few hours to discover what taildragger flying is all about, if he even likes tailwheel flying.

Instead, I learned that in his effort to rediscover the thrill of the aviator within himself he had already laid down the $250,000 cash for a brand-new Super Decathlon, custom-built by the American Champion factory in Illinois, complete with options, select avionics, and custom paint.

After several delays on the assembly line, the airplane is due to be finished mid-to-late February. American Champion provides tailwheel training and sign-off as part of the purchase price, a maximum six hours dual time. His plan includes flying to the factory for a day of ground school, then two days of flight training. That third day he will fly the airplane the five hours cross country back to Manassas, VA.

In his enthusiasm, his fantasies of the thrill of off-airport-landing capability, aerobatics and propeller governors, stick-and-rudder, seat-of-the-pants flying, of coveted membership in the elite tailwheel club, forward slips as a way of life, this man apparently had not done the arithmetic to discover that, at the end of it all, he will still lack four of the ten hours dual instruction required by his insurance company. So how, I wondered, will he even get his new airship home?

As he talked and I listened, I feared this man quickly becoming yet another FAA statistic-in-the-making. Money apparently no object for this man—one can only dream–he already comfortably laid down two million dollars for the Citation, complete with extended warranties and service contracts for the various components such as engines, avionics, and airframe. It’s a good thing this man is wealthy because he obviously is serious about his business jets.

The discerning person can be heard asking why this same commitment to common sense, safety, and reliability, preflight planning, currency, and the right attitude has not percolated into his personal life. Still, after flying only in the IFR environment, by his own admission he is nervous about once again flying VFR. While he claims his reservations are limited only to the fairly-strict DC SFRA environment, I cannot help hearing his unspoken anxiety about flying VFR at all.

Programming the flight director on his Citation, he has not at the very least done any practical navigation on his own, such as tracking inbound and outbound a VOR radial. The flight director navigates the airplane discretely by GPS. He just sits there. Neither has he flown by pilotage or dead reckoning. He has not used sectional or terminal area charts in over twenty years. Imagine the changes to these charts in that time, perhaps even changes to the symbols therein. It is as though he is learning to fly all over again.

Yet, here he is cavalierly buying an expensive, brand-new airplane, and a hi-performance one, at that, when he does not know if he likes, even if he can handle a taildragger in the first place. Not every wannabe can master a taildragger, especially one as powerful, capable, yet with its own inherent mysteries as a fully-aerobatic, 235-horsepower Super Decathlon.

As a flight instructor myself with considerable taildragger experience in my back pocket, one who himself tends to err on the side of caution, I tried counseling this man within an email about how immediately, indiscriminately, and with great vengeance a taildragger can bite the inexperienced, cavalier, undiscerning aviator. While he may perform the Citation’s takeoff himself, as well as the landing, he is hardly qualified at this juncture to be hand flying anything, much less a type aircraft well understood since aviation began, by design, to be unforgiving of attitudes careless, cavalier, and disrespectful.

Concerned he still was not heeding my warning, within the letter I offered not only to fly with him to help him learn the DC SFRA, but that I might be persuaded to make the trip with him from the American Champion factory in Illinois back to Manassas. This offer by itself should make his nervous wife feel more at ease since he admitted she thinks even a Boeing 747 is too small an aircraft.

In the letter, I wrote that flying cross country in what at that point will still be a relatively unfamiliar and, specific to both his experience and his apparent attitude, a relatively dangerous airplane, having done no navigation on his own in twenty years, flying only high and fast, instead of low and slow, is not prudent decision making for any pilot. I reminded him also that the first skill a pilot loses after mastering GPS is his memory of and ability to navigate by VOR, with the skills of dead reckoning and pilotage to follow in quick succession. This is the flight instructor within me, that voice that asks is what you are about to do really a good idea?

His disquieting response to all this is an attitude that pervades the aviation community and is one I consistently face as a flight instructor. It is a source of constant frustration for me. His email contained a detailed and, as much as an email can be, impassioned defense of how he understands to a fault the perils of taildragger flying, especially for the novice, that he will be taking no chances.

Yet, he did not seem at the very least an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of me, a certificated flight instructor, accompanying him on the adventure home from the factory. This man is transitioning from a modern, luxurious, automatic, hi-tech, sophisticated style of flying to an airplane among whose few defining characteristics that have changed at all from the first days of aviation is the addition of considerably more horsepower.

The transition he is making from one kind of airplane to the other has no equal in aviation, stepping from essentially fully automated flying to stick and rudder, the latter of which has takeoff, landing, and ground-handling characteristics that would strike terror into the heart of the most seasoned Citation pilot. Moreover, he is making this transition in only six hours, engine start to tailwheel sign-off.

Now, there is no reason a pilot capable in another kind of aircraft cannot learn to fly an aircraft as different as these two inherently are. The problem here, as is all too common in aviation, especially in light of his admitted deficiencies borne from his tenure flying IFR, is this man’s grasp of the scope of that transition.

“Baby Stepping,” as it were, his way back into the VFR environment, only then into a vastly-different aircraft, seems not in the nature of this man’s preflight planning. It is no wonder his wife is terrified of flying. Think about it, the only access to some ethereal state of calm acceptance of him as a pilot she may eventually attain is the cavalier attitude with which her husband frames the activity.

Nice a guy as this man seems to be, still, the phrase “more money than brains” comes to mind here as the definitive assessment of this dynamic. The problem as I see the world from my vantage point as a flight instructor is that this, what is nothing more than pilot bravado, pervades the aviation world as thoroughly as does the air that lifts our wings.

What I just euphemistically referred to here as pilot bravado is nothing more than ego. Despite what the FAA drones on about endlessly with respect to skills and learning, experience, checklists, and safety, currency, flight planning, and the right attitude, what undermines the best efforts of the FAA, then kills a pilot more quickly than any other force is his ego.

One reason for his decision to learn taildraggers, he told me that day within the EAA Liars Club, is because his wife, who, may I remind my readers, is terrified of flying, is uncomfortable at the controls of the Citation. Of course, she’s not a pilot, so it stands to reason she is not comfortable trying to fly a Citation. Given her life heretofore bereft of experience and training in aviation, she would not be comfortable at the controls even of a Cessna 150.

His brilliant plan includes putting this terrified woman’s mind at ease by suddenly placing her at the controls of a hi-performance, quite-capable aerobatic taildragger. Can any readers follow a common theme here, the tragic flaw in this man’s logic? There is a pattern to his thinking and his behavior.

What this man does to earn a living is information to which I am not privy, but it obviously does pay him extremely well. Brand-new Citations, Decathlons taught, fresh, and spanking, business trips, pleasure trips, where is that fine line? Ah, the jet set. This man is in that dubious, still enviable position occupied by a select few where the question becomes not “can I afford it?” but rather, “what color shall I buy and how many?”

The FAA, I finally concluded, operates under the unnerving delusion that the pilot, as an entity, can be improved by such programs as Wings, various safety courses, myriad what are called webinars, as well as the sage wisdom, practical influence, and the conscientiousness of the savvy flight instructor during the biennial flight review.

While these programs and requirements are useful tools, while they do have their valued place in the pilot’s life, the FAA is wrong about what ultimately causes accidents and runway incursions, incidents, mishaps, and catastrophes. All of this learning and skill they both require and encourage is useless if it is not applied, useless if it gets overshadowed by the human element.

The force that influences the outcome of every human event, and the operation of an airplane is no different, is the pilot’s ego. The aftermath of this aspect of human nature is a phenomenon over which the flight instructor, the examiner, even the FAA itself has no control.

It’s no wonder this man’s wife is terrified, why she fears for his safety, for the security of her family every time he takes to the skies. While she may not be able to articulate her fear, to understand or rationalize it, she knows her husband well enough by now to sense that something is wrong with the picture. Her enduring fear is a reflection of his refusal, his inability to resolve that fear.

His wife comprehends on some level that his cavalier attitude, his lack of respect for the activity of aviation may get them all into trouble someday. When her husband leaves for work in the morning, experience dictates she hope for the best, but she will navigate her day quietly expecting the worst. No sirens, medevac skimming treetop, no telephone call from authorities between breakfast and supper, in her mind means he has cheated death yet one more day.

So, as I said to a colleague recently, when this man’s wife corners me at her husband’s funeral, demanding why did I not counsel her husband, why did I not talk sense to the man, offer my sage wisdom, perhaps even stop him from making the trip, from buying the airplane in the first place, what will I say to her? After all, this is not a circumstance where he is trying to drive or fly while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, where my confiscating the keys or otherwise incapacitating the vehicle is proactive and justified, responsible, caring, civic-minded citizenry ultimately condoned by a sensible populace and an equally-sensible judge.

This is a decision he is making as an adult. However, he is making this decision based less upon the discernment of a seasoned aviator, but rather employing more of a kid-in-a-candy-store mentality who just received from his father a whopping allowance payout.

So, when his wife finally does spot and subsequently corner me at her husband’s funeral, all I will be able honestly to say, all I can offer her as consolation, my earnest role in trying to unwind this tragedy before it became one is, “Ma’am, I tried.”