which contained scenes, recreated with actors and stuntmen, of real accidents.

I'm afraid I don't regard a blunt riposte to a pointless quip as an insult.My main point, which some seemingly have chosen to ignore, is that I understand about the vouyeristic characteristics of normal humans, what I can't understand is why these sensationalist videos are on an aviation enthusiast's site.

Yes I agree. If you feel the need to learn from other peoples mistakes, then there is plenty of material out there designed to help you do that. The NTSB (US) and AAIB (UK) are two sources that produce essential reading. The BBC Horizon video "The Wrong Stuff" is basic fodder for MCC courses (but it is a bit expensive).

I guess I've just seen too many of these things in saftey meetings followed by the words, "For those of you that think you're immortal: Remember this could happen to you." In those meetings, I do know it drove the point home. I've read a lot of NTSB reports, but I think the ones that weighed the most in my mind have been the ones in the safety meetings where they show you the end result if you should make the same mistakes.----------------------------------------------------------------John MorganReal World: KGEG, UND Aerospace Spokane Satillite, Private ASEL 141.2 hrs, 314 landings, 46 inst. apprs.Virtual: MSFS 2004"There is a feeling about an airport that no other piece of ground can have. No matter what the name of the country on whose land it lies, an airport is a place you can see and touch that leads to a reality that can only be thought and felt." - The Bridge Across Forever: A Love Story by Richard Bach

I don't think spot lectures mean anything really - they are all knowledge with little realisation. One has to want to seek out advice and learn from other peoples errors. Just like my teenage daughter, she won't be told, but six months later she will say "I see what you mean Dad". One AAIB report that has stuck in my mind is a case where the pilot didn't lock his seat down properly. You can guess the result on take-off. I would imagine the tower can see my plane rocking back and forth during my before start checks. Gawd knows what they are thinking!!The problem with being human is that, at the end of the day, we can't pick and choose our mistakes, we can only attempt minimise them. Sooner or later we will all mess up. Hopefully, we have learnt enough to recognise little mistakes before they become real problems. I think this is partly why the best pilots make the most fundemental errors - they have learnt to watch for and recognise more complex issues. There are just too many potential problems to mentally comprehend in one go that one ball will be dropped eventually and you just hope (to a certain extent) that on that day, you are vigilant.You probably heard about this, but on a popular pilots forum a doctor asked how avition has managed to instill such a culture of safety where medicine has by and large failed. The one line response said it all: "Doctor screws up patient dies. Pilot screws up pilot dies".

Yeah, as the old addage goes "There are two kinds of pilots: Those that have made a gear-up landing and those that will." I do have to say, if used right, crash videos can be an effective message, though just browsing as on AirDisasters, they probably don't do much. It's like the videos and photos in drivers education of crashes and their casualties littered through lectures. Being a visual species, showing the effects of bad mistakes grips us more than mere words. I feel those lectures will stay longer with me seeing what will happen to me in those instances then just hearing about it. Mere words tend to just roll off. The anti-smoking campaign has also found it's mor effective to show what happens to you when you smoke than to just merely tell you. If AirDisaster and other sites made presentations of the NTSB reports and used videos to drive the point home, I feel they'd be more useful to real-world pilots. After seeing the twisted wreckage of Piper N248ND, I know I'm much more catious about how fatigued I am. Fortunately, the students servived that crash, but it was by the skin of his teeth.----------------------------------------------------------------John MorganReal World: KGEG, UND Aerospace Spokane Satillite, Private ASEL 141.2 hrs, 314 landings, 46 inst. apprs.Virtual: MSFS 2004"There is a feeling about an airport that no other piece of ground can have. No matter what the name of the country on whose land it lies, an airport is a place you can see and touch that leads to a reality that can only be thought and felt." - The Bridge Across Forever: A Love Story by Richard Bach

After seeing numerous wrecked airplanes, that I've been in, or flown; and having friends and associates who've perished in flying accidents...............I think I've become somewhat "numb".These day's I'll see an airshow crash on the news, naturally feel sorry for the pilot, family, and anyone else who is injured; but my main thought is what I'd hopefully do different, and it never deters my desire to fly.The only time, I didn't care to work on my kitbuilt airplane, was 9/11 and a week or two after. As I don't care to watch tight rope walkers or car racing in hope of an accident, I'd prefer recreated versions of accidents for lectures/instruction rather than seeing the real thing when it envolves fatalities. I do read NTSB reports daily. L.Adamsonedit ..... I was never in those aircraft at the time of the wreck.