Plane Crash!!!

Let's compare...

Does the nose color of this plane:


Resemble the color of this plane?


It does, and it should, because it's THE EXACT SAME PLANE!!! In other words, the plane that I flew in from Cedar City to Delta two weeks ago last Wednesday, crashed exactly two weeks later! The plane in the bottom picture, the one upside down, is the EXACT same plane I was in! How crazy is that?

I found all of this out when I was working at an event at Smiths in Magna. One of these people that comes to almost all my events stopped by and we began talking about me going to flight school. When I told him the school I was looking at was in Cedar City he asked if I had read the paper that day. I said no and he went inside to grab something. A few minutes later he came out with a copy of the days paper and showed me an article on a plane that had crashed in Cedar City belonging to the flight school down there. I instantly recognized the plane as the one I had just flown in a few weeks prior.

Now I have to decide if I still want to go to this school or not. I remember thinking the plane looked quite old when I first saw it, but it didn't worry me much since it's very common to fly older planes as a plane isn't judged by it's age as much as it's maintenance record. On the same note though, most in the aviation community consider it inexcusable for a plane to lose power or have any other form of catastrophic failure. Of course you can't ever be 100% positive nothing will go wrong and things can always happen, but when the maintenance and safety checklists are followed strictly it's extremely rare for a planes engine to just stop working. So I have to decide whether I trust this school and their maintanence program, and just put my faith in the senario that this was just a freak accident that could not be prevented, or I need to withdraw from the school because I don't think their maintanence department was doing a good job and is not taking care of their fleet of planes as they should. I'm still trying to figure it out, but as of now I'm still leaning towards going to the school. The plane that crashed is junk, so the good news is that they will have to replace it with a newer, nicer plane for me to fly.

If you want more information on the crash, you can read the official NTSB report.

Oh, and by the way, neither of the pilots in the plane were injured.