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Flight Into Unknown Ice With Gene Benson · The Reider Report

• 0:02
  Rob Reider: It's going to be about a one hour flight from Utica, New York to Nashua, New Hampshire, a piece of cake for the pilot and owner of a Seneca. It was a trip he'd made many times, But this time, the weather wasn't great, low ceilings and the freezing level at the surface. After he launched and went IMC, the performance of the plane began to deteriorate even with full power. He was picking up ice, but not where he expected it. Where?
• 0:31
  We'll find out on this episode of the Reider Report. Hello, everyone. I'm Rob Reiter, and welcome to the premier episode of AVBrief's The Reiter Report Podcast brought to you by Avemco Insurance. Vectors for Safety creator and human expert Gene Benson joins me today to share a story of a routine flight, a familiar ferry flight that turned dangerous as he was unable to maintain altitude while in the clouds. The lessons he learned are applicable to every pilot, irrespective of the years flown or hours in the long book.
• 1:18
  Gene and I will chat about it right after this message from Avemco. Not all aircraft insurance policies and premiums are the same. As the only direct writer in the market, AVEMCO never uses third party insurance agents and instead connects you directly with an aviation underwriter in their Frederick, Maryland office ready to solve problems and approve coverage based on what you fly and how you fly it. Avemco provides lightning fast quotes, rates, and personalized policies that are easy to read and tailored to you. Call (800) 353-9089 for your free quote or visit avemco.com/reiderreport.
• 2:12
  Don't forget to tell them you're a Reider Report listener and save 5%. Premium credits are subject to underwriting guidelines, including Avemco recognized training and memberships. Now, the Reider report. My guest today on our inaugural program is Gene Benson. He's a pilot, CFII, human factors specialist, and the creator of Vectors for Safety.
• 2:41
  And with all those credentials, he's still got himself in a bit of a pickle with some ice. Gene, welcome to the Reider Report.
• 2:48
  Gene Benson: See, Rob, it's great to be here with you. I'm a I'm a great fan. I listen often.
• 2:53
  Rob Reider: We had a great run over there, and I'm glad you listened. And we're gonna have a great run here as well, and we're gonna treat it just like we have for the past five years. And I'm gonna start by asking you how you got started with aviation.
• 3:08
  Gene Benson: Well, I was one of those kids that for somehow I was born with the aviation bug. I can't explain it, but I always was just really interested in airplanes, and the only toys I was ever interested in having were airplane toys. And of course, I built the model airplanes, you know, the the display models and the flyable models and the whole nine yards. And then there was an airport nearby, a county airport, but it was it wasn't really kid friendly very much. One day out for the dreaded Sunday drive with my parents when I was 14 years old, we pulled in a little small private airport about 13 miles from our house that I didn't know ever existed.
• 3:55
  And we got out of the car, and my dad asked the owner if we could walk around and look at the airplane. He said, oh, well, let me take you around and show you. And he spent about an hour with us walking down the flight line and telling us a little bit about every airplane that was there and telling us stories. I was just, wow, I'm so close to these airplanes. It's, you know, it's unbelievable.
• 4:13
  Rob Reider: Do you by any chance remember any of the specific airplanes he showed you?
• 4:17
  Gene Benson: Oh, I do. There was a wooden twin engine airplane that was built by Cessna for transport in World War II. They used to call it the something bomber. I can't remember now what it was. Bamboo anyway bomber.
• 4:34
  Bamboo bomber. Yes. Very good. Thank you.
• 4:36
  Rob Reider: They call it the T-fifty. And my father-in-law was an instructor during the war. And he used to call it, he and some of his compatriots used to call it the useless 78, the UC 78. But you got to see a bamboo bomber when you were 14?
• 4:53
  Gene Benson: Well, better than that. It wasn't flyable, but they had decided to taxi it around for some reason. And not on that day, but later, they invited me to go, and I was in the back seat of it when they when they actually started up and taxied it around the ground. It was quite a quite a thrill. I bet it was.
• 5:12
  So the Schuttle Airport, they were very friendly, and the owner somehow sensed how interested I was in aviation. He said, would you like a ride? Oh, but I like a ride. Are you kidding me? So he took me over to the ops, little Ops Building, but they had a flying club there, and they had no availability that day.
• 5:34
  He said, well, if you come back next week, I'll get you a ride. Well, of course, I pestered my parents all week to make sure they got me back there the next week. And sure enough, they sent me up for a ride in a J three Cub with a man who had just gotten his private pilot certificate the week before in the club. And so I was in was in the back, and he was in the front, and he took me up and he flew around and he he flew around this something that looked like an upside down ice cream cone on the ground, and it was a newly installed, what he called a VOR, and I had absolutely no idea what a VOR was, but I sure did find out later on. Holy cow.
• 6:13
  Yeah. Yeah. There was this was probably, I think, 1960, I believe, or '60 or '61. And, you know, we finished the flight, and it was unbelievable. They had a book for sale in there.
• 6:28
  There were very few books on flying back then, you know, on the how to fly kind of thing, but they had one kind of a textbook thing, and my parents bought it for me, and I took that home, and I just read that thing cover to cover to cover. And then I started going back to the airport regularly. Nobody would allow anybody to do this today, but at 13 years old I was allowed to ride my bicycle, or 14 rather, I was allowed to ride my bicycle the 13 miles each way to go to the airport. And they had a dairy farm. Their main source of income there was not the airport, it was the dairy farm.
• 7:06
  And they told me if I wanted to work on the dairy farm that I could earn some flying lessons. So, you know, that was a no brainer. So I would I would go and work on the dairy farm, and every once in a while, they'd say, okay, you know what? You've earned a lesson, and here you go. And they also had a glider operation there.
• 7:27
  And on weekends, I would work walking the wings of the gliders and sometimes, not always, but sometimes at the end of the day, I'd get a glider ride. So that was pretty exciting too.
• 7:39
  Rob Reider: Fully expected, Gene, to hear you say that you worked at the airport washing planes and being a line guy in order to earn your money. But in point of fact, what, you were milking cows to do it?
• 7:52
  Gene Benson: Well, they had milking machines and I was present for that, but I was more working on the other end of the cows. I had a lot of that. I worked in the fields you know, in the summer and the whole thing. They they kept me pretty busy, but they were very fair about it. And I was the the man and woman.
• 8:15
  They they just became like my second parents there and were very, very encouraging of me. And I I, you know, my first official flying lesson in the logbook was at 14, and I just kept going with that. And by the time I was approaching my sixteenth birthday, old enough to solo, I had sixty hours in my logbook. Wow. So when somebody says, how many hours did it take you to solo?
• 8:41
  I said, well, it took me sixty hours to solo, and they look at me really funny, you know? But I I my sixteenth birthday rolled around, and I got my student file certificate, my class three medical certificate, and I was ready to go. And it was a turf runway, and my birthday was in December in Upstate New York in December on a turf runway. There tends to not be a lot of flying going on.
• 9:07
  Rob Reider: Certainly understand that.
• 9:09
  Gene Benson: A snowstorm rolled in early in the morning, and my parents allowed me to take the day off from school, and they took me to the airport. And my flight instructor called, and he said, it's gonna clear. Just hang in there. It's gonna clear. And I'm looking at how much snow was accumulating on the runway, and they didn't plow it being turf, you know.
• 9:29
  So I wasn't sure if it was gonna happen, but sure enough, about maybe two or 02:30 in the afternoon, the sky opened up. My flight instructor came wheeling in in his car, I think on two wheels, and said, let's go. By now, were flying a Piper Tri Pacer. Wow. I'd started in the j three, and then the wind blew that away one night, so they got a PA 17 Vagabond.
• 9:52
  I got about ten hours in that, and then the wind blew that away one night. So then they got the Tri Pacer. So my first solo was in the Tri Pacer, and I was able to, you know, able to accomplish it on that day, and I was I was golden. It was the best thing could have ever could have ever happened. You did tell me you had a great flight instructor.
• 10:12
  I wanna give a shout out to him. His name is Ed Hayes. He's presently 94 years old, and I call him about every other week. He still lives in the Utica, New York area there. We we have a great chat.
• 10:23
  He's a great guy, and I wouldn't have gotten where I was if it hadn't been for him.
• 10:26
  Rob Reider: That's so great that you can stay in touch with him, Gene. That's wonderful. I'm sure that every one of us has a person or a few people who were big inspirations as we as we accomplished different steps along our aviation journeys. But now, Gene, tell us what happened on your Reider Report incident. Set us up when it was, what happened.
• 10:48
  Let's hear your story.
• 10:49
  Gene Benson: Well, sure. It was in 2000, and I believe it was March. I had an operation at Nashua, New Hampshire. By then, I was living in the New Hampshire area. But, I also had an operation, a smaller operation, at the Oneida County Airport in Utica, and Seneca was used for multi engine training at Utica, but I was trying to do all my maintenance back in New Hampshire.
• 11:13
  And the airplane was due for probably a 100 inspection. There wasn't anything wrong with it, just needed an inspection. So it was to be a repositioning flight. Wow. And I was going just gonna fly back to to New Hampshire with the airplane.
• 11:25
  I'd spent the night in the Utica area. So I showed up at the airport, and the ceiling was, I think, 400 feet. The freezing level was at the surface.
• 11:36
  Rob Reider: Wow. That's already ugly weather. Doesn't sound like a great day to fly to me.
• 11:40
  Gene Benson: But I could look up, and I could see blue breaks through the through the clouds. I knew it wasn't very thick, but there were also cumulus clouds in the area. Honestly, Rob, hundreds of times I'd done that. And you pop up through it and you're on top and there's no ice and many, many times. So I filed my AFR flight plan for Nashua.
• 12:02
  And How long a
• 12:03
  Rob Reider: flight would that have been from Utica to Nashua? Not a long flight, I assume.
• 12:07
  Gene Benson: No. No. I I think in that airplane, I don't know. I I think it was around an hour maybe. Mhmm.
• 12:12
  Maybe an hour ten. It wasn't wasn't very long. You're right. So I think I filed for I usually filed for 7,000 feet going back, and the wind was strong up front. A cold front had just gone through, and the wind was 30 knots out of two seven zero.
• 12:31
  Well, the county airport's runways were three three and 27, so obviously, seven's my choice for departure. And I was cleared to go. I was given a clearance to heading, turn left after depart to a heading and directed the Utica VOR, which was about, oh, 10 or 12 miles away, and climb and maintain, I think it was 5,000 was the initial climb altitude. And I did that. I made the turn, and I turned toward the VOR.
• 13:03
  And just about when I got to the VOR, I'm in the clouds, and I expected to not be in the clouds anymore. I was I'd gone through 4,000 feet, still climbing, and I was doing my instrument scan. I was very proficient in instrument flying, and, by the way, I was flying almost every day, flying instruments almost every day. I was instructing instruments. I was I had some businesses, I'd use the airplane for for business travel, and I was very, very current, very proficient.
• 13:35
  Rob Reider: So this is not just in terms of IFR, but IMC. You were allowed of IMC time.
• 13:41
  Gene Benson: Yes. Got it. Yes, I did. Yeah. Yeah.
• 13:44
  On the Northeast, you can't help but get that. Sometimes you like not to, but it's plentiful. So as I did my instrument scan, I happened to notice the VSI all of a sudden was traveling south. Was I've been climbing at about fifteen fifteen hundred feet a minute, and the the VSI is showing a decrease. And my first thought was, wow, something's wrong with the pedal static system, right?
• 14:11
  This couldn't be happening because the airplane's flying fine. And I glanced at the altimeter, and the altimeter was starting to unwind. So, something's going on here.
• 14:21
  Rob Reider: Strike two.
• 14:21
  Gene Benson: Yeah. I suspected ice. There was a little trace along the bottom of the windshield, but nothing really substantial. Looking out the windows, the airplane was white. The wings were white.
• 14:33
  There were no black strips along the front or anything, so it was very difficult to see if there was any ice on the wings. So I had but I had to assume it was ice, so, you know, I I still had climb power in. So I I I lowered the nose. My airspeed was starting to deteriorate on keep airspeed. Stalling would have been not good at that point.
• 14:54
  So lowered the nose a little bit, pushed everything full forward on the throttle quadrant, and set the airspeed up to blue line, and I should have been climbing like crazy because the airplane was pretty light. But I wasn't. I was still coming down at like now, like 1,500 feet per minute coming down.
• 15:14
  Rob Reider: That in addition. But in addition to that, you've got terrain that is rising around you, isn't it? Isn't that the case?
• 15:22
  Gene Benson: It was, but not substantially so. The terrain really wasn't an issue at that point because I was I was I was above 4,000. This happened, and now I'm starting to but it's down. It's starting to come down. There wasn't anything really tall.
• 15:36
  Fortunately, I had grown up in that area, I knew what was there, and I knew where I was, and I knew where I was relative to the airport. I wasn't terribly concerned about terrain, but something was clearly wrong. So I keyed the mic, and back then it was Griffiths Approach Control out of the Griffiths Air Force Base at Rome, New York. Been there. Yeah.
• 15:56
  I said, Griffiths, Griffiths Approach, gave the end number, to return to the airport. I have a problem. So he gave me a turn, gave me a heading to intercept the localizer for Runway 33. Now remember, we still have this 30 or 30 knot wind out of two seven zero, so 33 is gonna be a lot of fun to try and put that syndicate down on, but ceiling was still they were still calling 400 feet, so I I do a circling approach to 27 was out of the question. So I took his vector, and as I was coming down, first thing he said was descend and maintain 3,000, and I think I was about 3,300 when he said that and coming down like a polished crowbar.
• 16:40
  And I he said, we're to be unable to level off at 3,000 going down. He said, well, be advised minimum vectoring altitude in the area is 2,600 can't guarantee terrain currents below that. I said, well, okay. Doing the best I can here.
• 16:58
  Rob Reider: How far from the airport were you at that point? Probably about
• 17:04
  Gene Benson: close to 20 miles out. So I'm headed toward the localizer with this vector to give me an excellent vector. I intercepted the localizer and turned inbound, and I'm still descending. Everything's still full forward on the throttle quadrant. I'm still at blue line.
• 17:24
  I'm still descending. Not quite as fast. Was now I was down maybe 1,100 feet a minute or a thousand feet a minute down.
• 17:31
  Rob Reider: But you still don't see any ice, no rhyme ice buildup on the leading edges?
• 17:36
  Gene Benson: No. I I I really couldn't couldn't see anything, but frankly, wasn't spending a whole lot of time looking for that either. I was like I was pretty much glued to that panel and making sure I wasn't gonna lose airspeed and that kind of thing.
• 17:48
  Rob Reider: And the engines were still producing full power.
• 17:51
  Gene Benson: Yeah, no problem. They're really, they're screaming out there. So I intercepted the localizer just outside the outer marker, and I maybe a half a dot low on the glide slope, not, you know, not unbelievably low, just maybe a half a dot. And I wasn't quite able to get up to the glide slope, but I knew I was safe. I knew at that point that if unless something else went wrong, I was gonna make it to the airport.
• 18:18
  So I continued on in, past the outer marker. Normally, would drop the gear at the outer marker, but, you know, the last thing I needed right now was more drag. So I decided to leave the gear up and did a little mental check of, had I paid the insurance policy on the airplane? Yeah. He had.
• 18:36
  So if we have to gear up, their airplane.
• 18:39
  Rob Reider: I cannot imagine, Gene, that going through your head as well as just trying to maintain altitude. You're worried about the insurance company?
• 18:48
  Gene Benson: Well, you know, when you own airplanes or an aviation business, money counts. So Okay. This might just be the insurance company's airplane here in a very short amount of time. I loved that airplane. I hope that didn't happen.
• 19:01
  But anyway, I came down, and I broke out of the clouds at a little above 400, maybe four fifty feet or so above the clouds. I broke out, saw the runway. I'm gonna make it. Well, I'll put the gear down. So I hit the lever for the gear to go down and nothing happened.
• 19:16
  No. Oh, boy.
• 19:18
  Rob Reider: So this airplane really was the insurance companies.
• 19:21
  Gene Benson: Yeah. It was I thought I'm pretty sure at that point it was going to be,
• 19:24
  Rob Reider: but all
• 19:24
  Gene Benson: of a sudden, there's this loud cracking snapping noise that didn't sound good, I was just hoping it wasn't a wing. You know? Oh, gosh. And it was the apparently, was ice on the gear doors or the, you know, the gear underneath the airplane. I broke the ice off with the the the hydraulics were strong enough to break the ice off, and the gear came down.
• 19:43
  And one by one, I got three green lights on there, and I pulled the power back a little bit. I still didn't close the throttle. I would have fallen out of the sky, and the tires squeaked down the runway. And I went to went to idle on the power and little braking, and and I was on the ground, and I was alive. I was unharmed.
• 20:03
  The airplane was unharmed. So Tower just calmly said, you know, taxi to parking. Okay. So I turned off, and it took a lot of a lot of power to to taxi.
• 20:16
  Rob Reider: That doesn't make any sense at all.
• 20:18
  Gene Benson: No. It didn't. So I'm thinking, well, you know, are the brakes dragging? Where at work? Or there also could be ice?
• 20:24
  And I'm still looking out the window, and I'm seeing now there's some ice on the leading edges, but still couldn't see it very, very clearly. So I taxied over into parking. There was nobody around, and I I swung into a parking spot, and I I shut down and took a few good good deep breaths and made sure my legs were able to hold my body if I got help to walk.
• 20:49
  Rob Reider: All seriousness, Gene, though, in all seriousness, is this a case of all of a sudden the nerves caught up with you because you were probably paying so much attention and had such focus on completing the task, you didn't realize you were scared to death.
• 21:05
  Gene Benson: I don't have a recollection of that happening or having any thoughts like that. It certainly was a tense time, but I was okay. I got out of the airplane, and you know, I would give anything if I had a camera. I had a cell phone, but that was before we all had cameras on our cell phones. And I often carried a camera with me, but I did not have one that day, and those pictures would be so valuable if I could have taken the pictures of the airplane.
• 21:35
  Why is that? Well, first of all, the wings, the ice had formed in something that's called ice horns. You can Google it and see some pictures of it online. It's very, very rare, but it takes just the right conditions, and apparently, I had just the right conditions that day. And it's what it is, it's like well, it looks like it looks like the wings had horns on the front of them growing up, and it's it's tremendous drag, and of course, it totally disrupts the airflow on the wings.
• 22:02
  And I after I was amazed by that, I walked around and looked at the props. Now I was even more amazed because the props were shaped like baseball bats. There was very little airfoil to those props. The ice was so thick on the props. So that was the problem with not getting the thrust.
• 22:22
  The engines were working their little hearts out there, but the the power was coming out of the engines, but the power was not being transmitted to the airframe because of the shape of those props.
• 22:32
  Rob Reider: Goodness. I cannot imagine what they must have appeared to be. If baseball bat is so round, I mean, that's there's no way you could get lift out of something like that.
• 22:42
  Gene Benson: Yeah. They may not have been quite that round, but that was my first thought was, wow, these things are baseball bats. They have obviously had some airfoil abilities to them. Or you would
• 22:53
  Rob Reider: have been that polished crowbar.
• 22:55
  Gene Benson: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So there I was, safe and sound. Unfortunately, no photographic evidence of it.
• 23:03
  Rob Reider: Well, I think this is a good time to take a break and then we'll come back and we'll go over those lessons. We'll be right back. Based on a Vemco claims data, did you know that ten percent of accidents happen while taxiing? Does this number surprise you? Avemco Insurance Company values safety and believes strongly in continuous pilot training and education to help prevent these accidents and promote safer skies for everyone.
• 23:33
  That's why they sponsor the Fast Team Wings program and the Reider Report podcast. Avemco rewards safer pilots with premium credits through their safety rewards program. Earn an automatic 5% off by mentioning you're a Rider Report listener. Call 803539089 for a free quote or visit avemco.com/riderreport today. Premium credits are subject to underwriting guidelines, including a VEMCO recognized training and member ships.
• 24:05
  Now back to the Reider Report. We're back with Gene Benson, publisher and writer of Vectors for Safety, a CFII and a human factors expert. He safely landed a plane that had severe ice buildup. What should have been an uneventful flight turned out to be a real nail biter. Gene, what are the lessons you learned on this flight?
• 24:32
  Gene Benson: Well, I learned that, first of all, if you're if you're gonna expect to punch through the clouds and be up on top, beware that there might be cumulus forecasts, and I knew that there were cumulus there. And apparently, what happened to me was I was climbing up through one of those cumulus clouds. If I'd been a a few miles either way, I would have been in the clear, but just so happened that I was in the cumulus cloud and, you know, didn't know where the end of it was. So so that was what happened there. But what I learned was about complacency.
• 25:02
  I was I considered myself to be a very good pilot by that point in time in my career. I had maybe fourteen thousand hours, and I had lots of real world experience in the Northeast, and I just got complacent about the ice. I'd done that many times, and just because you do it and get lucky one time doesn't mean you'll have the same result the next time, and I'd become complacent about that and hadn't given it the the the respect that it deserved. And I also learned about one of the human factors, this continuation bias. As human beings, once we start a task, we have a real tendency to continue it, and and we just don't see evidence that that may present itself that indicates we should abandon that that task.
• 25:52
  And, you know, I was pretty much determined to go that day, even though I saw the, you know, the forecast, and I thought I'd be okay with that. And the other lesson I learned was declare an emergency. The thought of declaring an emergency never ever crossed my mind, that day. I think my my mindset was, why bother because there's nothing they can do for me here? You know, I can't get somebody to come up here and scrape the ice off this airplane for me, so why bother declaring an emergency?
• 26:22
  But if that gear had not come down, and I'd had a full fuel load in that airplane, and I'd gone sliding down that runway or off the side of that runway and hit something, it would have been really, really nice to have a fire truck sitting there. And, you know, obviously the equipment had not been scrambled because I didn't declare an emergency, and I don't think the tower fully understood the situation because I don't know how much Griffith's approach had told him. He probably just told him that he had an airplane inbound, you know, for the approach, and the tower just cleared me to land. There wasn't any other traffic. I think I was the only one foolish enough to be flying that day.
• 26:56
  So I was I was all by my all by myself out there and declare the emergency, get the equipment out there. You know, they don't mind. They they appreciate getting to practice too of having to scramble it out and get in position. It certainly is is worthwhile to do that.
• 27:14
  Rob Reider: Those are three very good lessons. Don't become complacent, fight continuation bias, and don't be afraid to declare an emergency. Looking back, knowing what you know now, with freezing level at the surface and 400 foot ceilings, would you make that flight today?
• 27:35
  Gene Benson: Well, that's why the airports have coffee shops, Rod. Sit there and have a cup of coffee. You know, it's always better to be on the ground wishing you were flying than to be flying and wishing you were on the ground. Boy.
• 27:49
  Rob Reider: Yeah. It's so true. So true. Well, let me go back if I can, Gene, to your college days. You had a major in psychology, and that has been, you've combined that with your passion for flying and your aviation experience and career to deal with human factors.
• 28:10
  Can you tell us a little bit about how that all came together for you?
• 28:15
  Gene Benson: Sure. I didn't start out in psychology. I started out in a different major that involved more science and math, and I found out I wasn't nearly smart enough to do that. But in my first semester, I took one of my core courses, which happened to be psychology one, psych one zero one, and and I just found it fascinating. I was like, wow, this is kind of why people do things.
• 28:39
  I really enjoyed the course. It was really kind of neat. And the more I thought about it, I said, you know what? I'm just going to do this. So I changed my major, and I majored in psychology, and that was the beginning of that.
• 28:56
  I was interested in how people learn. Being a flight instructor, I was really interested in that, and I ended up later getting a master's degree in education, so I combined the psychology and the education. And then what really triggered me into going into human factors was in the in the course of five years, I had five friends and colleagues, all of whom I considered to be very good pilots, experienced pilots, that had serious accidents, aircraft accidents. Four of them died. The one who did not die suffered life changing injuries.
• 29:37
  He had a stroke while undergoing emergency surgery after his crash. So, you know, these guys are good pilots. Why why did they crash? And came out that at least three of the accidents, two of them one of them was a mechanical failure that that could not be foreseen. But, and one of them, we don't know what happened.
• 30:01
  The one that had the stroke, he has no recollection of it, and nobody knows why this happened. But anyway, three of them were human error. They made bad decisions. And, you know, I'm thinking, why? How how can this possibly be the case?
• 30:17
  So I started digging into the the psychology of it, the human factors of it, and started applying that and trying to explain to pilots how we get ourselves sometimes in these situations that, you know, we may be very smart, we may be very skilled pilots, but I could have been one of those statistics that they do just as easily as the other ones, you know, and the why and the how. So I started putting together programs to maybe educate people a little bit on our humanness and how we get into those problems.
• 30:49
  Rob Reider: If somebody wants to learn more from you, do you have a website?
• 30:52
  Gene Benson: I do. I actually have two websites. Like you, I'm sponsored by Abemco with my safety work, and the website that I do on their behalf is called vectorsforsafety.com. Just spell the words out, not the numeral four, just vectors and the word four, safety.com. And then my own personal website is genebenson.com.
• 31:19
  Rob Reider: Well, I hope that folks will go over to those sites and check them out because the idea of declaring an emergency and not becoming complacent and not having that continuation bias. And I think there's another term that we've heard a lot about the normalization of deviance. All of those things affect us as humans. And if we can keep those in check, think we could make everybody a little bit safer in GA.
• 31:49
  Gene Benson: So really, the normalization of deviance, I have a number of programs that they put together. In fact, on the Wechtors for Safety site, there's absolutely nothing for sale on there. Nobody's trying to get your money, but we have a number of free courses all valid for Wing's credit, and one of them is called, just this once. And basically, it's, about being normal and deviating. We think it'll be okay just this once, and we do, and it is.
• 32:13
  So then we're more likely to do it again and again and again until it isn't.
• 32:17
  Rob Reider: I certainly appreciate what you've shared with us, particularly with respect to the fourteen thousand hours you've got in your logbook. Gene Benson, thank you so much for being on the Writer Report.
• 32:30
  Gene Benson: Thank you for having me, Rob.
• 32:38
  Rob Reider: Thanks for listening. Please tell your friends that we've moved and that we really want them to join us for this new chapter in the same storytelling I've done for the last five years, just with a new name. We drop episodes every couple of weeks so you can hear the firsthand accounts of the flying lessons that sometimes only experience can teach. If you've got a story that you'd like to share, here's my new email address, roboavbrief dot com. That's roboavbrief dot com.
• 33:12
  The Reider Report theme and commercial instrumental music for the podcast was written and performed by Rob Pothorff. For Avemco Aviation Insurance and AvBrief.com. I'm Rob Reider. Catch you next time on The Reider Report.