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The world of aviation is one of both joy and sorrow. If you work in it, you eventually lose friends because of it. No different for me. Lost a friend early on, when he lost consciousness and flew his F-16 into the ground. Lost another friend shortly after, while he was up testing a new ultralight design by his employer. Could go on and on. Fast forward until today, when I recently found out an old friend (an otherwise good and experienced non-instrument rated pilot) got himself into bad weather and crashed into a mountain.
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^^^In another life, an essential part of my job was to try and imagine the many ways a design can fail with fatal consequences....and they make fun of engineers for being conservative, lol.
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An old buddy of mine has almost put his Cirrus into the ground three times. Iced over twice. The second time was pilot error--I hear most of this in passing across the table at Perkins for lunch--he had to declare emergency. When he got on the ground in the second one FAA inspector was there and in the plane with him shortly after landing; he didn't even let him out of the plane to piss. They walked backwards in what he did and FAA showed him how he screwed up and didn't turn on the plane's ice melt system correctly.
He had to hire a pilot to fly the plane home.
