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"you die when you are supposed to die" implies that your death is a set event and/or determined by a "higher power".

If taken completely at face-value, it's a completely fatalistic mindset: If i am not "supposed to die" until the 27th of March, 2036 (or whatever), then obviously i can do everything i want until then, ne? Including things that SHOULD kill me, including jumping out of a plane with a parachute - which would then lead to the conclusion that i don't actually have free will, nor does anyone else - or else, how could my death by "supposed to happen" at a fixed date?


No, the notion that you don't die until you are "supposed to" is obviously utter bullshit. You live or die depending on the circumstances, and while not all of them are under control, most of them are.

Sarevok wrote: Pretty sure sky divers follow a lot of safety procedures including multiple backup chutes etc. Point is even with all the safety procedures when you are supposed to die you die. Alan Poindexter (NASA astronaut) died this month, 2 space shuttle flights, numerous aircraft carrier landings, combat missions in Operation Desert Storm. And he died in jet ski accident.

Uh, yeah, so?

Are you saying that statistics don't matter? People who take calculated risks live longer. Your bleating about "leading a safe lifestyle and slipping on a banana peel" is just empty rhethoric, since people who live those extremely safe lifestyles do, in fact, live longer. They don't slip on banana peels en masse.

Sarevok wrote:

I don't even know what the bolded part is supposed to mean. Is it supposed to mean something?

Death is outside your control ? You may adopt an extremely safe lifestyle but end up the unlucky one who failed the DC test when rolling for "will i die tommorow ?"

If that's your belief and attitude do me a favor and stay out of my airspace. That kind of fatalism at altitude gets people killed.

Yeah, shit happens, but something as inherently dangerous as aviation didn't get to be the safest transportation method known to humanity by adopting that sort of fatalistic bullshit.

It's trivially easy to show that our decisions can greatly influence our lifespan, and that our lifespan is therefore not pre-ordained. But Sarevok is a Muslim, isn't he? He presumably thinks everything is pre-ordained.

Reflecting on this, it really brings to mind the reasons why "never tell me the odds!" is a very bad attitude for a pilot.

Although it makes for good fiction.

My brother in law started telling me a story about a crop duster pilot he knew. I thought, 'here we go, horror story about a horror crash in one of the riskiest arms of civil aviation.'

But no. This guy walked away from three accidents, two of them hull losses, and the third involved the hilarious-in-hindsight image of a PacAero dragging a power line and the wooden pylon it had yanked from the ground in a lazy arc across a field before the pylon finally speared into a substation and blacked out the town of Bourke.

That lucky bastard kept rolling the dice and coming up seven. Mind you, he was still doing it and I was told the yarn a few years back. Anything could have happened. Obviously, the pay and the career enjoyment outweighed the risk for this bloke.

It does help that those crop dusting planes are so slow and light, indeed some of them are slower then the free fall speed of a human making a sky dive.

General rule of thumb in the experimental aviation crowd is that accident impacts of 80 mph are survivable, and anything you can do to get your speed lower than that increases your chances. It's not impact that kills you, it's sudden impact.