Being certified and claiming to others to be certified is a promise. It's a position of trust in much the same way is anyone with a licence to practice medicine and who actually does practice is trusted.
We guard the system so jealously because have to trust in the system. Without it, it's far too dangerous for any rational person to even consider stepping foot on a plane or in an emergency room.
This is the most crucial part. Maybe you, personally, are OK with modifying your plane and you accept the possibility that your tinkering may cause the plane to crash. But unless you're flying in the middle of Siberia, there are others.
The people in the house you may crash in, the people in the other plane you may have just clipped in the runway, the SAR crew that may drown trying to rescue you after your corrupted GPS database diverted the plane to open ocean in stormy IFR conditions. Please everyone, think of their lives even if you're open to risk yours.
I grew up in a house that's adjacent to a small grass airstrip. You walk across a grassy field for 50 feet and around a barbed wire fence, there's a barn on your right that opens onto the airstrip. The guy who owned that barn died when the wing fell off his buddy's ultralight down in Florida. Now it belongs to his kids and they're keeping some construction equipment in there until it finishes decaying and falls down.
My dad belonged to an aviation club at a municipal airport (different from the grass strip) with four aircraft for about a decade when I was a kid. I can remember no less than three major accidents.
Once, the mechanic was changing the oil and stuffed a paper towel into the oil drain cock to catch those last annoying drips of oil that gunk up the cowling. He forgot about it and it held well enough for the pilot to make it off the ground, then popped loose. She saw the oil pressure gauge drop and decided it was a bad gauge and proceeded on. She made it about 30 miles and seized the engine, then put it down on Milford Proving Grounds.
Another time, a club member was making a night approach into Lansing and got a little low. Apparently he noticed that the runway lights were starting to sparkle, and that's when he clipped the tree canopy (low-wing aircraft). He jerked the yoke back and floored it and managed to climb out. Thanks to the adrenaline rush he made the worst decision of his life. He called the 24/7 staffed tower at a mid-tier international airport with fire rescue service and requested direct clearance back to his home-field where the tower had closed at sundown, without mentioning that he'd flown his plane into a fucking tree. On the hour long flight back he had some time to cool off and think about it, which turned out to be the best decision of his life. He realized how totally fucked he was flying at night with a derelict aircraft into a municipal airport with no tower and no fire service, and started thinking. He reckoned that since he'd been doing 75 knots when he jerked the yoke back, the aircraft would be flyable at that speed. So his plan was to fly it all the way down to the ground at 75 knots. Turned out to be a great decision - a Piper Archer normally lands at 50kts, he flared at 75 kts and the aircraft fell out of the air onto the runway. When he could get some lights on he saw that he'd knocked several feet out of the leading edge of one of his wings. Repairable, the club fixed it and eventually sold the airplane.
Much simpler one, someone fucked up and ran the plane out of gas and parked it in a cornfield. That's the good kind of accident, everyone involved is real happy to walk away and come hire a trailer to come and get the plane.
That includes the FAA. To be brutally honest the FAA is the poster child of a cooperative regulatory agency. If you make an oopsie and have an accident, you come clean and tell them what happened. They track all that shit, they have probably the world's most accurate picture of the kind of accidents that happen in their field. They know everyone is human and mistakes happen, if you come clean and weren't grossly negligent then you are likely to walk away with a "this is a life lesson: do better next time". Or maybe some remedial flight training if you were a total knucklehead. But if they catch you doing something like modifying your avionics or pencil-whipping your maintenance logs they will come down on you like a fucking ton of bricks and you will never again set foot on any airplane where the flight attendants don't do a song-and-dance before takeoff.
I myself had a semi-close call when I was a kid. We had a father-son outing where my dad flew me, his instructor, and his instructor's kid across the state to a really cool aircraft museum attached to an airport (nowadays they have an SR-71). On the way back they noted the oil pressure was getting a little low, topped it up, and marked it in the log. The maintenance guy took a look at it. Cracked crankcase, don't remember if it was major service or a new engine. Could have been a problem if someone else had flown it for a couple more hours before us and hadn't noted it. That's the kind of shit that gets you if you're not careful about it. One pilot - not even the pilot actually flying the airplane at the time - making an oopsie at a bad time, or in too much hurry to mark that they added some oil in the maintenance log, and that could have been it. You're fucked if it seizes on climbout - and that's when you're pushing the engine hardest.
Ever heard the saying? There's old pilots and there's bold pilots, but there's no old, bold pilots. The truth is the FAA is just the hired gun here. Around good pilots - nobody pencilwhips the logs because if that's the norm then next time it might be them, or their buddy. The FAA rules are there for a reason, hard learned reasons, and airmen don't want to kill each other either or the public. The risks of flying around a several-ton missile full of fuel at 100kts are absolutely palpable in this hobby. A good airman will drive the plane down into the ground rather than hit something that might have people in it. That could be you or your friend.
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It's kind of sad because I know the airstrip is toast as soon as the 85 year old who owns it croaks. His son is raring to sell it.
On the other hand once I got to see someone bring this CASA-212 twin-engine cargo plane into this tiny grass strip, turn around, and do a takeoff. Must have been someone on their checkride - spec sheets says the plane can do it, so let's see it. Damndest thing I've ever seen, I wish I had video.
http://www.jetphotos.net/showphotos.php?regsearch=N687MA
Jack Roush (the racecar driver) also used to buzz the airfield in his T-6 Texan and P-51 Mustang. We would always run out and watch, and one time he landed and asked if it was cool if he buzzed the runway and we were like "hell yeah!?". Then our asshole neighbors who unknowingly bought airport-fronting real estate got butthurt because he was waking up their infant and reported reported him to the FAA for doing low level acrobatics. He got a suspension and never came back again.
Not strictly legal with the license he had, and that's how the FAA plays the game. He stepped over the line and he got slapped for it. But he wasn't really being dangerous and it was so cool to see, he'd dive and come by 30 feet off the deck, then do a sick climbout, maybe with like a roll or something. One time we heard him make a pass and then rushed my grandma out without telling her what was happening, and he came by and gave her the scare of her life. I miss you buzzing the field, buddy, come land again and say hi sometime :(
Another time, my sister and I witnessed a plane crash. Living next to an airfield you get a sense for how fast a plane needs to be going to take off. I saw this Cessna come by way fucking slow. Like probably 30mph, 150 feet from the end of the runway, on the ground. There's a point on the runway called V1 where you're committed , usually below the speed where you can take off safely, so you're in it for the long haul. There's a displaced threshold on that runway because of a gigantic fucking tree 50 feet off the end of the runway. This guy was way below where he needed to be, he was fucked, and he realized it, and he pushed it back onto the ground, jammed the brakes, and swerved into a field of soy (60 ft wide with a busy road on the other side). Clipped a wingtip (high wing), torqued it around 270 degrees, and ripped one of his gear off. But it was the good kind of crash. He walked away and the trailer came and picked up his plane.
We'd sometimes get Blackhawks from Selfridge ANGB and shit in the middle of night practicing their rustic-site operations. Never knew what you'd get, really. One time 7-year-old me helped launch a hot-air balloon that had decided to ride out some inclement weather on our field.
But yeah, in 10 years tops it'll all be a subdivision because the son of the owner is chomping at the bit to sell and develop that shit, since it's several hundred acres of woods with several lakes included. Used to take my dog running down the twotrack and see the lakes. 25 years ago a tornado ripped all the siding off the only permanent hanger and threw it into a tree, and it's only been getting worse since. The owner hardly ever plows the field anymore (used to use a vintage Korean War Deuce-and-a-half to plow and roll). We've been the ones who do the mowing for quite a while now. All those moments will be lost, like tears in rain. At least my parents tell me that they're filming a Netflix movie called "Crystal" there (production codename?) so I hope it will be immortalized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMC_CCKW#/media/File:GMC_2_Hal...
I should get a drone and do some flyarounds for posterity. I used to fly R/C airplanes there all the time, we get a landing like once a month nowadays and I'm 100% willing to trash the R/C airplane to avoid hitting a real plane if it comes down to it.
The air traffic controllers are there for you. They are waiting for you to declare an emergency so they can use their superpowers to help - I've literally heard a controller prompt a distressed pilot to make a declaration. Once you say those magic words, "[tail number] declaring an emergency", you literally can request any clearance or approach and reject anything they grant if that's what you need in order to get onto the ground. They will bend heaven and earth to get you back down safely - they will divert multiple airliner traffic for you if that's what it takes. Tell them what is wrong and they will rally ground resources for you and tell you from a 3rd party perspective what they think your best move is. They are there to help you, the pilot who is fighting a losing battle in their tiny, fragile, flammable little bubble of a world, and the FAA will likely forgive all if you weren't a total retard about the whole accident. Admitting you made a mistake is 75% of the battle.
That's the deal, you tell daddy and everything will be OK. They need to know what actually happened so they can address the actual risks of aviation. If people are flying tired, they want to know. If digital cockpits are too complex, they want to know. Etc etc. That's their mandate. General aviation is a super fucking risky business, they know it, there's tons of hardware failure and pilot error and combinations thereof, and they want to try and make it safer.
But if you try to fuck the system then you will be taken out and shot out back as far as the FAA is concerned. Lying to them is the worst offense you can possibly do as a pilot, either in an incident report or in your maintenance logs. If they catch that it's over.
They track every problem back relentlessly and they will have a very solid chance of catching you in a lie, because they want to make damned sure nobody else ever dies needlessly to the same thing that downed your aircraft. There is no such thing as "nobody's fault" as far as the FAA is concerned and they will bend heaven and hell just as hard to find out what really happened. Every part in every system on your plane has a page in a binder that lists everyone who touched it - they will find it eventually.
If you have a problem, you fess up to your lie right then and there, or you better hope you crash so bad that when you hit every chip on that memory card is shattered beyond repair. You get to choose, either confess and live, or die and keep your secret, or live and keep your secret and spend the rest of your life as a paraplegic. Either way it will be on the ground where you belong.