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An F-18 pilot shut down the wrong engine during a fire emergency and crashed into an apartment complex. The story illustrates why panic kills in aviation and investing alike: discipline and checklists beat fast hands every time.
An F-18 pilot shut down the wrong engine during a fire emergency and crashed into an apartment complex. The story illustrates why panic kills in aviation and investing alike: discipline and checklists beat fast hands every time.
One of my favorite sayings is no fast hands in the cockpit. Where that comes from is there's a really famous, in naval aviation, case study where an F-18 launched out of Virginia Beach and they got a left engine fire at like 300 feet off the ground. That is a really bad place to get an engine fire. The beautiful thing about the F-18 is that it has two engines and can fly perfectly well on one engine. This aircrew panicked with the engine fire and seeing the smoke and all of this stuff, and they shut down the right engine and they crashed into an apartment complex. This is a really, really sad thing that happened. But what happened was rather than being methodical and rather going, hey, let's break out our checklist, let's go through the appropriate steps, they started rushing and they shut off the wrong engine and now like have no chance of making it out of that thing. And I say that because when either the market is swinging on the downside, we get scared and we make rash decisions, or when it's swinging on the upside, we get scared and we make rash decisions.
