Before we proceed I want to explain that the title is a direct quote from the aircraft in question’s pilot taken from the official report. And I freely admit he was right, they couldn’t stop him.

This is the story of a man who was also a pilot who was in a difficult weather situation. Advised over and over and over again not to attempt a take off, he insisted and took off anyway. Or almost took off. He and one of his two passengers died.

This sounds more like a fable from the time of the Greeks. A man determined on a disastrous course of action is offered help which he refuses, advice which he resents, and expert help which he ignores. And then he goes ahead and dies.

Three people laded at Lake Renegade. They are in an amphibian aircraft. It only lands and takes off on water. There are so many bodies of water in the United States, people wonder why there aren’t more of these kinds of planes. It’s very simple. Calm water is a wonderful surface to land on, but in most of the United States there is considerable wind and you don’t have it. Choppy wind-blown water will kill you. Water landings depend on very calm and stable conditions. And that simply wasn’t the case at Lake Renegade that day.

I’ve read the report twice because it was so hard to believe. A veritable army of experienced and kind individuals virtually begged him not to take off. He went anyway.

Hubris is fatal. I suppose if a man wants to risk his life there is little that can be done to stop him but this man in his overweening pride also killed one passenger and injured another.

This was all a profound failure of ethics.

A man should take stock of expert advice. A man should not without a good adequate reason risk his own life or the lives of others. And above all, a man should respect the forces of nature and make decisions in accordance with weather and terrain.

There is a lot of pseudo-masculine ideology running about these days. I can’t help but wonder if he thought all the warnings were from “snowflakes” and “wimps” — and he was going to show everybody what a real man could do with an aircraft. He did provide us with a useful example of what not to do.

http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2017/07/lake-la-250-n1400p-accident-occurred.html

From the article above:

The staff and volunteers at the Airbase are all very clear that they literally begged him not to fly in these conditions. The pilot may have considered the rough conditions to be borderline and it’s true that at least one Lake pilot at the site stated that he thought it wasn’t outside of the ability of a highly experienced pilot. However, the pilot that day wasn’t highly experienced in seaplanes and he chose to risk a tailwind take-off in an aircraft that had required a tow a few hours before because it had taken on water. In his rush to leave, he either forgot or chose not to configure the aircraft correctly for take-off. It is very difficult to interpret his actions as anything other than reckless.