types of grief

Denial
This is the most common stage. Many pilots never get beyond denial. We know conceptually that flying is dangerous but we convince ourselves that the pilots who have been hurt or killed made mistakes that we would never make. We convince ourselves that we are better flyers or that our gliders are more docile and safe.
Often it takes a bad scare or an accident to shake a pilot out of denial. The lucky ones learn from the mishaps of others. Eventually, we realize that we're not as good a flyer as we think we are. No matter how many advanced flying clinics we complete, we discover that we're really not in control up there, the air is. We are no more immune from mistakes than the pilots we read about in the accident reports.