For those unfortunate souls who haven’t come across the genius of the Darwin Awards before, I will give you a brief overview before we crack on:

Winners of the coveted Darwin Award are people who have shown their stupidity by dying in ridiculous ways, consequently removing themselves from the reproducing masses. In a nutshell, the award is given to people who’ve removed their crappy thicko sperm from our glittering gene pool. If you missed part one of the Best Of The Darwin Awards click on that.

Here’s a few of my faves…

Don’t Drink And Fly

Our first tale today is of an airborne nature, set in Massachusetts. A pilot landed his Piper PA-32-300 at New Bedford airport without a hitch. He wanted to get some beer inside of him so he put a gust lock on the steering column and went off for a jolly. A gust lock is the aeronautical version of a steering lock and it basically locks the plane’s steering column right back and covers up the ignition key slot.

For some reason this chap put the gust lock on the co-pilot’s side rather then the pilot’s side. Putting it on that side isn’t a problem, unless you return to your craft under the influence of booze and forget it’s on there. Which he did.

The aircraft shot off in a steep ascent and the panicked numb-nut went into melt down. The key for the lock is on the same set as the ignition key so he had two options: remove the key from the fob which as everyone knows is a nightmare to do at the best of times and would defo take longer than he had. Or, turn off the engine, remove the key, remove the lock then restart the plane. Neither of those options are great and it appears he went for the latter.

His destroyed plane was found with the lock still on and both keys on the floor of the cockpit. That’s what happens if you fly a plane with 155 mg/dL of ethanol in your blood.

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