Paula;

I know pilots too - in fact, I are one <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I have given talks on wilderness survival to a local chapter of an organisation of pilots that I used to belong to. One pilot did fall asleep during my lecture; otoh, that same pilot died a year later when the wing of his brand-new homebuilt glider collapsed during a steep turn to final on his third test flight (subsequent investigation revealed that he had tried to save weight by reducing the thickness of the wing spar).Other than that, the main complaint I had was that the demonstration survival kit (which I had put together myself, based purely on what I had read) was too bulky for most light planes; when I repeated the talk the next year, I had reduced the kit to the size of a Baggie sandwich bag.

Several pilots came up to me after the talk and inquired where I had bought my copy of Lofty Wiseman's "SAS Survival Guide"; some even wrote down the ISBN number.

Recently, a fellow pilot and co-worker who had agreed to ferry a new homebuilt plane across Canada came to me and asked if I had a small survival kit that he could borrow. Granted, he normally flew without one, but he realised that he would be flying for extended periods over remote areas in a relatively unproven airplane.

Many, if not most, pilots do think about what could go wrong. You're right, this almost always extends only as far as landing the plane safely; surviving a night in the open in the same bad weather that forced you to land does receive remarkably short shrift. (But the same goes for most outdoor activities; I've only read two stories in Backpacker magazine dealing with outdoor survival, and neither of them contained what I would consider useful information.)

Perhaps we should try lobbying Transport Canada and the FAA to make wilderness survival training mandatory for all licensed pilots; after all, it is the pilot's responsibility to care for his/her passengers, even after the forced landing.