08/26/2026
To our BAT family, students, supporters, and the Brenham community:
BAT will continue to fly.
We got punched in the face. There really isn't a prettier way to say it.
That decision came after much prayer and many difficult but necessary conversations with our families, our stakeholders, our students, FAA investigators, consultants, DPEs, and other aviation professionals.
We started BAT with the best of intentions. We worked to hire talented people from respected aviation programs, people who embodied the discipline and professionalism we wanted associated with our school. We put safety procedures in place. We set expectations and standards. We invested our time, our money, our reputations, and our hearts into building something we believed Brenham and the aviation community deserved.
And BAT still got knocked down.
But getting knocked down and staying down are two very different things.
Flying is one of life's greatest joys. It is challenging, humbling, incredibly rewarding, and it commands a level of respect unlike almost any other hobby or profession. Those who truly know aviation understand that it humbles everyone eventually.
Accidents have happened to 30,000 hour pilots. They have happened to 3 hour student pilots. And they have happened at just about every experience level in between.
How can someone fly safely for 30,000 hours and then on hour 30,001 the holes in the Swiss cheese line up? Meanwhile another pilot can spend a lifetime pushing margins and never see a serious accident.
That contradiction is one of aviation's most humbling realities. There is no formula that predicts when a chain of circumstances, decisions, human factors, mechanical issues, environmental conditions, or simple bad luck will finally align.
We study accidents precisely because we want to understand those chains and break them before the holes ever have the opportunity to line up.
Experience matters. Training matters. Judgment matters. Procedures matter. Maintenance matters. Safety culture matters. They all reduce risk tremendously.
But they can never reduce it to zero.
That is a difficult truth for people outside aviation, and sometimes a harder one for those of us inside it to accept.
We spend our flying lives stacking the odds overwhelmingly in our favor, knowing aviation will never give any of us an absolute guarantee.
Perhaps that is why aviation demands humility above almost everything else. The moment we begin believing experience makes us immune is the moment we have misunderstood what all that experience was supposed to teach us.
That is aviation.
It does not mean accidents are acceptable. They aren't!
It means that when something goes wrong, you investigate it. You learn from it. You ask uncomfortable questions. You make changes where changes are warranted. And you refuse to become complacent.
No flight school, including ours, can promise that every flight will be flawless. What a flight school can and should do is identify and mitigate risk wherever reasonably possible, establish robust safety practices, learn relentlessly, and create a culture where safety is never negotiable.
Sometimes you can have what appear to be all the right ingredients and the bread still doesn't rise.
When that happens, you don't keep doing the same thing and hope for a different result. You start fresh. You study the recipe. You measure every ingredient again. You check the temperature. You question your assumptions. You listen to people who know more than you do. Then you bake again, carefully, and you observe.
That is exactly what BAT is doing now.
We are measuring every ingredient again. How we train. How we oversee. How decisions get made. What we expect from everyone who straps into one of our airplanes. Not because those things were missing, but because experience teaches you things that planning alone never will.
We aren't interested in rushing to prove something. We are interested in getting it right.
And we are confident the bread will rise.
Nobody should celebrate an aircraft accident. Nobody should be disappointed that pilots walked away.
Our people made it home to their families. Full stop.
That is what matters. Aviation has humbled countless pilots, instructors, mechanics, businesses, and operators throughout its history, and none of us is above being humbled by it.
The productive response has never been to point across the ramp and laugh when someone gets knocked down. It is to ask what happened, what can be learned from it, and whether that lesson might someday keep the same thing from happening to you.
To the students who have called and messaged asking when they can get back into our airplanes, thank you.
To the pilots, instructors, aviation professionals, community members, friends, and complete strangers who reached out privately to share their own stories of aviation humbling them, thank you.
To those who offered their expertise instead of their judgment, thank you.
And to the people who asked hard questions, challenged us, and forced us to examine things we might not otherwise have examined, thank you, too.
Support doesn't always look like applause. Sometimes it looks like someone sitting across the table and telling you what you need to hear.
BAT is not going to pretend the last few weeks didn't happen.
We are going to learn from them. We are going to make changes where changes need to be made. We are going to keep asking questions. We are going to keep listening. We are going to keep learning.
And then we are going to get back in the airplane.
Because getting knocked down doesn't define you. What you do when you get back up does.
We will be back to flying soon. Stronger. Wiser. Humbler. And with an even greater respect for the privilege and the responsibility that comes with putting an airplane into the sky.
To everyone who has stood beside us through the highs and especially through the lows, we cannot thank you enough.
This chapter isn't the end of BAT's story. It's part of the education.
One last thing. Somebody commented that our post about hitting 88 miles per hour and seeing some serious stuff didn't age well.
I'd say it aged just fine.
We did see something serious. We saw GOD flying that airplane. Everybody walked away.
The sky is still within reach.
