“The pilot had no knowledge of the aircraft’s stall behaviour at all. His opinion was that the Cessna 185 simply didn’t stall.”
The pilot had 2,940 hours and 8,125 take-offs without an incident and had never practised a stall in the Cessna 185. His floatplane carried floats, a cargo pack, a STOL kit and a three-blade prop, and nobody had documented what all of them did together. It also had a twisted right wing from an earlier repair. He let the plane lift off and climb by itself, it rolled into the lake at 15 metres, and his passenger drowned strapped into the front seat. Experience without testing is just a long streak of luck.