What Had Already Happened Before the Crash?
The past perfect (had + past participle) shows that one thing happened before another point in the past. It moves the story one step further back — before the main past-tense action you’re already describing.
Watch out for this mistake: the past perfect only works when you’re comparing two past events. If there’s only one, use the simple past. Compare He had landed the plane before the storm arrived (two past events, one before the other) with He landed the plane at 2pm (a single past event — no past perfect needed).
Read and Check
This short passage comes from a report on a recent cargo-plane crash at Miami Airport:
The captain was 55 years old. He had received his type rating on the Boeing 767 only a few months before the crash. The first officer had trained on the same aircraft the year before.
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According to the article, when did the captain receive his type rating on the Boeing 767?
The text says the captain “had received his type rating on the Boeing 767 only a few months before the crash.”
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True or false: the first officer had never flown a Boeing 767 before this flight.
False — the article says he “had trained on the same aircraft the year before,” so he already had experience on the type.
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Why does the article say the captain “had received” his rating, rather than just “received” it?
The past perfect marks the earlier of two past events. Getting the rating came before the flight that crashed, so the article steps one tense further back to show that order.
Grammar focus: notice both underlined ideas — had received his rating, had trained on the aircraft — happened before the crew’s flight that day. The article reaches for the past perfect exactly because a later, more central past event (the crash itself) needs a clear “earlier still” point to measure against.
Now Make It Real
Think of a flight, a shift or a training day of your own. Write 1–2 true sentences using the past perfect to describe something you had already done before that day started.
Before you compare, check your draft against this:
- Does your sentence describe two past events, not just one?
- Is the earlier event in the past perfect (had + past participle)?
- Is the later event in the simple past?
- Is the participle correct (had gone, not had went)?
- Capital letter and full stop?
- Before I started my shift, I had already checked the weather report twice.
- By the time the aircraft pushed back, the ground crew had finished the walk-around inspection.
Now go back to your own sentence — can you add a time word like before, already or by the time to make the sequence even clearer?
CEFR Level B1 / ICAO Level 4
If you found the past perfect useful here, the present perfect and past simple often get mixed up in exactly the same way — worth a look next.
