"Gary Drescher" wrote in message
news:WSaNb.49062$sv6.126431@attbi_s52...
|
| It's important to realize that your fearful friends may be right.
| Recreational flying is more dangerous than any activity that most
Americans
| engage in (unless we count dietary and exercise habits as an "activity").
| According to AOPA's Air Safety Foundation's 2002 Nall Report
| (http://www.aopa.org/asf/publications/02nall.pdf), personal (non-business)
| GA flying has an average rate of one fatality per 56,000 hours of flying.
| At that rate, among people who do 100 hours per year of personal flying,
| about 1 in 20 are killed within 25 years. To put that in perspective, for
| 40-year-olds with a life expectancy of 80 years, 6.3 hours of life are
lost
| for every hour flown. For 10-year-olds with the same life expectancy, 11
| hours of life are lost for every hour flown.
|

Wanna check your math, there, Gary? And maybe you could mine the data for a
little more interesting information. You do come up with good stuff.

It would be more accurate to say that there is one fatal accident (as
opposed to fatality) every 76,000 hours of flying. That would be one fatal
accident every 760 years for people flying 100 hours per year. However, most
people fly much less than 100 hours per year. They also do not have long
flying careers. Most people fly for less than 20 years of their adult life.

It would be interesting to know whether accidents cluster around those who
don't fly very often (less than 50 hours per year) or those who fly a lot or
even professionally.