Wow, I asked a short question and this thread has blown into dozens
of postings. I'm glad I'm not the only who was interested
in talking about this.

Also I would like to thank everyone for your thoughts.
I guess most of my friends will never go flying but that
is their choice.


Gary wrote:
According to p. 1 of the Nall Report, there are 1.22 fatal accidents per
100,000 GA hours. That's one every 82,000 hours. According to p. 5,
personal flying accounts for 48.1% of GA hours, but 70.8% of GA flying.
That comes to one fatal accident per 56,000 hours of personal flying.
That's every 560 years at 100 hours per year, or every 28 years among 20
pilots who fly 100 hours per year each. So as I said, it's roughly 1 in 20
within 25 years.

Is it me or do others
find all these stats just completely useless after a while since it
appears that if you add all the percentages up it comes out to
14,284% (Gary I'm not pointing this next comment you *at all*)
I'm starting to believe the old saying, "Statistics don't
lie. The people who use statistics lie." Gary's example is
pretty clear cut but most of these reports are quite
comfusing. (NOTE: I took 9 semesters of math above Calculus I
so my math is not exactly lacking)

Gerald