"C Kingsbury" wrote in message link.net...
"Captain Wubba" wrote in message
om...

It made the most sense to me, when comparing 'travel by car'
to 'travel by GA plane' to use the figures for *all* cars vs. *all* GA
planes.

Except that it doesn't, really. A 500-hour pilot flying an Arrow and two
ATPs cuing the FMS on a Gulfstream V are about as different as a wheelbarrow
and a submarine. Even owner-flown jets and turboprops rarely match the
safety record of profesionally-crewed flights in the same equipment. The
data are unambiguous on this point.

Indeed. And since we are comparing 'autos' to 'GA Airplanes', then if
you are going to start teasing out certain components from one side to
make the data appear a certain way, then we need to tease the data out
from the other side as well. Highway travel, for instance, is
significantly more deadly than local driving. So...do you want to
tease out 'car trips over 200 miles' and compare them to 'plane trips
over 200 miles'? How about 'Plane trips over 200 miles flown by pilots
over 25 years of age' versus 'car trips over 200 miles made by....'
You want to talk 'wheelbarrows' and 'submarines'? Then it is equally
unfair to use auto statistics that include 100 drivers driving 2 miles
to the video store each way and back and comparing that to a Mooney
driver flying a 400 mile XC in hard IFR at night. And when you start
teasing out all the possible permutations, the data really becomes
meaningless. Is it *really* useful to know that travelling 300 miles
at night in the Southwest US during October, you are 3.16 times more
likely to be injured in a car than in an airplane?

I'm not arguing that professionally flown aircraft are safer.
Professionally driven cars are safer too. But even increasing the
accident, injury, and death per hour rates by 50%, you *still* find
that by using GA (even owner-flown) you are *still* more likely to
arrive at your destination without a scratch (i.e. without being
injured or killed) than if you take that same trip by car.


It depends on which definition you want to use. What is 'safe'? Just
for giggles, I asked that question ("Which of these two definitions
would you personally use in determeing if something was safe or not?")
to 8 non-aviator co-workers today. 6 of them said 'Injured or killed'
(which favors GA) and 2 of them said 'killed' (which favors cars).

As any exit pollster will tell you, how people answer the question is
largely determined by how you ask it.

Try asking the question this way: "Activity A is three times more likely to
cause you an injury than Activity B. Activity B is four and a half times
more likely to kill you than Activity A. Which sounds like the safer
activity?"

Indeed. And I can ask the exact same question a different way and get
a different response. I understand what and agree with what you are
saying.


Another problem is that you're not weighting for the severity of injury.
Breaking an arm and being paralyzed from the neck down are thus being
counted the same. Without knowing this breakdown we can only guess at what's
going on.

The numbers don't lie tho...to say that aviation is 'less safe' than
car travel, one has to use a particular definition of 'safe'. You may
feel it is the 'better' definition. I don't.

By your own tortured numbers you are 4.5 times as likely to die in a plane
crash as a car crash. QED.

Well, that isn't quite 'true' The liklihood of dying in any event is
proportional to the time spend performing it. But basically you are
right...and you are 4 times more likely to be injured per mile while
driving a car than flying. But to have a 'serious' (i.e. 10%)
probability of dying in *either*, one would have to spent several
*years* doing either as a full time job. And in aviation, it's been
very clearly shown that low-time pilots (under 350 hours) have a
*vastly* higher accident and death rate than more experienced pilots
(See "The Killing Zone", by Paul A. Craig), then the more you fly, the
lower your odds per mile traveled of dying becomes. I doubt that is
the case withd riving, but I don't know.

This issue is harder to get a hold of than some people seem to think.
It is *not* as simple as just saying 'GA aviation is more dangerous
than driving' It is *provable* that if you define 'more dangerous' as
'more likely to experience injury or death', then GA is actually
clearly *safer* than driving. if you define 'more dangerous' as 'more
likely to experience death', then GA travel is clearly *more
dangerous*.

Cheers,

Cap





-cwk.