Gary Drescher wrote:

"anon" wrote in message
news
Our 17 year old son want to fly as a passenger with his 17 year old friend
who
is a brand new pilot. We think the boy is level-headed and mature. He
grew up
flying with his dad who is a retired test pilot for an aircraft
manufacturer.

The standard reference for small-plane safety statistics is the Air Safety
Foundation's Nall Report (http://www.aopa.org/asf/publications/03nall.pdf).
As far as I know, there are no good statistics about the safety of new
pilots vs. more-experienced pilots.

That report includes the statement that "ASF studies have shown that low
pilot time in type is often a significant contributing factor in
accidents." But I didn't see any specific data there to back it up.
The accompanying chart plots a histogram of accidents vs. PIC hours of
experience but unfortunately doesn't normalize it to the number of
pilots in each band and the number of hours flown by them.

However in this case where you personally know the pilot I would think
your judgement of his maturity would be more predictive of the risk than
any statistics based on the group of inexperienced young pilots as a whole.