This is a fundamental problem with the killing zone analysis. There is
another problem -- no adjustment for the exogeneity of innate ability
or cautiousness. That is, there's really no way to know if the pilots
who offed themselves in a few hundred hours would go on to fly for
thousands more hours if they were somehow magically revived, or if they
would have only gone and offed themselves a few hours later.

Put another way, there's no easy way to know if you, as a 300+ hour
pilot not only need not worry, but never needed to worry because you're
an innately better/smarter pilot than those other dead guys. (I'm being
facetious; of course you should worry. A pilot must constantly work to
maintain the safety of a flight.)

But statistically, this is a valid question. Are those pilot's who die
in 300 hours different in any other way other than being 300.
Because the of the partly self-selecting nature of making it to 300,
1000, 10000, or whatever, this is a real question. There are
statistical techniques for correcting this. Don't know if "killing
zone" does this.

-- dave, a still-worried instrument rated pilot 350 hours and a few too
many econometrics classes

-- jacobowitz73 --at-- yahoo --dot-- com

Gary Drescher wrote:
"Wizard of Draws" wrote in
message news:C0CD8176.7FC43%jeffbREMOVETHIS@REMOVEALSOwiza rdofdraws.com...
Today's flight put me over 300 hours total time without bending anything.
Someone here once wrote that that was a statistical milestone with regards
to accidents. Is that true?

No, not as far as anyone has shown. The legend seems to originate with Paul
Craig's book The Killing Zone, which says that most fatalities strike pilots
between 50 and 350 flight hours. The problem, though, is that the book makes
no attempt to normalize by the number of flight hours per year flown by
pilots with various levels of experience. So for all the book really shows,
pilots in the "killing zone" may be less safe, more safe, or just as safe
(in terms of fatality rate per flight hour) than pilots at other levels of
experience. (Several of the book's reader reviews at amazon.com point out
this elementary statistical error.)

Congratulations on your milestone though!

--Gary