On 2007-07-12, Matt Barrow wrote:

Do you understand why pilots that fly a lot of hours ( 250 hrs /
year) have greatly reduced insurance rates?

I'm not sure I understand how an insurer would even know how many
hours a pilot is flying for the current policy year. I can see how an
insurer would value air time logged in the *past* (which I assume is
already factored into the rate quote for the following term). Do
pilots update their insurers mid-term to get mid-term rate reductions?

At the risk of being wrong, I'm going to speculate that there is a
sweet spot amount of airtime where a pilot has achieved enough
experience to be considered substantially skilled and current, and the
benefit of experiencing many more hours beyond that point probably
tapers off and simply becomes more risky because they're in danger
more often and not learning and improving at the same rate. I would
not expect the learning curve of piloting to be exponential or even
linear, but rather logarithmic.

Suppose someone has 3k+ hours under their belt, and they're going to
cut back and just fly weekends. If I were their insurer (who
admittedly knows very little about aviation insurance) I would be
tempted to favor the weekend situation over the situation where the
same pilot continues to fly 40+ hours/week, because they're already
well experienced and current; so in all those additional expected
hours I would expect the pilot to encounter more incidents, and
relatively fewer opportunities to improve.

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