On 2007-07-15, Marty Shapiro wrote:

How do you propose for the insurance company, assuming they
did issue a "weekend only" policy, account for the higher risk
caused by the well known, and sometimes fatal, ailment, gethomeitis?
A "weekend only" policy could easily cause increased incidents of
gethomeitis to flare up. If you are running late Sunday evening and
won't be home before midnight do you plan to land and wait until the
next Saturday to retrieve your aircraft or will you be tempted to
fly just slightly into Monday so you can get home, put your airplane
away, and get to work Monday morning? If the weather becomes
marginal, will you be tempted to push it to arrive Sunday rather
than wait for the severe clear predicted for Monday? This could
easily make for a signficantly higher premium for a "weekend only"
policy.

In some cases, the risk will be less, and more in other cases. The
question is, if an unsafe pilot excercises poor judgement and violates
the weather minimums mandated by the FAR, is the insurance company
liable for the claim? If not, then the risk is actually less. Or
suppose a safe pilot decides to wait until Monday and fly without
insurance (is that legal?), the insurance company is 100% off the hook
for the risk associated with the return trip, which would again be
less net risk. For the gray area, where the weather is legally safe
but on the edge, and the pilot accepts it in light of an expectation
of better weather later, is that risk great enough to more than offset
the reduced risk cases? Perhaps.. and then the next question is
whether it's great enough to completely offset the reduced risk flying
significantly fewer hours. I doubt it because the FAR weather
minimums are adequite a majority of the time, and would have been
stricter if marginal conditions posed a significant danger. OTOH, you
may be right on the money. Good point.

We can also figure that a daily pilot is going to get trapped by the
weather more frequently.. so we would really need some stats to make
that comparison. Since this is a hypothetical policy anyway, we could
always include Monday in the weekend policy and increase the premium
so weekenders have an extra day to further mitigate this type of
issue.

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