Roger wrote:

On Thu, 12 May 2005 23:22:24 -0400, "Gary Drescher"
wrote:


"Peter" wrote in message
...

Gary Drescher wrote:

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.

Yup. Plus, low time in type is different from being recently licensed as a
pilot.


"It seems" as if I read some where a freshly minted pilot is one of
the safest times, but ... that is an old and foggy memory.

The report referenced above indicates that student pilots have only
about half the number of accidents (7.7%) that one would expect based on
their percentage of the total pilot population (15.3%). It also
mentions factors that may account for this: level of supervision and
flying only under good conditions.

One of the worst times is some where around 500 hours.

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.

Yup. Paul Craig's book The Killing Zone has the same problem. Without
normalization, the data tell us nothing about how safety might vary as a
function of experience.

The perception that around 500 hours is more risky may come from that
non-normalized chart in the report since it shows a high percentage of
accidents associated with the pilots who had up to 500 hours of
experience as PIC. But, as mentioned before, this data needs to be
normalized relative to the number of pilots and hours flown before one
can draw any conclusions about relative safety.