: Many pilots, in an attempt to perpetuate the "most dangerous part of flying
: is the drive to the airport" myth, feel compelled to condemn unsuccessful
: aviators as dolts or statistical outliers for the purpose of assuaging their
: potential passengers' fear of flying.

Quite true.

:While we can remove or control many
: of the factors of risk in general aviation, GA statistics are a reflection
: of the fact that for miles traveled, or trips taken, GA flying is
: considerably deadlier than driving.

The difference is that in driving, the drunk on the other side of
the road is most likely to kill you. When flying, you get to kill
yourself.

: Rather than dispelling pilots who crash as fools (which admittedly many are,
: read the NTSB reports), let's learn from their mistakes, place ourselves in
: their scenarios, and ask ourselves what we'd do in similar circumstances.

Most of the deadly accidents can be attributed to some form of
poor pilot decision, judgement, competence. It's pretty rare that a wing
falls off, or even that an engine quits outright. Much more often it's
VFR in IMC, fuel starvation, or overloading that gets people killed. It's
unfortunate that arrogance and hubris are typical pilot personality
traits, as these really have no business in aviation.


FWIW
-Cory

--
************************************************** ***********************
* The prime directive of Linux: *
* - learn what you don't know, *
* - teach what you do. *
* (Just my 20 USm$) *
************************************************** ***********************