On 21 Oct 2006 15:45:58 -0700, "Jay Honeck" wrote:

While discussing flight safety in a different thread, the idea popped
into my head that rental planes are probably more dangerous to fly than
owner-flown aircraft. In my case, some of the rental birds I used to
fly were down-right scary, and I know that they were often abused and
ignored.

This as opposed to my own aircraft, which have been meticulously
maintained and pampered. (And, other than the hangar queens that are
owned by "pilots" that never fly, every active pilot owner I know
treats their plane in much the same way.)

Strangely, I can't seem to find any statistics on this seemingly
obvious (and easy-to-compile) issue. Does anyone know if any studies
have been done in this regard?

It's not that easy to compile accurately, I think. The NTSB accident summaries
do include the owner and operator names, and has a "Oper_same" column, but
there's no way to really tell the relationship of the pilot to the owner. If
the pilot was "Joe Smith" and the owner is listed as "ABC Investments," was the
plane rented or did the pilot just operate it as a corporation for tax purposes?
If the "Oper_Same" flag is "N", was it rented or was it borrowed from a friend?

Certainly there are some owners who keep their airplanes in much better shape
than the average rental hack. But then, there are owners who cut corners and
defer repairs.

I have run a couple of analyses of NTSB data to investigate homebuilt aircraft
accident statistics. For these, I use a combination of Cessna 172s/210s as a
control group (leaving out the 172s involved in training accidents). During the
2002-2004 period, about 20% of the 172/210 group accidents were due to some sort
of mechanical problem, including faulty maintenance. But a third of those were
"unexplained engine failures" that might have been due to the pilot.

All boiled down, between 70% and 80% of the accidents had nothing to do with who
actually owned the airplane...the pilot goofed up. Perhaps some of the
remainder crashed because they were rental birds in poor condition, but the raw
number is not likely to be statistically significant. Convincing pilots to NOT
run their gas tanks dry would save more lives than tightening FBO maintenance
oversight.

It's interesting to note that I've seen the same argument made for
homebuilts...that homebuilt owners take better care of their airplanes. The
statistics don't bear that out. Homebuilts (which, it must be pointed out, are
generally manufactured *and* maintained by amateurs) have a mechanical-failure
accident rate about 50% higher than my C-172/210 control group.

Ron Wanttaja