How safe is it, really?

"Bob Fry" wrote in message
...
"Mike Rapoport" writes:

So the bottom line here is that the accident rate for personal flying is
about twice the figure that pilots like to start with!

OK, let's say that's true.

You still don't address our basic premise, which is that

1. A large fraction of the total Personal Flying accident rate is
composed of pilot-controllable causes: flying into marginal weather,
buzzing, etc.

2. The poster's hubby, if he's a careful fellow, can reduce that
fraction of accidents and thus be pretty safe--perhaps approaching
ground vehicle safety, perhaps not, but certainly reducing his
personal accident rate below the average rate, whatever it is.

I still would say that one's personal flying accident rate is probably
going to be higher than one's personal driving accident rate, but it
need not conform to average statistical rates, because flying
accidents are more preventable than driving accidents.


OK thats fair, I never objected that pilots don't have some control over the
risk. I object to the notion that they can reduce their accident risk by
90% or so and I object to the practice of using numbers that have much safer
flying included. The reality is that a *lot* of fatal personal flying
accidents are not marginal weather or stupid pilot tricks. Only 13% of
fatal accidents are attributed to weather and presumably VFR into IMC is
only a portion of this. Mechanical/maitenance is 14% and we an not talking
about lack of maitenance we are talking about maitenance errors. Only 6% of
the 70% pilot related accidents are attributed to fuel mis-management.
There are a *lot* of accidents that aren't avoided by prudence. We might as
well accept that.

Mike
MU-2