Night flying in the mountians in a cessna 150,

In article ,
wrote:

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:16:35 -0800, Ron Garret
wrote:

That's true, but the longer you fly (or play the lottery) the closer
your probability of experiencing an engine failure (or a lottery win)
some time your career approaches 1.

Of course, you might have to fly/play for a *very* long time before that
probability actually gets close to 1, but sooner or later it will be 1
to any desired degree of accuracy. So the statement "fly long enough and
you will experience an engine failure" is pretty close to being true.
The question is how long is "long enough."

rg


This just ain't so.

Every time you play the lottery, it's like the first time you ever
played it.

It doesn't matter whether you won a jillion yesterday, or haven't won
in 50 years, or never played. The odds are exactly the same.

The odds of winning any particular lottery are (approximately) the same.

The odds of winning a lottery sometime in your lifetime are much better if you
play the lottery every day of your life (assuming a nice long life) than if you
just play the lottery once.

--
Bob Noel
looking for a sig the lawyers will like

"Bob Noel" wrote in message
...
The odds of winning a lottery sometime in your lifetime are much better if
you
play the lottery every day of your life (assuming a nice long life) than
if you
just play the lottery once.

The odds are only higher at the beginning of your life.

For what you wrote to be true, you have to be calculating the odds at the
beginning of your life, and make some assumption about how often you'll play
(every day, for example), and about how long your life is (a year, for
example).

Once you make that calculation, then you go on with your life. Every day
you play the lottery. Every day that you fail to win the lottery, the
percentage chance of winning the lottery *during your life* is REDUCED (the
chance of winning on any given day, of course, is the constant chance anyone
has of winning on any given day). On the last day of your year-long life,
having not won the lottery, the chance of your winning the lottery is
exactly the same as the chance a person who has never played before and who
will only play this one day.

The only reason that it *seems* like people with high hours have a higher
chance of experience an engine failure is that the odds are being calculated
by assuming a fixed chance of the event over the entire number of hours.
But the hours already flown are irrelevant for the purpose of figuring your
chance of an engine failure for a given flight, as are the hours you expect
to fly after that flight.

Pete