A disturbing statistic

Gary Drescher wrote:
Yup. There've been many threads here on this topic, and (among people who do
the research and the arithmetic) the conclusions have been in line with
yours.

Because the conclusion is correct.

Moreover, according to the Nall Report, personal (as opposed to commercial)
GA flying has about twice the fatality rate of GA flying overall.

In fact, personal flying is the most dangerous segment of GA. Even
cropdusting is safer.

On the other hand, instructional flight (solo and dual) has about half the
fatality rate of GA overall (even though the most dangerous phases of
flight--takeoff, landing, and low-altitude maneuvering--are presumably
overrepresented in instructional flight).

The same is true of self-flown business travel.

What that suggests is that flying
simple planes, maintaining proficiency, and having conservative standards
regarding weather adds up to a fatality rate that is only slightly greater
than that of driving.

If that were truly the way to go, then self-flown business travel would
be far more dangerous than personal flying - the planes are generally
faster and more complex, and the pilots generally are under pressure to
be there on time and will push weather more. But the reality is very
different.

So I would suggest that while maintaining proficiency may well be
important (those who fly for business tend to fly much more than those
who only fly for personal reasons) simple planes and conservative
standards buy you little if anything.

Let's not kid ourselves - even corporate flying, which features pilots
who fly and train a lot more and much better equipment still won't come
within a factor of two of automobiles.

And here's the real kicker - automobile fatality rates are very
unevenly distributed. The teenage kids are way overrepresented, and
the middle aged, middle class types are way underrepresented. So what
does the typical pilot profile look like?

Michael

"Michael" wrote in message
oups.com...
Gary Drescher wrote:
What that suggests is that flying
simple planes, maintaining proficiency, and having conservative standards
regarding weather adds up to a fatality rate that is only slightly
greater
than that of driving.

If that were truly the way to go, then self-flown business travel would
be far more dangerous than personal flying - the planes are generally
faster and more complex, and the pilots generally are under pressure to
be there on time and will push weather more. But the reality is very
different.

So I would suggest that while maintaining proficiency may well be
important (those who fly for business tend to fly much more than those
who only fly for personal reasons) simple planes and conservative
standards buy you little if anything.

If self-flown business travel is also relatively safe, then there seem to be
at least two distinct modes of flying that are safer than the GA
average--instructional flying (with novice pilots but with simple planes and
conservative standards) and business travel (with more advanced aircraft and
more-experienced pilots).

--Gary

Gary Drescher wrote:
If self-flown business travel is also relatively safe, then there seem to be
at least two distinct modes of flying that are safer than the GA
average--instructional flying (with novice pilots but with simple planes and
conservative standards) and business travel (with more advanced aircraft and
more-experienced pilots).

I think that's sort of a backwards way of looking at it. It's not that
there are safer-than-average GA modes - it's that there is a
particularly dangerous mode that drags everything else down, and that
mode is personal flying. I think what we need to do is look at what
differentiates personal flying from all other forms of GA and figure
out what makes it more dangerous, rather than looking at every other
form (they're all safer) and figure out why.

I think (and of course now that we have departed from statistics into
causation this is purely opinion) the problem is twofold - most
personal flying is done by people who don't fly enough and don't have a
real reason to do it (they have no destination other than up and no
mission). In other words, poor proficiency coupled with the wrong
mindset.

Remember, most accidents are pilot error. Not being focused on what
you are doing is a great way to make mistakes - as is doing something
only rarely. Most insurance companies will give owners a discount for
flying over 100 hours a year, even though this dramatically increases
the exposure. They believe the additional proficiency more than
offsets the increased exposure, and they are in the business of being
right.

If we really wanted to improve the accident picture, we would simply
require one to fly 100 hours a year to keep the license valid, or take
another checkride. I don't favor this because it would kill personal
GA - there wouldn't be enough of us to support the infrastructure.

Michael

I think what we need to do is look at what
differentiates personal flying from all other forms of GA and figure
out what makes it more dangerous, rather than looking at every other
form (they're all safer) and figure out why.

I think the answer is fairly evident: Personal flying is not done often
enough by those who do it. This impacts proficiency. Personal flying
often involves decisions which are made independent of the weather,
making the weather a complicating factor rather than a deciding factor.
And since flying is expensive, it is harder to remain proficient.
Also, people who fly for personal transportation often fly on longer
trips, which are not taken all that often. Contrast this to driving,
where trips can be as short as a mile or two, and happen all the time.

So, anything that rasies the cost of flying, or makes it more difficult
to accomplish a mission by flying, or increases the impact of weather on
flying, or discourages flying, will have a component that adversely
affects safety.

Jose
--
"Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where
it keeps its brain." (chapter 10 of book 3 - Harry Potter).
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

"Dane Spearing" wrote in message
...
I've had many non-pilot friends and co-workers ask, "Is flying a small plane
more or less dangerous than driving a car?", to which my response has always
been "It depends on who is piloting the plane." However, in order to get
a firmer answer from a statistical standpoint on this question, I decided
to do a little homework:

According to the DOT, the 2005 automobile fatality accident rate is:
1.47 fatalities per 100 million miles traveled
(see http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/)

According to the 2005 Nall Report, the general aviation fatality accident rate
is: 1.2 fatalities per 100,000 flight hours
(see http://www.aopa.org/asf/publications/nall.html)

In order to compare these two statistics, we obviously need to assume an
average velocity for either automobiles or GA aircraft. If we assume an
average GA aircraft velocity of 150 mph, then the aviation accident statistic
becomes 1.2 fatalities per 15 million miles.

Thus, based on the above, it appears that the GA fatality rate is somewhere
around 7 times that of automobiles. Now I realize that one could fudge the
average GA aircraft velocity velocity up or down, but I'm farily confident
that it's not above 200 mph, nor below 100 mph, which brakets the aviation
fatality rate between 5 and 10 times that of driving. A sobering thought...

Comments?

I did the calculation too, and came up with roughly the same
numbers. Someone said the fatality rate for motorcycles is
roughly the same per mile as for small planes.

But your observation that "It depends on who is piloting
the plane" doesn't fold into this pessimistic ratio. Avoiding
"buzzing",
VFR into IMC, and remembering to fill the tanks sufficiently
and accident rates start to come down. "Pilot error" is responsible
for 75% of all GA accidents (from the Nalls report you site), so
find a "perfect pilot" and its only twice as dangerous ;-)

Dane Spearing wrote:
I've had many non-pilot friends and co-workers ask, "Is flying a small plane
more or less dangerous than driving a car?", to which my response has always
been "It depends on who is piloting the plane." However, in order to get
a firmer answer from a statistical standpoint on this question, I decided
to do a little homework:

It has so much to do both with pilot experience level and type of operation.

Day VFR, Night VFR, Day IFR, and night IFR.

Only Day VFR has the potential for being *very* safe in small,
single-engine aircraft.

No, I cannot pin down what "ver" means exactly in this context. But, my
observations over 50 years of being around this stuff tells me that
experienced pilots seldom crash on good VFR daytime operations.

Sam Spade wrote:
But, my
observations over 50 years of being around this stuff tells me that
experienced pilots seldom crash on good VFR daytime operations.

True enough. However, my observation is that pilots who limit
themselves to nothing but good VFR daytime operations never do become
experienced (they quit after a few hundred hours because flying just
isn't useful under those restrictions), so that doesn't help.

Michael

Michael wrote:
Sam Spade wrote:

But, my
observations over 50 years of being around this stuff tells me that
experienced pilots seldom crash on good VFR daytime operations.


True enough. However, my observation is that pilots who limit
themselves to nothing but good VFR daytime operations never do become
experienced (they quit after a few hundred hours because flying just
isn't useful under those restrictions), so that doesn't help.

Michael

Depends whether the self-imposed limit is imposed going into the game or
much later on after the cat has shed several lives. ;-)

Sam Spade wrote:
True enough. However, my observation is that pilots who limit
themselves to nothing but good VFR daytime operations never do become
experienced (they quit after a few hundred hours because flying just
isn't useful under those restrictions), so that doesn't help.

Depends whether the self-imposed limit is imposed going into the game or
much later on after the cat has shed several lives. ;-)

True enough. My point is that you don't get to be an experienced and
capable pilot without taking some significant risks somewhere along the
line.

Michael

Michael wrote:

Sam Spade wrote:

But, my
observations over 50 years of being around this stuff tells me that
experienced pilots seldom crash on good VFR daytime operations.


True enough. However, my observation is that pilots who limit
themselves to nothing but good VFR daytime operations never do become
experienced (they quit after a few hundred hours because flying just
isn't useful under those restrictions), so that doesn't help.

Michael

The OP stated,
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
I've had many non-pilot friends and co-workers ask, "Is flying a small
plane more or less dangerous than driving a car?", to which my response
has always been "It depends on who is piloting the plane."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Your observation is from the pilot perspective. A better answer to the
OP would include both pilot experience and type of operation.

I have always admonished my non-flying friends and relatives to only fly
with an experienced pilot and only during solid Day VFR conditions.
That will fit them into the safety slot I feel they deserve to be in.

If the pilot who they fly with chooses to fly at other times during the
night in IMC, dodging TRWs in the Rockies with his XM weather display,
that risk is not imposed upon those I am advising.