How do you get passengers over the fear of flying?

Wow, I asked a short question and this thread has blown into dozens
of postings. I'm glad I'm not the only who was interested
in talking about this.

Also I would like to thank everyone for your thoughts.
I guess most of my friends will never go flying but that
is their choice.


Gary wrote:
According to p. 1 of the Nall Report, there are 1.22 fatal accidents per
100,000 GA hours. That's one every 82,000 hours. According to p. 5,
personal flying accounts for 48.1% of GA hours, but 70.8% of GA flying.
That comes to one fatal accident per 56,000 hours of personal flying.
That's every 560 years at 100 hours per year, or every 28 years among 20
pilots who fly 100 hours per year each. So as I said, it's roughly 1 in 20
within 25 years.

Is it me or do others
find all these stats just completely useless after a while since it
appears that if you add all the percentages up it comes out to
14,284% (Gary I'm not pointing this next comment you *at all*)
I'm starting to believe the old saying, "Statistics don't
lie. The people who use statistics lie." Gary's example is
pretty clear cut but most of these reports are quite
comfusing. (NOTE: I took 9 semesters of math above Calculus I
so my math is not exactly lacking)

Gerald

The general rule of insurance is that you insure against the unlikely
event that would ruin you, not against the ordinary calamity that
might be expected to come along once in a lifetime.

Thus it is probably silly for me to carry hull insurance on a Piper
Cub. I really don't know why I do it, except that I don't know how I'd
explain to my wife if I had to scrape up $25,000 if I trashed the poor
thing.

But the million-dollar liability policy--that's what's important. I
often regret that I can plump it up even higher.

Similarly, I have thousand-dollar deductibles on my cars and house,
and would go to five thousand if it were offered.

all the best -- Dan Ford
email:

see the Warbird's Forum at www.warbirdforum.com
and the Piper Cub Forum at www.pipercubforum.com

"Gary Drescher" wrote in message
news:_LvNb.59755$5V2.69373@attbi_s53...
Not necessarily. You're right that the statistics reflect an unknown
number
of dumb decisions that you and I might never make. But they also reflect
an
unknown number of instances where a pilot escaped harm by exercising
better
skill or judgment than you or I possess. We don't know which factor
predominates, so we don't know if our personal risk is greater or less
than
what the raw stats show.

At the CAA safety evenings in the UK, they open up the discussion
with the lecturer explaining saying hello, and that just by turning up,
even if they didn't stay for the lecture, they're 20 (or was it 15, can't
remember) times less likely to suffer a fatality than average. Nothing
magical about turning up, just that people who are interested in safety
in flying are those who aren't likely to have the accidents...they know
what causes fatal accidents and avoid such situations.

Paul

"Paul Sengupta" wrote in message
...
At the CAA safety evenings in the UK, they open up the discussion
with the lecturer explaining saying hello, and that just by turning up,
even if they didn't stay for the lecture, they're 20 (or was it 15, can't

Sorry, I wasn't concentrating when I wrote that!

Let's try again:

The lecturer opens the discussion by saying hello and explaining that
just by turning up...

Paul

"Paul Sengupta" wrote in message
...
At the CAA safety evenings in the UK, they open up the discussion
with the lecturer explaining saying hello, and that just by turning up,
even if they didn't stay for the lecture, they're 20 (or was it 15, can't
remember) times less likely to suffer a fatality than average.

That would be an astonishing correlation, if true. Does the lecturer cite
any data to support the notion that it's true? (Even if these pilots have
ZERO chance of ever making a mistake of any kind, that would still make them
only 3 or 4 times less likely than average to suffer a fatality.)

--Gary

All this talk about stats ( and the stats them selves don't amount to a
hill of beans) I drove 5k to 6k miles a month that's 60k to 72k a year. At
the average for most people of 15k a year that made me 480% more likely to
be in an serious accident. Number of accidents I was involved in "0".
Keep your head, know your limits and that of the aircraft and respect the
weather and your can reduce your risk.

What I do when they finally agree to come flying is I make sure they know
why we preflight and what to expect even when only taxiing. Most
important gentle turns and maneuvers. Remember these are people who are used
to seeing the bulk head separating them from first class, and not all the
visual input from a light plane.

You might also arrange with your FBO to taxi an airplane to the fuel pump
and have one of your friends come along , sort of an introduction to a GA
aircraft. worked for me in the past.

"kilomii" wrote in message
m...
All this talk about stats ( and the stats them selves don't amount to a
hill of beans)

Not true. Carefully interpreted, statistics tell us a great deal about the
world.

I drove 5k to 6k miles a month that's 60k to 72k a year. At
the average for most people of 15k a year that made me 480% more likely to
be in an serious accident. Number of accidents I was involved in "0".

I'm not sure what conclusion you're trying to draw from this example.
Statistically speaking, the number of serious car accidents you'd most
likely be involved in--even at 5 times the average risk--is still closer to
zero than to one, so the statistical prediction was borne out in this case.

Keep your head, know your limits and that of the aircraft and respect the
weather and your can reduce your risk.

Yes, if you do those things, you reduce your risk below what it would be if
you didn't do those things. But you don't necessarily thereby reduce your
risk below the average risk among GA pilots.

--Gary