Ron Wanttaja wrote:
Mxsmanic wrote:
a writes:

It may be selective memory on my part, but it seems these airplanes
have been over represented among GA accidents lately.

They are indeed over-represented.

No. Their accident rate is less than that of Cessna 172s manufactured
over the same time period.

In 2009, there were 23 Cirrus accidents, vs. 3699 aircraft registered
as of January 2010. There were 3003 Cessna 172s on the registry that
had been manufactured since production restarted in the '90s. The
NTSB accident listing for 2009 shows 23 Cessna 172S models and four
172R models.

Cirrus: 23/3699 = 0.62%

New-Production 172s: 27/3003 = 0.89%

Having between 0.5% and 1% of an aircraft fleet (or subset) involved in
accidents per year always seemed a high attrition rate to me. But I can't
say I ever bothered to check before what the equivalent number was with
respect to automobiles. A quick check of approximate number of autos in the
U.S.[1] and accidents per year in the U.S.[2] seems to yield:

Autos: 6,000,000/250,000,000 = 2.4%

On the other hand, the auto accidents probably include many fender benders
which would probably be more equivalent to "Incidents" rather than
"Accidents" as those terms are defined by the FAA (or NTSB?), so the two
ratios aren't directly comparable. For fatal automobile accidents[3] the
numbers appear to be (roughly):

Fatal Auto Accidents: 40,000/250,000,000 = 0.016%

And idea how many of those Cirrus and Cessna 172 accidents involved
fatalities?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passeng..._United_States
[2] http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats.html
[3] http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/f...tatistics.html