How safe are we?

[pinerunner]

My wife, who objected to my purchase of N1289X, said she felt flying wasn't safe. I've always believed what my dad used to say; that aviation was far safer than driving a car. 

 

I googled it and was hit with statistics gave the airlines a stellar safety rating but put GA in about the same level as motorcycle riding when it comes to likelyhood of dying.

 

This bugged me because I still feel I'm way safer in my Mooney than on a motorcycle. On the motorcycle so many things can happen that are beyond my control. With GA almost all accidents are avoidable if the right mix of vigilence, good procedure, and good maintence are excersised.  Many of the accidents that you read about happen are due to ludicrously foolish decisions (like student pilots flying into instrument conditions) etc.  I don't think I'm legitimately in the same category with them and think GA pilots/owners who take the trouble to be on top of their game are MUCH safer than motorcycles.

 

Opinions? 

[co2bruce]

The numbers do not lie. Pilots still run out of fuel? VFR into IFR are rarely students. They are pilots, many times instrument rated, with plenty of hours.we are a complacent group. We should all invest in recurrent training. Take up an instructor, go though some emergency procedures. Keep current. Have personal minimums. Review them. Ok I'm done now, sorry cor the rant.

[yvesg]

I believe if you do stupid things on a motorcycle, compared to doing stupid things piloting an airplane your odds of surviving are better on the motorcycle. There is also the fact that there are 4 seats

Yves

[carusoam]

Training and practice helps calm the fears and minimize the danger.

More training for you...

And some right seat flight training (pinch-hitter course) for her, in your plane. (By a professional flight instructor aka 'not you')

Read early and often...

Share your pre-flight activities that start days before up to the Go/no go decision.

At least that worked for me. Took some time.

Have you done these?

Statistics won't diminish the fear of flying in small airplanes. Separating you from the bulk of GA pilots will.

Get to your next level.

Everyone is different. Be patient and understanding.

During our first flight together, my wife ask that I not watch the other airplanes in the pattern. She was concerned that I would get distracted...

Best regards,

-a-

In my neck of the woods... A significant difference between motor cycle accidents and airplane accidents...

The motorcyclist gets run over in the intersection by somebody else. Usually because the SUV driver is "unable" to see the motorcycle. I get this effect with my small car as well, but I have better protection.

The pilot is in control of his destiny. For the most part, what he does, is in his own hands...

Preparation prior to riding or flying can improve your outcome.

[aviatoreb]

I have collected a good bit of statistics from actuarial reports.  I will dig those out soon for here.

 

But the punchline is flying the airlines is pretty good - and if you are driving a highway to get to the airport, then you are at a greater risk of getting killed on the way to the highway.  And at great risk of getting killed taking a shower in a slippery bath tub getting ready to go to the airport.

 

Motorcycles by my memory are slightly worse statistically than general aviation and much worse than cars. Per hour of exposure.  As you said, remembering that these bulk statistics include all the yahoos of the world.  But how do you know you are not a yahoo?  Even very high pilots make mistakes.  I have two morbid stories.

 

1) The 14,000 hr pilot who was a wonderful guy we all loved, the DPE who did my check ride for my IFR ticket I think it was about 5 years ago, and taught us all the right things about proper choices, he made a bad choice one day scud running in the mountains in a pokey cherokee 140 that killed him as a CFIT. This does not tell me that he was a yahoo - this tells me to be humble because if it could happen to him it could happen to me - make my choices carefully. 

2) I found this out after the purchase of my current airplane.  The original owner of my airplane who owned it for like 20 years, died in a pedestrian car collision of sorts.  He died getting out of his car in a hurry forgetting to look in his rear view mirror.  The airplane never got him and I am enjoying his airplane as mine today.  A sobering story that reminds me to be careful getting out of my parked car.

 

Proper statistics later.  But yes, if you can manage your conditional probabilities, to remove yourself from each of the typical danger categories, then you will have much better than average safety statistics.

 

As a rule of thumb, I believe that 90% of the risk is carried by 10% of the people due to their behaviors.  Strive not to be in the 10%.

[Z W]

Statistically, the risks of flying GA are higher.  Fortunately, many of the risk factors of GA flying are within the pilot's control.  If you eliminate fuel exhaustion, inadvertent IMC, flight into known (knowable?) icing conditions, and pre-flight errors, the statistics would probably be better.  Unfortunately, nobody seems to have performed that study for us to show our wives.

 

You pick your odds in life, and take your chances.  Justify it how you want.  You're leaving this world feet-first anyways.  I just approach flying with extra caution and discipline and enjoy the ride.

[Bob - S50]

Airlines are safe because they have a backup for everything.. systems, engines, pilots... everything.  GA aircraft like ours usually only have a few backups (one engine, one alternator, one attitude indicator, one airspeed indicator, etc)

 

With that said, if you can break the statistics down into categories, the only ones you have minimal control over are mechanical and unforecast weather (windshear for example).  Figure out how many GA accidents were a result of those causes and calculate a new accident rate.  That would look better and be more realistic ... IF ...

 

.. you stay proficient

.. opt not to go if the weather is questionable

.. plan to land with more than the minimum required fuel

.. stay ahead of the plane instead of behind it

.. exercise good judgement

.. etc

 

Good luck,

 

Bob

[John Pleisse]

We drive down dual lane roads at 55 mph everyday, less than 10 feet from a gruesome death and completely reliant on our fellow man. Not so in the air. It is the one place you can mitigate nearly 100% of risk.

[chrisk]

It's hard to come by statistics.   So far I have only an almost 20 year old article

 

"As usual, we find pilots causing the accident about 75 percent of the time with Mooneys — virtually the same as with the other retractables. The Mooney comes out slightly better, with about six accidents per 100 registered aircraft versus 7.7 percent for the comparison group.

 

Looking at accidents that occurred under instrument conditions, we found that the Mooney pilots seem to do a significantly better job. The IMC accident rate per 100,000 hours for the Mooney is just a little over half the accident rate of the other retractables (5.91 versus 10.14). It's even better for instrument-rated Mooney pilots on IFR flight plans, at 1.89 per 100,000 hours versus 4.97 for the comparison group."

 

From this, it appears you can improve your safety by flying on an IFR flight plan.  --Now how that compares to a motorcycle or car, I haven't got a clue.  And do you compare per hour, or per mile. --After all, the risk of death in a car is about zero if your in rush hour traffic 90% of the time and moving at under 20mph.   On the other hand if you spend one hour on your commute each way, you have lost 10% of your waking hours.   And that is a very slow and painful death to me.

[jlunseth]

The GA safety record is clear.  The stupid die quickly, the rest fly a long time. Those who don't train and keep up their skills, and those who make good decisions some of the time and not all of the time, fall somewhere in between.  The vast majority of all accidents are caused by the pilot, or are within the control of the pilot to prevent. More than 70%.

 

There needs to be an asterisk to those statistics however.  If you look at the last few Nall reports, the statistics for GA include the statistics for experimental, and while the statistics for GA could be better, the statistics for experimental have been worse.  They make the record of type certificated aircraft look bad just because they are lumped together.

 

One issue is that statistically, 95% of all pilots believe they are above average.  That is where the problem starts, but regrettably not always where it ends.

 

One footnote - it seems to me that in aviation there is often a "reverse conservativism" safety issue.  An example would be pilots who fly tight patterns in order to stay within gliding distance of the runway at all times in the pattern.  The number of accidents caused by an engine quiting in the pattern are tiny and the Mooney has a great glide ratio.  The number of accidents caused by pilots doing tight turns at slow speeds in the pattern, particularly skidding turns because they blew through the base to final, is not tiny, and they are usually stall spin accidents that are fatal.  Mooneys have had many.  The moral is that you need to be truly smart about how you are smart.

[Wakeup]

You forgot to add the fellow man or woman has there head down texting and driving 75mph.

[Rhumbline]

Fortunately, or perhaps foolishly, my better half says she feels perfectly safe flying -even with me- and adds that she always worried more about my drive to/from work than my work itself (I flew professionally for many years).  However, I know (i.e. personally acquainted with) many more people who have expired in aircraft accidents than in automobile and motorcycle accidents combined.  Anecdotal but true. 

 

When I was a flight instructor, an NTSB investigator would occasionally attend our instructor meetings and bring along a bevy of accident reports, graphic photographs and footage, etc. not dissimilar to what you might have seen in a driver's ed course in decades past.  For the next couple of days I would have a very deep pit in my stomach every time I got into an airplane.  It finally occurred to me, as it was intended to, that nearly every one of these accidents was caused by fantastic examples of stupidity and were completely avoidable.  Sadly, the same can be said for all but one of those I know who are no longer among us.

[Dave Marten]

ABORT ABORT ABORT......

 

Let's go straight at the root of this issue: You're wife is nervous about flying and views the plane as 'the other woman'.

 

Do NOT try to convince you're wife how safe GA is by throwing stats at her - STOP!

 

YOU NEED TO SHOW HER!

 

Try this - take her on a date in the airplane! Give her the full up private plane jet-set experience.

 

1. WX - pick a beautiful day with light winds.

2. Destination - no beating up the pattern, but keep it under an hour flight. Go find a quaint little fly-in restaurant or an FBO with crew car and go to lunch at a classy joint she'll be proud to brag about to her lady friends.

3. Turn up charm! - call ahead and precoordinate with the FBO. Have the car pulled up, see if they're roll out the red carpet, heck even have a boquet of flowers delivered to the FBO ahead of time for her arrival. No airport car? Rent one. Clean up yourself and your airplane. Ditch the greasy airport coveralls - you're on a date damn it.

4. Safety - show her how safe YOU are. Talk to her about the weather, call for a brief, explain you'll use flight following (if available), do a good preflight, reference a checklist, etc. Show her you know what you're doing.

 

DO NOT:

1. Try to throw stats at her - STOP - you need to SHOW her.

2. Attempt to press through if the weather is anything less than ideal. Have a backup plan. IE, if you planned a flying date and the weather turns south then you better be ready to take the lady out on her date (that you promised) via alternate transportation.

 

BL: Once you convince her of the utility and yes ROMANCE in flying you'll be set!

 

Make her think you're little Mooney as her own private G650!

 

If she is the anayltical type then don't debate her yourself (you WILL loose). You'll need a pinch hitter experience, or maybe she'll warm to the counsel of a fellow lady.

 

Use the Mooney to get to activities SHE wants to do and she'll go along (weekend getaway to a B& . Once she's comfortable then she'll go along with you to the local fly-ins and maybe someday you'll convince her to camp at Oshkosh.

 

Good luck.

[DonMuncy]

Yes, a very high percentage of GA accidents are preventable. Unfortunately, if we wanted to be almost guaranteed to prevent all of them, you couldn't fly long trips as often as we like. Going from Texas to either coast will run you through, over or around some weather fairly often. Once you decide to fly when there is weather between you and your destination, you have to start making some risk decisions. In my experience, you can't learn about the risks of getting into weather without getting close to it. Then the decisions about how close is learning and how close is dangerous, are not all that easy.

As to the non weather factors, I think the dangers of driving are a little more obvious, maybe because I have been driving for over 60 years. I don't know of an analogous driving situation to a stall/spin on turning base to final.

Maybe you guys who have been flying a lot longer than me don't have the problem, but I find flying takes a lot more effort to avoid danger than driving.

[flyboy0681]

Take up an instructor, go though some emergency procedures. Keep current. Have personal minimums. Review them. Ok I'm done now, sorry cor the rant.

 

What he said.

[Danb]

Don, I would feel doing 65 miles an hour on the highway over a overpass with black ice may be as hairy as a stall spin, or on the same hwy, with an 18 wheeler in front of you blowing out his cheap retreads. A friends wife lost her life just out of college when a truck carrying beams was to high hit the overpass the metal went through his windscreen and killed his bride to be, he never got a scratch...therefore there are numerous items we may encounter in our vehicles of which we are not at fault which likes us...stats are very useful if your one of them!

[Epiphyte]

I love Dave martins reply,

My wife loves to shop, but she also likes to travel. She tolerates my flying habits because I keep her aware of what's going on, plan, and take time to stop and smell the flowers. We had an amazing montery vacation, last summer. We stopped at the nut tree airport, along the way for coffee and some light shopping. It was one of her favorite trips, to date, and was all done with a relatively tight financial and time budget. Spoil her and she will come back for more!

[N201MKTurbo]

If you only fly on beautiful sunny days with little wind and make sure you have plenty of gas and oil, you will be safer then driving an auto. IMHO....

[kerry]

I bet 90% of GA accidents or VFR into IFR condition.  If you take that out of the equation GA flying is very safe.  

[Bennett]

Statistics about safety in GA can be very misleading, and much depends on the base line: Hours flown per 100,000 hrs, number of flight operateions, VFR, IFR, etc. I think that just about all the participants in this forum are safety conscious, and are reasonably competent. Personally, I think that luck plays a larger factor than most pilots will admit to. In the 35 years (about 3000 civilian hours) that I have been flying, I have had my share of inflight emergencies. I am a preventative maintenance freak, changing magnetos, batteries, vacuum pumps, etc long before the expected times of failure, or useful life. My instrument panels are always built out to the cutting edge of avionics, and I have always have redundancies for most instrumets. Yet, I have had two vacuum pump failures in IMC, throttles that have pulled off in my hand, asymmetric speed-brake failures, brake failures, gear indicator failures, a clear air lightning strike, incredibly quick ice accumulations, complete fuel pump systems failure, two runaway autopilot failures, and more. I'm here today because of a combination of hard learned skills, good flight planning, conservative attitudes towards fuel, and go/no-go decision making, but also a good of luck being at the right place at the right time to have a successful outcome. One of my early flight instructors when I decided to buy a Mooney was an old time Air Force vet. Thousands of hours in jet fighters, bombers, and even transport aircraft. After he retired he missed flying so much he started instructing, just for the fun of it. Walt was a great guy, and wow, could he handle an airplane. One day he was flying with another student, when, while landing, a Mooney landed on top of his Cessna. The Mooney was out of annual (hadn't flown for years), the "pilot" lost his medical years before, and of course that person had not flown for at least 6 years, Nevertheless he loaded a couple of buddies in his old Mooney, managed to fire it up, and on his first pass around the pattern, landed on the Cessna. Of course there were no radio callouts by him at this uncontrolled field, nor were his radios even working, and they were set to the wrong frequency anyway. My instructor friend was killed, as was his student, consumed by fire. The Mooney also caught fire, and ironically, the fire truck operator saved the pilot and passengers of the Mooney, and could not get to the Cessna in time. He made a choice as to which aircraft he would douse with foam and water. I went to Walt's military funeral, complete with the missing man formation. My point here is that there is no way to factor in statistics to that situation. Personally, I play "what-if" games with myself on almost evert flight, and the mental visualization of process is great training for the remote possibility of some particular problem. But mostly, I credit my longevity with being willing to cancel a flight, even with passengers who "need" to get somewhere, if the airplane is not right, and even more importantly, if I'm not right - physically and mentally. There have been times, more than a few, when I have left the airplane somewhere, and flown home commercially - even chartered an airplane (small jet) once for myself and passengers when we had to get to a business meeting, and I didn't feel right about flying that day. So, call me a wuss if you want, but I enjoy life too much to take unnecessary chances. We all take some risks in flying, but reasoned and reasonable risk is part of the enjoyment, but lets not trust to odds and statistics for justifications to others as how safe flying is.

[scottfromiowa]

I bet 90% of GA accidents or VFR into IFR condition.  If you take that out of the equation GA flying is very safe.

I will take that bet.

[ChrisH]

The only stat that helped my ease the mind of my wife was the NTSB annual report on GA accidents vs BOATING (more people die in boat accidents most years). That, and having her listen to the radio while we flew and get an appreciation of how many people are up there with us NOT falling out of the sky.

[Jeff_S]

I had a motorcyle once. Went through all the safety programs but still managed to high-side it coming down a hill one fine spring day outside Golden Colorado. Nasty concussion, bruised shoulder and a broken ankle that still has a pin in it. So far my Mooney has been much better behaved!

 

My best friend from college was killed in a motorcycle accident also in the hills outside Golden Colorado. He was alone at the time and there were no other witnesses, but he was found by the side of the road having impacted a road sign. Guido loved to do everything fast, so no doubt this finally reached out and bit him.

 

The thread I see in both of these (and other's comments above) is that either activity can be harmful but the pilot (or rider) is ultimately the cause of most accidents.  You can't blame the machine...it is only the facilitator.

[scottfromiowa]

Statistics are...statistics. They are what they are. I wear a helmet, boots and padded jacket when I ride...and I look both ways at controlled and uncontrolled intersections expecting NOT TO BE SEEN. I have been called "to conservative" regarding go no go flying decisions on multiple occasions...by my wife. I wear that badge with honor.

If I run my plane out of fuel or stall spin on turn to final come piss on my grave...I unfortunately won't be able to buy. If I fly VFR into IMC...piss on my wife's grave

[Joe Zuffoletto]

The number 1 killer in aviation is sleep apnea. Just ask the FAA. Avoid that and you'll be fine.