Another C lost with fatality Arizona City, AZ.

[Eight8Victor]

https://www.kold.com/2022/01/04/plane-crashes-southern-arizona/

 

http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2022/01/mooney-m20c-n6796n-fatal-accident.html

[DCarlton]

I can't get my head around the frequency of accidents now that I'm watching the reports.  Been flying since the mid-80s but I've never tracked the accident stats.  It's really f'ing with my desire to continue flying.  With 10K+ Mooney's flying, I'm wondering how many flights there are a week now.  Gotta put it in perspective somehow.  

[201er]

2 minutes ago, DCarlton said:

I can't get my head around the frequency of accidents now that I'm watching the reports.  Been flying since the mid-80s but I've never tracked the accident stats.  It's really f'ing with my desire to continue flying.  With 10K+ Mooney's flying, I'm wondering how many flights there are a week now.  Gotta put it in perspective somehow.  

The accident rate is better now than it was then so you can go ahead and keep on flying.

[ArtVandelay]

The accident rate is better now than it was then so you can go ahead and keep on flying.

Ignorance is bliss.

[Hank]

11 hours ago, 1980Mooney said:

Click on the FAA Registry link on the KathrynsReport and you will see that the plane was deregistered in January.

I saw where weather was considered to be a factor in this accident, but not the state of the aircraft registration . . . . .

But that makes me wonder about pilot currency and proficiency.

[kortopates]

Last fightaware track was a 8 min flight in 2016, over 5 years ago

AC Registry shows it was cancelled due to expiration.

[Hank]

2 minutes ago, kortopates said:

Last fightaware track was a 8 min flight in 2016, over 5 years ago

Flight aware does not show many of my own flights, either . . . .

[skydvrboy]

If the plane was not ADS-B equipped, flight aware would only capture IFR flights and those using flight following.  The same would be true if equipped with ADS-B using 978 UAT technology.  The lack of flight aware data does not indicate that the plane hasn't been flying regularly.

[Schllc]

3 hours ago, DCarlton said:

I can't get my head around the frequency of accidents now that I'm watching the reports.  Been flying since the mid-80s but I've never tracked the accident stats.  It's really f'ing with my desire to continue flying.  With 10K+ Mooney's flying, I'm wondering how many flights there are a week now.  Gotta put it in perspective somehow.  

Another perspective....

The most recent that I found were 2018......      
2018 had 25,000,000 (twenty five million) flight hours  
1275 accidents  
225 of them being fatal accidents  
381 fatalities

The vast majority of these accidents are fuel starvation or weather related.

if you assume an average of 2 hours per flights.
your odds of an accident are .000153%  
your odds of it being fatal are .0000457%

even if you assume an average of 4 hours per flight.  
your odds of an accident are .000204%  
your odds of it being fatal are .0000609%

 

 

 

 

[kortopates]

1 hour ago, skydvrboy said:

If the plane was not ADS-B equipped, flight aware would only capture IFR flights and those using flight following.  The same would be true if equipped with ADS-B using 978 UAT technology.  The lack of flight aware data does not indicate that the plane hasn't been flying regularly.

agreed, it just means we have nothing to go by in terms of flying activity and I probably should have mentioned that.  (afterall it was you that showed lack of UAT tracking a while back.)

Letting the aircraft registry expire to the point of being cancelled make you wonder though. But I see it happen enough to pilots that leave the country and get stuck in Mexico because of it too. 

Edited January 5, 2022 by kortopates

[Guest]

45 minutes ago, kortopates said:

agreed, it just means we have nothing to go by in terms of flying activity and I probably should have mentioned that.  (afterall it was you that showed lack of UAT tracking a while back.)

Letting the aircraft registry expire to the point of being cancelled make you wonder though. But I see it happen enough to pilots that leave the country and get stuck in Mexico because of it too. 

Perhaps it speaks to a stupid registration requirement.  In Canada the registration stays in force until the plane is sold and re-registered, or withdrawn from service and cancelled.  Your system sounds like a make work project for the FAA.

Clarence

[DCarlton]

3 hours ago, Schllc said:

Another perspective....

The most recent that I found were 2018......      
2018 had 25,000,000 (twenty five million) flight hours  
1275 accidents  
225 of them being fatal accidents  
381 fatalities

The vast majority of these accidents are fuel starvation or weather related.

if you assume an average of 2 hours per flights.
your odds of an accident are .000153%  
your odds of it being fatal are .0000457%

even if you assume an average of 4 hours per flight.  
your odds of an accident are .000204%  
your odds of it being fatal are .0000609%

 

 

 

 

Good stuff.  In my ideal world, two fatal crashes a year in M20's would be too much.  Two accidents a week or two fatal accidents a month is hard to process.  Heck if the military had two crashes a year in a particular type, there would be a safety stand down.  I'm sure the FAA has sliced and diced the statistics a thousands ways, but it would be interesting to know the percentage that are pilot error.  Then how many of those are low time or weekend flyers and how many have commercial / instrument ratings and are professional highly proficient pilots.  I'm sure there are pie charts somewhere.   I had an older friend once that boasted that he had crashed three airplanes.  All I could think is WTF is wrong with you.  Perhaps the process of natural selection applies to aviation.  :/  

Edited January 6, 2022 by DCarlton
typos

[201er]

1 hour ago, DCarlton said:

Good stuff.  In my ideal world, two fatal crashes a year in M20's would be too much.  Two accidents a week or two fatal accidents a month is hard to process.  Heck if the military had two crashes a year in a particular type, there would be a safety stand down.  I'm sure the FAA has sliced and diced the statistics a thousands ways, but it would be interesting to know the percentage that are pilot error.  Then how many of those are low time or weekend flyers and how many have commercial / instrument ratings and are professional highly proficient pilots.  I'm sure there are pie charts somewhere.   I had an older friend once that boasted that he had crashed three airplanes.  All I could think is WTF is wrong with you.  Perhaps the process of natural selection applies to aviation.  :/  

That would be the Nall report. 
https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institute/accident-analysis/joseph-t-nall-report/nall-report-figure-view?category=all&year=2019&condition=all&report=true

 

Pilot error tends to account for 70-80% of GA accidents

 

Edited January 6, 2022 by 201er

[cliffy]

20+ years ago I did a study of all night time single engine accidents to see how safe it was to fly at night in a Mooney

I looked at 10 years of accidents and out of all of them  only 5 were for something other than running into the ground at night.

Lots of them in hilly terrain 

They were virtually all CFIT accidents. 

Isn't that what the big numbers on the Sectional chart are for? 

[Marauder]

Good stuff.  In my ideal world, two fatal crashes a year in M20's would be too much.  Two accidents a week or two fatal accidents a month is hard to process.  Heck if the military had two crashes a year in a particular type, there would be a safety stand down.  I'm sure the FAA has sliced and diced the statistics a thousands ways, but it would be interesting to know the percentage that are pilot error.  Then how many of those are low time or weekend flyers and how many have commercial / instrument ratings and are professional highly proficient pilots.  I'm sure there are pie charts somewhere.   I had an older friend once that boasted that he had crashed three airplanes.  All I could think is WTF is wrong with you.  Perhaps the process of natural selection applies to aviation.  :/  

Back in 1993, not long after I got my instrument rating, I had a mechanical problem while in some pretty tough IFR conditions. It was a wake up call for me. The first thing I did was pull all the accident reports for F model Mooney’s. I wanted to know specifically what caused F model accidents. I read them all and being a data nerd, summarized the root cause. The majority of the accidents >75% were pilot induced (CFIT, over confidence, inexperience, etc.), 15% were true mechanical and the rest an assortment of other factors.

Of course, we will never know exactly how many accidents were avoided despite having a mechanical issue because of a successful outcome (like mine). We also will never know how many of the mechanical issues were because of poor maintenance of the plane.

My takeaway from the exercise was that if I did my best to make sure my plane was always properly maintained and I used the same approach that I was properly maintained as a pilot, the odds were in my favor.

My “incident” on that flight did change my thinking about some type of flying. Although I still fly at night, I no longer do long cross country flights at night. When I fly IFR, I make sure that the majority of the route has 1000’ ceilings. Not saying I would cancel a flight if I needed to cross 50 miles of low IFR. I just try to avoid those situations as a part of my routine flying.

For my decision making, I follow the 3C rules. Current, Competent and Confident. Although I may be current to fly an IFR flight, do I have enough recent flight experience to be competent for that particular flight and am I confident in my skills and the condition of my plane to make that flight?

I even apply this approach to things like flying on days where my crosswind experience may be rusty. It’s just a matter of managing the factors associated with the risk.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of pilots who have a lot of the third C and not much else…


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[David Lloyd]

I did pretty much the same, looking at all general aviation accidents.  My conclusion was if doing the stupid stuff was avoided (continued VFR into IFR conditions, busting minimums, buzz jobs, running out of gas, etc.), flying a single engine was nearly as safe as flying a turboprop. For the last 8 years before I retired, fully 1/3 of my hours were at night.  If the weather was flyable, I went.  Averaged 250 hours per year, IFR currency was never an issue.  Current, Competent and Confident, I like that.

[aviatoreb]

20 hours ago, DCarlton said:

I can't get my head around the frequency of accidents now that I'm watching the reports.  Been flying since the mid-80s but I've never tracked the accident stats.  It's really f'ing with my desire to continue flying.  With 10K+ Mooney's flying, I'm wondering how many flights there are a week now.  Gotta put it in perspective somehow.  

I appreciate the sentiment!  Seeing any, and several fatal incidents is highly upsetting.  It is anecdotal and some people here are citing stats.  Its the per 100,000 hrs of flight rate of incidents that is the most relevant.  But psychologically empathetically, we focus on the crisis.  It is hard to pull apart the two.  As a professional mathematician, I am well suited to focus on the actual stats, but as an empathetic human, it is still a struggle to separate my logical side from my emotional side.

Knock on wood, I have known people to die or be permanently maimed in essentially all of my other favorite activities, driving, bike riding, paddling, taking showers, sitting on the couch.  But I continue to do those.  I don't sky dive... I don't smoke, I don't go to Central Park at night.

[cliffy]

Overconfidence is not a "cause" on any NTSB report yet it is the overlaying factor in most small aircraft accidents. 

I have said this many times over the years right here among other places-

 

A pilot is not a safe pilot until he is "tempered"

A pilot is not "tempered" until he does something in an airplane that scares the hell out of him and he realizes that he did it to himself!

From then on flying takes on an entirely different perspective

Some pilots are never scared of anything. That usually doesn't end well. 

 

Just like the sea, flying is unforgiving of carelessness. 

Even Wilber Wright, when asked about flying safety said, "If you want to be perfectly safe go sit on the fence".

We can never eliminate risk in flying, we can only mitigate it as far as possible by our actions. 

Another old "saw"   Those who forget history are bound to repeat it. 

                                                                          

Edited January 8, 2022 by cliffy
add spell

[N201MKTurbo]

The weather was really crappy that day. Low vis and low ceilings. Very unusual for around here. Does it say if he hit a mountain or crashed in the flats? All I saw was Arizona City. It is one of those Arizona towns with little population and lots of Sq. miles. I believe it incorporates a few mountains. I was riding my dirt bike on a mountain a few miles south of there and found a drug runner camp on top. Kind of scary 

[N201MKTurbo]

12 hours ago, 201er said:

That would be the Nall report. 
https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institute/accident-analysis/joseph-t-nall-report/nall-report-figure-view?category=all&year=2019&condition=all&report=true

 

Pilot error tends to account for 70-80% of GA accidents

 

So, student pilots are a lot safer without the CFI on board....

[1980Mooney]

9 hours ago, Schllc said:

Another perspective....

The most recent that I found were 2018......      
2018 had 25,000,000 (twenty five million) flight hours  
1275 accidents  
225 of them being fatal accidents  
381 fatalities

The vast majority of these accidents are fuel starvation or weather related.

if you assume an average of 2 hours per flights.
your odds of an accident are .000153%  
your odds of it being fatal are .0000457%

even if you assume an average of 4 hours per flight.  
your odds of an accident are .000204%  
your odds of it being fatal are .0000609%

Your numbers are all off by a factor of 100 since you are showing as percentage.  And it looks like you have a typo in your first assumption - the numbers you have are for 3 hours of flight not 2.  A single hour of flight has a 0.0051% chance of accident.  And a single hour of flight has a 0.0009% chance of being a fatal accident. If you fly 90 hours per year that annual risk of an accident is 0.46% based on overall GA numbers and 0.081% of being a fatal accident.  So that doesn't sound like much but if you fly for 10 years your chance or having an accident is 4.6%.  Your chance of having a fatal accident is 0.81% 

But wait - those numbers have all GA in them - the jets, the turboprops and the much safer fixed landing gear pistons - and it includes the hours flown by professionals.  So the risk we face is greater.

Using 2019 FAA Survey and Nall Reports:

106,065 General Aviation Single Engine Piston aircraft were actively flown for Personal use and another 10,816 Single Engine Piston were actively flown for Business - Self Flown in 2019.  Personal SEP total hours were 5.422 million and Business - Self Flown SEP total hours were 860,921.  That is 116,881 GA SEP aircraft actively flown for 6.283 million hours flown for Personal and Business - Self Flown (only one fourth of the total GA).  I have intentionally left Student Instruction Flight out.   There were 734 Single Engine Piston accidents in this group of which 148 were Fatal accidents.

That is an accident rate of 0.63% based upon population and based upon hours it is 1.05% if you fly 90 hours per year.  The fatality rate is 0.127% per year based on population and 0.212% if you fly 90 hours per year.  So once again over a 10 year period of flying that means your chance of an accident is 6.3% to 10% if you fly 90 hours per year (more than average).  And the chance of a fatal accident over that same 10 years is 1-2%.  

We tend to dismiss the risk of flying.  These risks are high compared to other forms of transportation and probably higher than you want to recognize.

I also found it interesting that the FAA estimates that there are only 32,035 Single Engine Piston GA airplanes with RETRACTABLE GEAR being ACTIVELY flown for a total of 2,666,504 hours.  Mooney may have built 11,000 -12,000 planes but I bet only about 7,000 or less still actively exist (lost to accident, corrosion, hangar queens).  Also see the Nall Report that shows an accident in a Retractable Single Engine Piston plane is twice as likely to be lethal than in a Fixed Gear plane. - 26% vs 13%.  I suppose it is because the Retractable is more likely to be high performance but that is not true compared to Cirrus.

Nall Report Figure View - AOPA

General Aviation and Part 135 Activity Surveys - CY 2019 (faa.gov)

 

[Hank]

So many people mangle statistics and percentages. If the risk is 0.46% per year, it is.not 4.6% over ten years.

Roll a single die. The chance is 1 in 6, or 16.67%, that you will roll a 6. Now roll the same die four times--are your odds now 4 in 6, or 66.67%, that you'll roll a 6? No, your odds are still 1 in 6 . . . .

Same for flying, driving, scuba diving or being a couch potato.

Your odds of having an accident in your 2000th hour are not 2000 * 0.0051% = 10.2%!

But people talk, write.and live as if this is true. Please learn real math before discussing probabilities and statistics!

@aviatoreb can probably shed some light on this, if he can tone it down enough for those of us without PhDs to understand. 

[Ragsf15e]

18 minutes ago, Hank said:

So many people mangle statistics and percentages. If the risk is 0.46% per year, it is.not 4.6% over ten years.

Roll a single die. The chance is 1 in 6, or 16.67%, that you will roll a 6. Now roll the same die four times--are your odds now 4 in 6, or 66.67%, that you'll roll a 6? No, your odds are still 1 in 6 . . . .

Same for flying, driving, scuba diving or being a couch potato.

Your odds of having an accident in your 2000th hour are not 2000 * 0.0051% = 10.2%!

But people talk, write.and live as if this is true. Please learn real math before discussing probabilities and statistics!

@aviatoreb can probably shed some light on this, if he can tone it down enough for those of us without PhDs to understand. 

Agree we often mess up stats, and @aviatoreb can help us out, but I got ~43% chance of rolling a 6 if given 4 tries.  That percentage is about the same as my confidence level, however, I’m pretty sure it’s not 1/6 given 4 trys.

[Hank]

11 minutes ago, Ragsf15e said:

Agree we often mess up stats, and @aviatoreb can help us out, but I got ~43% chance of rolling a 6 if given 4 tries.  That percentage is about the same as my confidence level, however, I’m pretty sure it’s not 1/6 given 4 trys.

It's 1 in 6 on every roll. You are not guaranteed to roll each number every six throws. 

1/6 x 6 = 100% chance to roll a 1 in six throws. 

1/6 x 6 = 100% chance to roll a 2 in six throws.

1/6 x 6 = 100% chance to roll a 3 in six throws.

1/6 x 6 = 100% chance to roll a 4 in six throws.

1/6 x 6 = 100% chance to roll a 5 in six throws.

1/6 x 6 = 100% chance to roll a 6 in six throws.

See how silly this is? 

[Matt Ward]

Interesting data but I'm seeing it a little different.  My stats are rusty but I think I remember the key is solving the inverse.

From that Survey, it looks like 7.849m hours personal GA flying.  From Nail, it looks like 730 accidents.  Granted it's two different data sources, but ok.  So the probability of having an accident in the next hour is 0.00009 and not having an accident is 0.99991.  The probability of not having an accident over 90 hours is  0.991664 and having one is  0.008336, or, 0.83%.  Over 900 hours, the probability of having one is more like 8.03%.  That's not because of "times 10", it's the exponential of not having an accident.

So yeah, over a 10 year period of about 90 hours per year, about 92% likely you don't have one and 8% you do.