Originally Posted by
Helinut
My suggestion is that the historical gyro accident rate is due to no certification standard for airworthiness and virtually no training.
Which is assisted by the fact that autogyros give you even more opportunities to kill yourself when not being extremely cautious and disciplined (sideslip, fast gyration/yaw, push-over, strong turbulence, often horrific H-V diagram, did I forget anything?), not to mention the fact that there are some quite unforgiving designs out there (High Thrust Line, no stab).
edit:
Regading the comparison FW - RW it has to be said that from a purely technical perspective FW have far less non- redundant critical parts that can lead to unrecoverable/unsurvivable situations when they fail. That can be mitigated to some extent by more rigourous maintenance though.