Originally Posted by
2Donkeys
Lots of scope for playing with the NTSB's statistics as I know you are well aware. The gap changes if one takes into account the number of fatalities as opposed to the number of fatal accidents, for example.
As a passenger boarding an aircraft, I care only about the likelihood of me surviving the journey. If I die, I don't care how many people die with me.
If you start to consider the effect of aircraft size, the gap actually
widens: if I'm one of 100 pax on an airliner on which one person dies, I've still been involved in a fatal accident, even though I have a 99% chance of surviving that fatal accident. My chances of surviving a "fatal accident" (an accident in which at least one person died) in a Lance or Twin Comanche are rather worse.
Or put another way, if you want to look at total fatalities in the numerator, the correct denominator is not flight-hours but
passenger-flight-hours. Either way you cut it, GA looks worse not better.
If you look at the rates per
mile rather than per hour, GA again looks worse because it's slower.
Only if you look at the rates per
flight is there a little solace for GA, because our flights tend to be shorter on average than the 1.8 hours of a Part-121 scheduled carrier. Per flight, we may well be
only 100 times more at risk than an airliner, compared to 400 times more at risk if you count hours.