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Old 26th Aug 2019, 23:13
  #125 (permalink)  
Sunfish
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: moon
Posts: 3,564
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As others have said, “a little statistical knowledge is a dangerous thing”.

The occurrence data is irrelevant. Your argument about stress in unfamiliar environments is correct from my experience, I’ve been caught that way myself.

However that argument fails statistically because you would need to compare AF to other GA flights operating in unfamiliar airports, which ATSB could not do. Furthermore that issue can be fixed by training and mentoring anyway. In any case the AF accidents were not caused by unfamiliar airports.

Then you raise “passenger carrying”, you would again need to compare AF with GA flights carrying passengers from A to B, not just tootling around the circuit on a sunny day or doing a local scenic flight.

However, even without those tests, the basic poisson and normal distribution tests for the accident rates can’t produce significant results or ATSB would have trumpeted them.

What that means is that we DON’T KNOW if the two crashes are anything more than coincidence.

The same argument unfortunately applies to the RPT fatality rate in Australia. We cannot crow about how safe we are because the data is “lumpy”. You could go 40 years without an accident, then lose 500+ in a mid air over Sydney. If that ever happened, you can bet that the ATSB would be calling it an “isolated incident “ - statistically insignificant, random, etc. etc. They should afford the same latitude to Angel Flight.

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