Originally Posted by
JimEli
I think you're talking about the FAA Annual General Aviation (GA) and Part 135 Activity Survey. A strictly voluntary survey distributed by mail to a representative sample of GA and on-demand Part 135 aircraft owners and operators. How could that be used to determine hours by tail number or type? The survey is designed to estimate the size, primary use, and flight hours of the entire GA fleet.
Thank you, Jim. Exactly! You are making my case for me. There is NO WAY that the FAA or anyone else has any sort of reliable and complete data on how many hours each type of helicopter flies. Thus the famous LA Times "Danger Spins From the Sky" article is predicated on data that could not possibly exist in any sort of accurate form.
If I'm wrong about this I'd gladly accept correction, because I'd really love to have the data to look at myself. Alas, the only hard data that appears to exist is the NTSB aviation accident database, which does not track operational hours. There is also the FAA aircraft registration database, so the number of aircraft of each type can be also be accurately known. I've done that dance, and published it on PPRuNe, and when scaled for fleet size Robinson compares well to Bell. But, again, no operational hour data.