Originally Posted by
aa777888
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.
Not trying to prove anyone’s point. Just saying you are making an apple vs. oranges comparison, akin to arguing who’s the best baseball player of all time. The type of flying enters heavily into the equation (i.e. instructional, offshore, tour, air ambulance, fire-fighting, personal, etc.) along with the number of people on the aircraft (more/less chance of fatality).