Same as us, big sky, natural scatter theory. However because of the large amount of aircraft flying collision rate is somewhere around 10-20 per year and 200 reported near collisions.
The majority of collisions occur in or near the traffic pattern. There are 500 or so towered airports and around 20,000 non towered airports in the USA. Meaning that around 2.5% of airports have a tower service, yet 22% of collisions in the traffic pattern occurred at towered airports, meaning on that evidence you are more likely to collide at a towered airport than non towered. It would be interesting to see traffic stats as well though, obviously tower services are vital for very high density areas, but that number shows a huge amount of accidents still occur in CTA as opposed to outside.
Last edited by 43Inches; 12th Jun 2022 at 11:37.