Ladies and gents, thank you very much (and particularly Pilot DAR for the journal reference, which I'd not come across - but certainly will be tracking down PDQ).
I'm helping out an organisation called GASCo, which will be familiar to most UK pilots, but for those outside the UK, is a joint industry/association/CAA managed body whose objective is promoting GA safety in the UK. GASCo has been doing (and is still doing) an analysis of UK GA fatal accidents since 1980, looking for any trends.
Whilst the UK accident rate is pretty damned good, and consistently improving over that time, there are nonetheless a few interesting trends to this. One, which surprised nobody is that the majority of GA fatals involve a stall or spin in there somewhere. Another, which did surprise us was a factor 16 difference between the C150 and C152 - per flying hour the C150 is 16 times more likely to suffer a stall/spin related fatal accident. (Please nobody take a message from this that the C150 is unsafe, it isn't - but this is nonetheless a marked difference). Pretty much all of the accidents result from a loss of control in low level manoeuvring somewhere.
So, I've undertaken to try and answer the simple question - "why?". This will take a while, and I'm fairly well set up to do this, but one of things I really want to get a handle on, so that I can construct my assessment of the differences between the two types, is how people operate the C150 for real - not by the manual, not necessarily the opinions of a very experienced and safe pilot like PilotDAR (although as a baseline of how it can be done, that post is nonetheless extremely useful!), but what is really done.
It'll probably be 2008 before (the results from) what I'm up to is openly publishable, so in the meantime, thanks folks for your help, and any further views - particularly on how the C150 actually is operated are very much welcomed. (Incidentally there are other trends, which will get published in good time, that I or others - Irv is very involved also, and the whole effort is being run by MikeJ are/will look into).
Why are we doing this? Well pure curiosity is in there somewhere, but the hope is that we can learn lessons from the differences between these two, quite similar, aeroplanes that can be fed into both flying training and aeroplane design towards minimising future fatal departures from controlled flight - something that we'd all like to see.
G