smarthawke, thanks for the information on the fuel tank structure of other aircraft. It prompted me to do similar searches of the
NTSB database, with the following results:
- Cirrus: 26 fatal crashes with 10 post-impact fires
- Mooney: 44 fatal crashes with 7 post-impact fires
- Cessna 172: 162 fatal crashes with 3 post-impact fires
- Diamond: 4 fatal crashes with 1 post-impact fire (a DA20 that hit power lines)
I'm not a statistician, so don't know if those figures need to be normalised before any significance can be drawn from them.