JimL,
This link takes you to an FAA document that compares JAR Safety measures to the FAA standard and defines incident rates and other measures used.
http://www.faa.gov/library/manuals/a...Chap3_1200.PDF
While you were posting I was googling and found the following at a previous posting here at pprune by Nick.
At the risk of incurring his wrath twice in one day.....here is his post from before.
Nick Lappos18th October 2002, 13:00
Some statistic approximations about failures, (a failure is a total catastrophic loss of full function):
Turbine engines fail at about 1: 250,000 hours for engine cause, about 1:100,000 hours for all causes (fuel lines, tanks, pilot fingers on switches).
Transmissions, rotors and such tough stuff fails about 1:10,000,000 hours to 1:100,000,000)
So, for a 10,000 helicopter fleet, where they each fly 500 hours per year, (this is approximately the world's civil helo fleet) we collectively log 5 million hours per year.
At the above failure rates, we can expect an engine failure every week (50 per year), a main rotor or main transmission failure every two years.
If we include all the military helos in the world (10,000 in the US alone, about the same for the rest of the world) we would triple the usage, and therefore increase the likelihood of occurrence by a factor of three.
Three engine failures a week, and a major rotor/transmission failure every 8 months.
To examine what it means to any one of us, we have to fly 200 years at 500 hours per year to get an engine failure, and we have to fly for 20,000 years before a transmission or rotor fails.
To compare to cars, in the US, one person dies about every 25,000,000 miles driven (100 million cars at 10,000 miles each, at 40,000 fatalities). If you drive 10,000 miles per year, you can expect to be killed every 2500 years in your car. This is slightly conservative, because there might be more than one occupant in the typical car, but then again, everything else in this post isn an approximation