DeltaFree,
Thanks for asking, "Give me those stats and I think an argument would be solved."
When safety is concerned, the issue is almost always the difference between perception and reality. I suggest some ernest wandering through the FAA data base (for accident stats, actual flight hours logged each year by type, and the like,) along with the NTSB site for accident narratives. Remember that the accident lists and pprune accounts almost always list the acidents, we are left to try and determine how many successful flights and near nisses there were between incidents through other means.
At the manufacturer, we get to see all the stuff, the latent failures seen in overhaul, the near misses, the crunchy sounding bits that are found on pre-flight, etc. This is a much more full account than the war stories (some misaccounted as they wander verbally through the community) we often get.
A few simple facts for us to debate:
1) The worst item in the aircraft, most failure prone, is the crew.
This is often because of poor planning and poor judgement. In helos the issue is lack of standardization for our operations, so we rely more heavily on judgement than airplanes. It can be argued that all airplanes land on the same runway, we just move it to different places for them! Helos make a living by being able to bend their operations to the environment, so they rely on the pilot to sort through all the factors and keep safe.
2) We tend to dwell on the worst of the worst, because we are human, and it makes juicier conversation. The fact that a statistic says we are exposed to a 1 in 1000 years probability doesn't phase us, we can still say it is unsafe. thats why sharks need the same press agent as dogs, cause dogs kill about 100 times more humans than sharks. Wanna pet a shark?
3) We practice what we can, and then imagine that is what happens. Engine failure is the most practiced emergency procedure, and one of the less likely. I asked my crew chief why he changed the K-28 relay to try and fix a snag once (when it was obviously the K-101 that was at fault), and he told me "I don't have a K-101 in stock, so I tried the other! We practice what we can, and this makes us think that what we practice will be what happens. Based on the real facts, we should practice crashing onto dark mountain sides and into wires!
4) We should devote the next dollar, and then next irate word, on the next most probable accident, knock it down as a cause, and go on to the next. Working systematically, aviation will get safer. Working hodge poge, we will kill all the sharks, and make not a whit of difference in safety.
I will post the best single source of accident data for those who wish to debate the facts, and not the proclivities they were taught through the Urban Legend School of Aviation Safety (I love it when I get nasty!!):
http://www.ogp.org.uk/pubs/300.pdf
The OGP server is down now, if it stays down, you can email me and I will send the document to you.
For pilot and airplane data in the US (raw numbers of hours, airplanes and pilots gives you the divisor for turning war stories into stats). As an example, there are over 200,000 airplanes in the US:
http://api.hq.faa.gov/clientfiles/CONTENT.htm
NTSB Accident data total:
http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/month.asp
NTSB query page, (search for helos and get 1235 accidents):
http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/query.asp#query_start
BTW, DeltaFree, "Give me" doesn't work where I come from, we usually depend on ourselves in this God-forsaken continent. The above sites I found in about 30 minutes of searching!
