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Old 2nd Jan 2012, 12:21
  #43 (permalink)  
SDB73
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: UK
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Crankshaft makes an excellent point.

IF there are many more non-fatal accidents than there are fatal ones, then those accidents could include horrendous injuries. Often, when considering safety we focus too much on whether we'll be killed or not.

A really irritating example of this are the muppets who take their seatbelt off too early / stand up on commercial flights. You can see them thinking "i'm hardly going to be killed if it stops abruptly", well that's true, but you could also lose an eye or have horrific facial scarring, etc, etc. Or worse still, these utter morons could cause the same to another innocent passenger.

Aside from that rant! ... You'd probably find that if you were able to look at all GA accidents, then once an accident becomes and accident it's only a matter of luck whether it ends up a fatal one or not. So ...

But abgd's last post says it all in my opinion :
In a sense, we already have a fair qualitative idea of what kills pilots - flying into IMC; carb icing; engine failure at night; the impossible turn etc... One could also argue that it doesn't really make sense to worry too much about the proportions of most of those accidents, because whichever one we neglect is the one that will catch us out. One has to think about all of them.
It's pointless worry about the number of hours you've had as P1 as a safety factor, as you literally cannot affect that (except not to fly into the "killing zone" at all).. instead look at what causes people to crash, and work as hard as you can to avoid the causes.

Otherwise all you're doing is saying "hold on, I'm in the killing zone, so I better be a bit more careful for 100 hours or so until I'm out of it, and can then just fly around carefree".
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