Irish Steve, You certainly raise some thought provoking points, which I shall leave to people more qualified than me to comment upon.
With respect to:
The last comment, which may or may not be relevant, in among all the statistics about flying hours, and types and accident ratios, has anyone factored in the passenger kilometers, from what I have seen of it, the number of passenger kilometers flown is significantly higher in the NS than in other areas, so the number of fatalities per passenger kilometer will probably end up being lower than places like the GOM.
It strikes me that both hours and distance flown are pretty crude measures for comparing accident statistics. Neither take account of differences in the pilot workload or the forces and fatigue to which the airframe and its systems are being subjected. Some measure of challenging to non-challenging flying really needs to be factored in to make a worthwhile comparison between operations in different parts of the world.