Originally Posted by
notapilotbut
how does one balance the risk to many versus the enjoyment of a relative few?
".
This is the crux of the whole business.
When you do a risk assessment, you consider two things.
1. The likelihood of the event.
2. The consequences.
If we do this for airshow crashes into spectators outside the airfield, the empirical evidence shows that the likelihood is astronomically low.
Once since 1952?
The consequences in this case were pretty much a worst case scenario.
Let do the same for airliners approaching Heathrow over London.
The empirical evidence suggests that this is also extremely unlikely, but the consequences could be orders of magnitude higher.....
So which should we ban?
Does anybody
need to be on that airliner over London?
Where do we stop with this descent into impossible quests for perfect safety?
This graph is for RAF accidents, but it pretty much mirrors the general aviation graph.
The easy gains have been made.
We stopped making a difference with new rules in the 80's
there is a small but unavoidable risk involved in flying as in all things.
All we are doing now is reducing flying because less flying means less accidents.
I don't think that the trade off is worth it.