Flight safety

[Hairyplane]

Hi all!

I have been asked the question 'how safe is a flight in a light aircraft compared to other activities?'

I would suggest driving, motorcycling, skiing, cycling and horseriding as a comparison although how meaningful it can be..well..I dunno....

We have all heard the expression' the most dangerous think about flying is the drive to the airport'.

This statement is of course incorrect when applied to light aircraft, at least when the entire spectrum of light aircraft flying is considered.

However, I believe that a flight in a well maintained (PTCofA) aircraft, flown by a current and experienced pilot in good VFR, on a non aerobatic/ non display flight removes a lot of the risk.

Certainly the big killers -CFIT/ Loss of control in IMC etc. - are'nt there in the above scenario.

I have studied CAP 735 - a mighty 54-page tome - and have found some very interesting data on it.

However, comparisons as above are not within the scope of 735.

Can anybody point me in the right direction please?

I believe I did see one somewhere. Maybe I didn't....

For those really interested in safety stats - try CAP 701 and the older CAP 667.

All are on the CAA website.

See what you can do for me on the above. First one to point me in the direction of a properly structured report of the nature I seek gets a flight in the yellow cabrio!

All the best.

HP

[Gertrude the Wombat]

We have all heard the expression' the most dangerous think about flying is the drive to the airport'. Well, I've certainly heard that from some of my passengers :O - as in, as we pull into the airport car park, "I hope you're not going to be flying like that".

[phnuff]

Try asking insurance companies. So many policies say something along the lines of 'excluded if flying in an aircraft if it is not as a fare paying passenger " While I would probably disagree with their assessment, it must be based on something

[Evo]

I believe and assume that the risk is somewhat akin to riding a motorcycle - i.e. considerably more dangerous than driving a car - although based on my attempts at getting life insurance, the typical life insurer thinks it is more dangerous than that (a specialist sorted that one out). However, I think a major difference between flying and most other potentially-dangerous pursuits is that there are fairly few accidents that are totally outside your control - most can be either avoided by some sensible decision making or prepared for by training and currency. I would be interested to know how the "there but for the grace of god go I" accidents stack up against the ones that would earn you a page in "the Killing Zone", but I bet there are many more of the latter.

As to the measure of risk, god knows how the numbers are worked out, because we all know the issues with counting accidents per mile, per hour flown etc. Commercial air travel looks remarkably good when measured against driving the same distance, but less good per trip - and we all know that takeoff/landing is much more dangerous than the cruise. Lies, damn lies etc...

(edited for content, then spelling...:rolleyes: )

[Barshifter]

most can be avoided by some sensible decision making


Yep that was this morning.I decided to stay on the deck for 10 mins longer at the private airfield I fly from only to then witness a Hawk trainer fly over the hangar roof at about 200 ft AGL.


Tommorows another Day!!!



Cheers

Barshifter

[dublinpilot]

Well I'm not under the illusions that flying a light aircraft is safe. However from reading the accident reports in the usual flying mags, it would seem that the majority of accidents are easily avoidable.

If you take the propper steps and don't get lazy or over confident, the risks shouldn't be too high.

At least that's what I tell myself everytime I find myself rushed going flying. Force myself to slow down, and make sure I avoid all the silly mistakes that I can.

dp

[High Wing Drifter]

Interestingly, my life assurance attached to my mortgage covers me so long as I fly less that 100hrs/annum. Either they think the more you fly to more likely you are to hurt yourself or they have another more expensive product waiting in the wings - so to speak.

[Flyin'Dutch']

HP,

Much as we dislike it, the truth is that the flying we do is more dangerous to us participants than we like to think it is.

I have been around aviation for all my life and can without any problem come up with the names of at least half a dozen friends/acquaintances who got killed/killed themselves while flying.

Although I know a lot more people that drive than fly, I would struggle to find even half that number killed on the roads.

Insurance companies are just a bunch of boring actuaries who look at the statistics and distill premiums on the bases of them. If the sort of flying we do would be within the 'normal background risk' they would not bother charging extra. As it stands they are happy to accept people riding bikes and horses and obviously not us aviators.

Now looking into the why these accidents happen is an interesting pastime.

FD

[Polly Gnome]

I understand about 12 people are killed a year flying. There are about 30,000 PPLs (but not all are current) and about 15,000 commercial pilots (some of whom must be involved with GA). Most current PPLs seem to fly less than 30 hours a year. It must be possible to work out some statistics.

However, I also understand that light aircraft are less dangerous than helicopters, gliders and microlights - in that order. Aerobatics and flying historic aircraft also seem to carry more risk.

Friends of mine dive and say one person a month dies just at the site where they dive. Other friends ride horses and although it is rare for people to get killed just 'riding out', cross country jumping is dangerous. Apparently angling is dangerous, but why I am not sure - I suspect the anglers' neglected wives push them in the water!!

[drauk]

There is an interesting perspective on this topic here (http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety)

[IO540]

FD

Insurance companies are just a bunch of boring actuaries who look at the statistics and distill premiums on the bases of them

That's true but they often lump one group in with another. For example if you go back more than 25 years, motorcycle insurance was very cheap. You could have insured a 1000cc bike for £10/year. The companies did not properly separate the motorcycle accident rate from the car figures. Then suddenly they discovered this, and the premiums went up several times.

Most life insurers will not load a PPL who flies <100hrs/year.

Personally I feel safer flying 200 miles than driving the same distance on a crowded motorway, with a lot of people zigzagging while on the phone :O But I would not say the same if I was in a 1970 C150... I also used to ride motorbikes a lot but would not do so today.

I don't think the calculated PPL accident figures make any sense whatever as far as an individual pilot's risk is concerned - because of the huge variation in # of hrs flown, huge variation in the quality of aircraft, in the quality of maintenance of same, in pilots' currency, attitudes to safety, etc.

[Flyin'Dutch']

IO wrote:

Personally I feel safer flying 200 miles than driving the same distance on a crowded motorway, with a lot of people zigzagging while on the phone But I would not say the same if I was in a 1970 C150... I also used to ride motorbikes a lot but would not do so today.

I wish I could say the same but am afraid that looking at the accident statistics by those involved in accident investigation must be akin to me talking to my teenagers.

The same (sometimes stupid) mistakes are made over and over again and some argue that this is in part due to the personality make up that most of us that fly are made of.

I was recently in Oklahoma and visited the FAA and looking at their stats was pretty im- or depressive.

Whilst the accident rates declined a lot over the first half of the last century due to the fact that we learned more about making aeroplanes more reliable and safer to operate, the curve is now a plateau as it seems impossible to make those that handle the controls better at avoiding accidents.

We comfort ourselves (at least I do) by reading the reports and thinking that we would never do anything as reported upon, but I think that if we look a bit closer at our own performance that we can all write a couple of 'I learned about flying from that columns' and have no doubt that those who have come to grief in accidents did the same.

Just be careful out there.

FD

[IO540]

FD

I agree with you. I however maintain that we as individuals can do a great deal to make a flight safer.

I am sure that the GA accident statistics do not adequately analyse the personalities involved. I say this because the pilots I have met range from very careless to very careful, but the investigators don't usually access this after the event. They report the total hrs and hrs in the last 90 days; that's about it. But they have no data plotting the % chance of getting killed on the y axis versus the "% clown factor" on the x axis :O I know pilots who most people around reckon won't last very long because of their dead casual attitude, but that isn't going to get analysed.

Maybe it is a false sense of security, I don't know, but I think that just being very careful is going to go a long way to take somebody well above the average survival rate. There is no way that can be said of riding a motorbike, for example.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Lets start with some hard facts.

UK Fatal accident rate in certified light aircraft - about 1 per 70,000 hrs.

Ditto microlight, gliders, light helicopters - about 1 per 50,000 hours

Ditto homebuilts - about 1 per 34,000 hours

Ditto Gyroplanes - about 1 per 6,000 hours.

On British roads, about 3,500 people are killed each year.


Starting with driving, there are about 60 million of us in this island, and I think we can assume virtually nobody fails to go near the road or travel by car. So, in a given year that gives a risk of about 1 in 1700 of any of us dying in a car-crash in any given year.

At the fatal accident rate for certified light aircraft (your typical club Piper) you'd have to fly about 41 hours per year to hit the same probability of death. In a microlight, glider or helicopter about 30 hours.


So, speaking for myself in an average year I drive regularly, fly about 40 hours in light aircraft and around 60 hours in microlights. That means I'm about 3 times as likely to die flying as I am driving, but from all three my risk of being killed in any given year is about 1 in 400.

Put otherwise, in, let's say a reasonably active 50 year career of flying and driving, I'll at the end have had an overal risk of about 1 in 34 of being killed in or by a car, about 1 in 35 of being killed in an aeroplane, and about 1 in 17 of being killed in a microlight. This adds up to about a 1 in 8½ chance of failing to reach 70 due to one or t'other.

Dangerous world we live in isn't it !

Of-course, as others have said, the odds are just an average. We can all do a great deal by the way we behave to improve or worsen the odds by the way we carry out all our activities, whether it's flying, driving, eating, smoking, etc. etc. At the end of the day, the statistics only really apply to the whole population not to any one individual.

G

[Pub User]

How safe is a light aircraft?

This is a very difficult question to answer. The problem with aircraft accidents is that they tend to be either very minor or fatal, with very little in between.

The other activities mentioned often involve very serious, but not fatal, injuries. I used to fly an Air Ambulance, and as such got involved with a lot of accidents involving serious injuries. A rough breakdown of those accidents is as follows:

Daily, approx' 5 accidents or medical emergencies (roughly 60/40).
Car accidents with serious injuries, 1 or 2 a day, fatal 1 or 2 every 10 days.
Motorcycling accidents, serious injury, 1 or 2 a week, fatals quite rarely.
Industrial accidents, about the same rate as motorcyclists.
Horseriding, serious injury, about 1 every 10 days.
Military training accidents, about 1 a fortnight.
Other sports, never.
Aircraft/microlights, never.

[Evo]

Put otherwise, in, let's say a reasonably active 50 year career of flying and driving, I'll at the end have had an overal risk of about 1 in 34 of being killed in or by a car, about 1 in 35 of being killed in an aeroplane, and about 1 in 17 of being killed in a microlight. This adds up to about a 1 in 8½ chance of failing to reach 70 due to one or t'other.


Being a bit pedantic your chances are slightly better than that, because your risks of dying are not independent probablilities - only one of the three can actually get you - so you cannot just add them up. You need to work out the chance of exactly one of the three getting you :8 :bored: :zzz: I reckon about 1 in 10 - 11 or so, but a nice bottle of Gevrey-Chambertain at lunchtime means I can't be faffed working it out... :rolleyes:

[englishal]

If you want a definitive answer, read "The Killing Zone". The author analyses light aircraft incidents, and to cut a long story short his conclusion is: Flying light aircraft is roughly as safe as driving a car (this is all based on the states of course, and anyone who has driven the California highways knows that is highly dangerous :D).

One interesting statistic is the number of fatalities that used to occour when the FAA had a requirement of 200hrs TT before you could take the instrument rating. Deaths were higher due to people burning holes in the sky, trying to build hours for Commercials / IRs etc. When the FAA lowered the requirement, fatalities dropped significantly, and when they got rid of any TT requirement, they dropped again....

Goes to show, get yourself some sort of instrument qualification, and your chances are probably better...

EA

[RodgerF]

Genghis, Evo

I don't want to sound too morbid, but there is roughly a 1 in 3 1/2 chance of not surviving 50 years from age 20 anyway. This is from all causes. So flying doesn't load the risk that much.