That claim ...

[Pronto]

Over the past few years, I've seen a claim that flying light aircraft is as dangerous as riding a motorbike :eek: quoted several times, most recently in this forum.

My question is, does anyone know where and when this claim originated, and how it was arrived at?

P

[Dewdrop]

A soft answer I know, its as dangerous as the combination of the pilot and the aircraft, if one of these two is sub standard then the risk increases, same with motorcyles.

[FNG]

At least in the air one's highly polished skills, judgment, experience and equipment are less likely to be rendered nugatory by some git in a rusty Fiesta pulling out without looking. I don't know how valid the motorbiking claim really is, but it feels about right to me. Flying is, I would say, definitely safer than horse riding and probably safer than skiing, but the other oft-repeated claim, that flying is as safe as or safer than driving, appears to me to be misleading. You can debate forever the statistics in terms of fatalities per operating hour, but the fact remains that aviation is a risk sport. The thing is to manage the risk.

[Mr Wolfie]

Pronto,

I'm pretty sure that the relative statistical risks for motorcycling and private flying can be ascertained.

There is a "Statistics Year Book" published by the National Statistics Office I believe. It is a HMSO publication and is almost certainly filed in the reference section of your nearest public library. It contains abstracted statistics ranging from household expenditure on bog-roll through to %GDP derived from maggot farming (I might be exagerating a little here)!

I'm betting that Bookworm has a copy of it at his fingertips. :O

It does however list the total number of vehicle miles travelled per year by cars, lorries, motorbikes, etc, and the numbers of the various types of each licence held in the UK. It also lists road casualties per annum again subdivided into various catagories (including motorcycle fatalities). By combining all this information you can start to derive statistics for %of all persons holding a motorcycle licence who were killed or seriously injured last year, or that a motorcycle fatality occurs every xx,000 miles etc.

It is all very sobering stuff & from memory the frequency of fatalities (per mile travelled) for bikers was about 15 times that of car drivers. (Pedal cyclists and pedestrians also came out badly by this measure).

It didn't contain any stats for private aviation, only info for scheduled commercial flights (passenger numbers, etc.), but I should think that the CAA or AAIB websites (or for that matter the FAA or any other regulatory collector of statistics) would be able to provide comparable figures - (doesn't GASIL publish an annual death toll broken down by fixed wing, rotary & microlight types, together with the "one fatality every xx,ooo hours" figures)? - I seem to recall it is about 1 fatality every 60,000 hours for fixed wing.

Anyway, raw statistics, whilst useful for comparison purposes, can hide a lot of devil in the detail. And as FNG points out, an individuals risk management can affect their personal risk by a considerable magnitude either side of the published averages.

Personally, as someone who often motorbikes to and from the airfield to go flying, I often amaze myself that I make it home in one piece at all! (I'll probably get run over by a number 11 bus on my stroll to buy a newspaper now)!:ooh:

Perception of risk is highly subjective, but I would say that my own gut feeling is that the two activities seem broadly similar in risk profile. If anything, motorbiking seems slightly riskier but that is perhaps due to my inability to have control over the myopic drivers alluded to by FNG, and thus manage this risk effectively.

Mr. W

P.S. I think I'll have a lie down now & give buying the newspaper a miss - you can't be too careful.

[Flap40]

FNG

Will a Jag' do instead of the Fiesta?????:\

[drauk]

Two different approaches shown here (http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety) suggest that flying is 10 (per mile) to 20 (per hour) times more dangerous than driving. So if the figure of 15 times is right for motorcycles, that would set the risk as broadly similar.

[Zlin526]

As somebody who, over a 15 year period, cleared up a fair few dead motorcyclists after they had collided with vehicles/walls/bridges etc etc, I can confirm that motorcycling does seem to be slightly riskier than flying a light aircraft (OK, to be honest, its a hell of a lot riskier!!!)

I think insurance companies penalise pilots with higher insurance premiums because they are allowed too! Greedy chaps indeed..:confused:

[KCDW]

From an insurance underwriting point of view, it does seem to be heavily loaded against private flying compared to motorcycling. Many apps I have seen don't even include motorbiking on the harzardous activities form (I work in the Industry... zzzz).

[IO540]

As someone who has done some 60k miles on 2 wheels, I think flying is vastly safer. There are far too many "blind" people on the roads today, and if somebody pulls out of a sideroad, you have no chance - unless you ride so ridiculously defensively there isn't any point in having a motorbike. In flying, perhaps 99% of the risk is under your own control and there is a helluva lot an individual pilot can do.

And en-route flight is particularly safe. I think that flying say 300 miles is safer than driving that distance in a car, especially if it is country lanes. Unless, again, one drives unreasonably defensively.

Re insurance premiums, most likely the number of people killed or injured in GA is too small for an actuary to be able to work out the risk accurately. 3rd party (ground) damage data is even harder to come by. On top of that, the underwriters are all anonymous Lloyds syndicates (BAIG aside) and without any public relations profile they don't need to offer good value.

Finally, regarding competition, if anyone thinks there is competition, they should contact say ten brokers for a quote on the same plane, and see what happens... what happens is that nobody will want your business because the underwriters don't like people that shop around.

I've had some dealings with Lloyds in other areas (product liability) and been told that on the more obscure types of cover where there is very little data they often work out their premiums by throwing a dart.