Flying is danagerous - a risk assessment - comments please
 

My question was prompted by comments on PPRuNe along the lines “I wouldn’t do that if I were you because .. .. ..”

I can think of a number of flying “pursuits” we might do which are arguably “safe” with proper training.

GIVEN PROPER TRAINING I was wondering which we thought were inherently more dangerous and why - or if you like, the same question, without proper training.

Here is my list - you can assume in a SEP or multi as you wish.

Aerobatics
Formation flying
Tail wheel flying in and out of farm strips
IMC
IMC at night
Night flying in VMC
Air racing
Gliding of any sort

You can add to the list if you wish.

Flying's not dangerous. It's crashing you want to worry about. ;)

(Apologies for flippant post - been a long day....)

Given the right training and the right equipment I wouldn't describe any of the above list as "dangerous".

The only item there though, where I would consider specific scenario training unnecessary, would be the tail dragging out of fields - you just have to approach it with the right attitude.

Driving to the airfield
Instructing

Display flying is probably the most dangerous, followed by flying in and out of short strips.
Aerobatics is quite safe if done at a good height as evidenced by the British Aerobatics Assoc never having a fatal accident in 30 yrs of aerobatics competions.

Its my perception that it has the potential to be quite dangerous...but that hasn't stopped me flying at night single engined.

I'm probably much more likely to have a smash in a taildragger trying to exit some field than have an engine failure in the night and ending up looking for a dark spot.

I stand to be corrected on this one but actually in the case of GA flying is more dangerous than driving. On average someone dies in a GA accident in the US everyday!

I would probably go for night flying. Not at all hard to do, but if things go wrong you are in a big mess.

Rod1

Flying (light aircraft) is statistically dangerous.

However, many will fly hundreds of hours without an incident.

Low probability x high severity event.

Those of us who love it feel that this is okay.

Bit of a non-sequitur, don't you think, unless fewer people are killed, each day, driving?

That I would find hard to believe!

Anyway, it's a crude comparison at best; it doesn't compare like with like.

Deaths per year per million occupant/miles would be a better number to know.

:ok:

Sadly, the regulators don't gather data on flight hours, landings, numbers on board, or any other statistics needed for this analysis. :eek:

However, there is little doubt that some areas of sport aviation offer risk equivalent to motorcycling without a crash helmet, on a wet road. Others do better. :sad:

None of them approach the levels achieved by commercial air transport operations in large jets, and they should never pretend to do so. Flying school instructors who, when challenged by nervous 'trial lesson students', say, 'you're taking a greater risk driving to the airfield', are lying, pure and simple. :=

Indeed, but considering the number of planes in the US flying and the number of cars on the road I think you'll find GA flying is more dangerous. As I said though I stand to be corrected with some hard stats.

YOU made the statement - you back it up ;)

Actually I'll save you the trouble - http://www.meretrix.com/~harry/flyin...vsdriving.html.
Does this tell the whole story - who knows?

Everything is dangerous to some extent.

Driving can be dangerous, getting on a train is not without risk, even walking to the shop is slightly dangerous.

It's all about managing risk.

Crop Dusting...

...At Night...

...In Afghanistan.

I'm curious as to how farm strips become more dangerous because you are flying a tail wheel aircraft :confused:

Sleeping is dangerous.

How many people die while sleeping?

Getting out of bed in the morning is full of risk if you want to look for it.

Life without risk could perhaps be called coma if it was not for the risk of not being given some sustinance while in such a state.

Regards,

DFC

Well said my friend! :D

hazard : flying
definition of hazard : something with the potential to cause harm :eek:

risk : likelyhood of that happening :{
severity rating
hazard 1.no injury
2. minor injury
3. lost time > 3 days illness
4. major injury
5. fatal

likelyhood 1. highly improbable
2. remotely possible
3. occasional occurance
4.fairly frequent occurance
5. regular occurance
6. almost a certainty

risk = likelyhood x severity

make ya decision :ok:

Chapter and verse to back that up please?

Yes I know, I'm very lazy :=.

But to be fair since when have assertions needed backing up with hard stats on PPRuNe? ;)

Usually reasonable statements like: Taildraggers are more dangerous than nose gear planes can be taken as correct without the need to look up numbers- if everyone had to do that then very little would get posted here.

Of course, a Cub can just barely kill you, as someone famous once said.

ContactTower please elucidate. I am in danger of needing a RA before walking up to my aeroplane now. Will she explode because there's no wheel at the front? Does the tailwheel trigger a landmine as it trundles along the grass? I'm intrigued.

I think I would refer the OP and all since to what is basic in risk assessments. People make accidents, not the tools and equipment.

"You take a risk getting up in the morning, crossing the street, or sticking your face in a fan!"

Name the film...

xxxx

f

Risk is the degree of exposure to both negative events and their probable consequences.

Risk differs from uncertainty in that it can be measured.

Risk is measured in terms of both consequences and likelihood.

It is therefore pretty meaningless in discussion to say that there is a "risk" of death associate with an activity - unless the probability of that outcome is also stated.

Risk assessment is concerned with identifying the hazards associated with an activity, and also assessing the probabilities associated with each hazard - the sum of "hazard x probability" is effectively the overall risk.

From this a strategy of risk management can be implemented to mitigate the effects of the hazards and / or reduce the probabilities to lower the overall risk to an acceptable level, commensurate with the objectives (e.g. to go flying).

It may be that it is not possible to manage the risk to an acceptable level, in which case the sane decision would be not to embark on the endeavour!

Of course, the above is a great simplification of a complex subject! It is rarely easy to quantify all the hazards and associated consequences, let alone to calculate the probabilities. And I have not mentioned categorizing risk according to severity. Yet we do this daily at both conscious and unconscious levels for a wide variety of activities, from crossing the street to deciding whether the weather is suitable to go flying.

SD

The Nekkid Gun................

Do I win a pint???????? :D

It is amazing how easy it is to get misunderstood on this forum...the Cub is indeed a very 'safe' aircraft and believe me I am not a risk averse pilot...at all.

Having said that though as far as the landing and take off phase is concerned one would be a fool to treat the Super Cub like it was the idiot proof PA28. In that sense at least...all other things being equal...taildraggers are more 'dangerous' than nose gear aircraft.

And just so we are clear...if I had my way all light aircraft would be taildraggers. ;)

Attempting to remain VFR with lowering cloud base.

A recent report into flying out to the rigs in the North Sea put the most dangerous part of the trip as the drive to the airport. And they still make everyone wear rubber suits and do the dunker every three years.

CT,

You're talking rubbish.

The only difference in handling between a nosewheel and tailwheel aeroplane is during taxying, take-off and landing.

With the appropriate skills both are fine.

Insurers do not make any differences in premiums between the two set ups making it fairly obvious that there is no additional risk.

You may have a taildragger in your avatar but if these are the convictions you hold I doubt that you are either very experienced or confident.

What I will grant you is that windwise tailwheel boats are sooner at the handling limits than the comparable nosewheel variants (ie nosewheel vs tailwheel Maule) but there is such a variety in aeroplanes that you can not use that generalisation.

A DC3 in skilled hands can be flown in more adverse conditions than a PA28 by a low houred PPL.

IMHO ground operations are the most dangerous bit of flying.

I've never had as much as a scare when airborne, but had one or two major mishaps (none my fault) on the ground, plus a load of sticky situations (usually to do with negligent airfield surface maintenance at some of the places I've been to) which luckily did not result in damage.

As for flying itself, one should always have an escape route. Therefore, I avoid SE night flight for long periods because there is no escape route. Other stuff e.g. over water flight is handled by carrying a raft etc. Mountains are OK - fly high above and have a GPS displaying the topo chart so one can glide into a valley if there is an overcast.

Night IMC - I recall reading more than once that some of the most demanding of all flying we do is night IMC. If you read the NTSB reports it is indeed noteworthy how many accidents occur at night in IMC. Of course in Europe so little night IMC is flown that the number of accidents are insignificant.

Formation - some would have you believe this accounts for the highest number of accidents. I am not sure whether the evidence supports that assertion. As has been discussed on another thread there are of course variation of formation from flying in very well spaced company, to tactical and close formation.

Tail wheel in to farm strips - I guess I mentioned this one not so much with an eye on the tail wheel in particular, but because it is tail wheel aircraft that are more likely to go into the shortest strips and therefore press the boundaries of what is possible. While usually the accidents aren’t serious, they do seem to account for a fair number. Perhaps that is just because pilots are “pushing” the boundaries, or because conditions are less controlled (usually the strips are un- managed and inevitably grass).

Risk can be managed, although I am not sure how you manage the risk of night flying with one engine. If the engine stops there is a large amount of unmanageable luck involved.

Only a fool doesn’t try and manage the risk (albeit there are plenty of fools around). We might assume that most pilots who fly night IMC have therefore taken what steps they consider necessary to best manage the risk. However the accident rate is high. This might suggest it is one of the most “demanding” forms flying takes. However, on the other hand so is aerobatics, but interestingly the accident rate is very low. I wonder if this is because the pilots manage the risk better or because the risk is inherently less?

Umm ... or could this possibly be because, unlike flying aeros etc, there's by and large sweet FA you can do if the donkey stops ?

The more interesting question is why so many people know this and yet still do it (and yes, that includes me, including directly over the North Sea on a few occasions ...) ?

FF :ok:

Yes, but that is reason enough for only a very very small percentage of the accidents.

Look I don't want to get into a silly arguement about this...because actually I suspect in reality that our views on taildraggers are pretty much the same. A little while ago a friend of mine started doing his PPL on a Super Cub and on his first solo he ground looped it and damaged it to the point that he had to complete his PPL on the C152.

I don't know about this country...but in the US insurance companies do recognise that taildraggers are more likely to be crashed. I was talking to some US pilot in passing a while ago and he said that due to his low hours he couldn't get insurance for a Husky that he dreamed of buying. Why do you think that schools in the US are so 'funny' about taildraggers? Even if the actual risk is the same, the percieved risk is greater.

I quite agree about the DC-3...but the experience of the pilot is not relevant to what I was saying since I made it clear that I meant 'all things being equal'.

Perhaps what I should have said was 'To the fairly low experience pilot the taildragger is more risky than the nose wheel'. Once the pilot has lots of hours on taildraggers, or if he has always flown taildraggers then the risk difference disappears.

I don't see why night IMC should be particularly dangerous, if one is a current enough instrument pilot to fly the approaches at the end.

Flying at night is harder work but one needs an autopilot for any serious IFR anyway.

Ever heard of a parachute (either personal or fitted to the airframe)? Granted it might only be a good idea during daylight.

Weather is a significant factor perhaps not helped by less ability to avoid it visually.

Approaches that go wrong also seem to be a big factor where the differing visual cues may be relevant.

CT, as FD said, you are talking rubbish.

Once your friend is trained to fly taildraggers, he'll find it no more 'dangerous' than nosewheel flying. There is nothing intrinsically more dangerous about a tailwheel aeroplane over a nosewheel one.

Indeed once tailwheel trained, you friend will actually be a safer pilot since, even when flying a nosewheel aircraft, he will hold off correctly because of his tailwheel training. He will thus be far less likely to become one of those several pilots in the AAIB reports each month who break their aircraft's noselegs. Just watch the C172s and PA28s landing at GA fields - many will land on all 3 wheels together, with little or no attempt at a hold off.

Yer tailwheel pilot would never inflict that on an aeroplane.

SSD

I agree completely with all that. But this is my point:

Once airbourne the plane doesn't care where the nose wheel is so from a risk point of view they are the same. But are you seriously telling me that you aren't more likely to be involved in a take-off/landing accident in a taildragger than a nose gear aircraft?

If someone was trying to say: 'Taildraggers are dangerous' then I'd be the first to stand up and correct him...because I don't believe they are and like you said, with proper training they are fine.

But danger and risk are relative terms as well and I think if I asked an instructor: 'Which is more likely to be involved in a landing or take off accident, a nose or tailwheel aircraft?' They would say tailwheel.

Yes.

If they did (which they wouldn't) they'd be wrong. I refer you again to all those broken noselegs, props, and shock-loaded engines in the AAIB reports every month.

To be fair there are a lot more nose wheel aircraft out there to get broken.

As I said I don't really want an arguement over this...so I'm not going to reassert what I said earlier (because you'll just disagree with me). Instead I'm just going to say what I think...in terms of me i.e. my personal perception of risk when I go flying:

When I go flying in the PA28 I don't really think about landing/taking off too much...after all it's a pretty solid plane...it doesn't pull any tricks and to be fair in good conditions its difficult to mess up the landing if you arrive over the threshold at the right height and speed; power off as you flare, raise the nose a bit, hold and 99/100 the main gear will kiss the ground followed by the nosegear shortly afterwards. Overall in terms of the different risks associated with different parts of the flight take off/landing does not rank very high.

When I go flying in the Super Cub my perception of the risk changes slightly...I'm never worried about running out of runway for example...but the risk associated with take off/landing increases in my mind slightly. When you open up the throttle it's not just 'sit there and wait for the speed to build'; one has to be much more active with the controls. I personally find landing the Super Cub harder than landing a PA28...and in my mind that equates to a greater degree of risk involved in the action.

These aren't the words of someone spreading 'barroom bravado' about taildraggers or someone who flys in fear of what the aircraft might do to them but someone who is slightly in awe of one of the greatest planes ever built and has the sense to treat it with the respect it needs and deserves.

Then please stop posting nonsense about something you clearly don't understand. FD told you, I told you.... What bit of "what you posted is plain wrong" don't you understand?

Go get a tailwheel checkout and discover what tosh you are spouting. :rolleyes:

Edit: You say you fly Supercubs. I find that worrying... I'm glad it's not my Supercub.