Re: Tom Knauff's newsletter

A few years ago I spent the good ****tion of an afternoon reviewing
NTSB accidents for GA (single engine) aircraft. As has already been
mentioned the find the number of flight hours is the most difficult
and suspect but using the best number I thought I could find here is
what if found.

Actually what initated this project was the phrase "The most dangerous
part of flying is driving to the air****t" I wanted to see how true
this phrase was.

He is the summary as I recall it. Unfortunatly I didn't look into
glider accident and I suspect this would be very difficult to
determine the amount of hours flown.

I tried to compare how dangerous spending 1 hour in and Airplane was
compared to spending one hour in a Car or on a Motorcycle.

I determined that overall flying single engine aircraft was more
dangerous than driver hour for hour.

Overall Flying single engine was about equally dangerous to riding a
motorcycle. The point I make to my students is that on a motor cycle
the majority of accidents are not caused by the motorcyclist. Flying
accidents are usually caused by the pilot. So for flying you have a
lot more control over how dangerous it is.

If you eliminated cropdusters (and other intentional low flying) and
flight into IMC conditions then the flying is about equally dangerous
to driving

I dont recall if I did this based on Fatal accident (I think I did) or
on Fatailities or on just re****ted Accidents.

The issue is there are quite a few ways to measure at how dangerous it
is, and different measurement methods produce significantly different
results.

Wish I had good numbers for Soaring for an hour to hour comparison.

Brian
CFIIG/ASEL.