Accidents classified by high or low wing?

[LandSickness]

With respect to the Cirrus SR22 and RV7a crashes this week, I want to extend my deepest condolences to the families affected.

I didn't want to litter the tribute threads with my question but I was wondering if someone could guide me to a resource that would show the percentages of plane crashes that are high wing versus low wing. I know there's not much in the way of glide ratio for low wing planes and I was just wondering if there is data somewhere that supports or rebuts the value of glide ratio in high wing planes. I'm not sure if the NTSB would break accidents down by high or low wing. I'd just like to see some statistics.

Again, my deepest condolences to the families and friends affected.

 

[Jim Logajan]

I was wondering if someone could guide me to a resource that would show the percentages of plane crashes that are high wing versus low wing.

Ron Wanttaja to the rescue:

http://www.pilotsofamerica.com/forum/showpost.php?p=630563&postcount=63

Note that all the planes with 15% or less fatality rate are high wing.
Note that all the planes with 30% or higher fatality rate are low or mid wing.
Note also that as the speed goes up, so does the minimum fatality rate.
On the subset of plane accidents that Ron reviewed, there is not much below the diagonal line from 50,0 to 350,45. Speed kills (well, probably high stall speed kills - it is not easy to get a large speed range out of a fixed wing airplane.)

 

[Jim Logajan]

There has never been a single documented incident of a low wing airplane such as a PA-28 falling from the sky due to a damaged or improperly maintained wing strut.

A Piper PA-28 doesn't have wing struts. Very hard for a non-existent entity to fail. It has cantilevered wings. I know of low wing airplane accidents where the wings failed. Not hard to find them.

By the way, the Piper PA-25 is a low wing aircraft with wing (lift) struts. Don't know if there have been any of those with wings failing in flight.

Someone has put together a list of some of the larger more notable aircraft structural failures on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_structural_failures

Looks like some low wing aircraft in that list.

 

[Jim Logajan]

Not just unsubstantiated, debunked.

Indeed. This article does more than debunk, it contains some useful survival pointers:

"Ditching Myths Torpedoed!"