Pelton's Editorial in Feb Sport Pilot

wabower said:
Interesting stuff regarding GA safety record. Anybody else read it?
Click to expand...
By the way, the article is also available online here:
http://www.sportaviationonline.org/sportaviation/201302?pg=3#pg3

It was the first thing I read when I got that issue. I'm afraid didn't see anything in it of any particular note. I do recall being annoyed by it at the time; for two reasons.

First, Pelton wrote:
"General aviation safety is now in the spotlight because, despite the positive improvements, our record is terrible compared to safety gains in other modes of transportation. Highway safety—including motorcycle riders and even pedestrians—has shown a tenfold improvement since the 1950s."

I think I was annoyed because prior to reading his editorial I was aware of the statistics here:
http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/stats/safety.html
1950: 46.6 accidents/100k hours; 5.1 fatal accidents/100k hours.
2009: 6.86 accidents/100k hours; 1.33 fatal accidents/100k hours.

Improvements by factors of 6.8 and 3.8, respectively.

Here is a quick check of his claim of a tenfold improvement for highway safety:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year
1950: 7.24 fatalities/100 million v.m.t.
2009: 1.14 fatalities/100 million v.m.t.

An improvement by a factor of 6.35.

So highway fatal accident safety improved by a factor of around 6.35 versus general aviation's 3.8. I would not characterize the 3.8 as "terrible" considering the amount the government spends on both modes per normalization factor is unknown. For example, if the government spent about twice as much per mile driven as it did per hour flown, then that might account for the differing rates of improvement in the two transportation modes.

His source of statistics may indeed show a factor of 10 - not saying his claimed number is wrong; but his failure to present the alleged "terrible" ratio for GA really makes for poor homework.

The other point that annoyed me was this:
"The FAA fiscal year begins on October 1, and in October and November there were 55 fatal GA accidents. By Christmas there were at least 25 more fatal crashes. The spike in fatal accidents may be an anomaly, but if this trend continues, the year could finish with well more than 300 fatal accidents, which would undo almost all of the safety gains made over the
past 20 years."

There may also have been an anomaly in the number of hours flown such the accident rate per hour is unchanged. That and the law of small statistical population is bound to show an occasional anomalous variation. Again, if he had done some homework by reviewing those 80 crashes and looked for any common factors and reported that, then his editorial might have actually been useful.
 
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