Plane Down-Western Iowa

[Cykoguy]

Looks like a Piper went down in Western Iowa last night. Reportedly the pilot had a heart attack and a student pilot in the right seat radioed that they were going to make an emergency landing but that ended up unsuccessful. A search began but nothing was found until this morning.

https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/O...crash-en-route-to-hunting-trip-500204272.html

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I met a pilot last year who miraculously survived a CO-induced crash. He passed out trimmed for climb not long after departure, the plane flew til it ran out of fuel and came down in a snowy field in Minnesota.

These accidents do happen but are actually quite rare. It has always struck me that the risks are so low as to not justify the costs of these electronic detectors, especially the certified ones.

But I guess everyone has a somewhat different risk/$ trade off.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

You're right. I find my life is worth $100 plus an AA battery every year.

But you have to multiply by the odds of it helping you. If it is a 1 in 100,000 chance and you spent $100 on preventing it, you just valued your life at $10 million dollars. Most people effectively can’t afford to do that.

What that means practically, assuming those numbers, is that it is quite likely there are better ways to spend the $100 if you want to improve your personal safety.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

What is a better way to spend $100 in aviation that will save your life and protect you against something that you would otherwise have NO way of protecting yourself from?

In terms of a rational calculation, one should probably consider potential risk reductions outside aviation as well.

Another way to look at it is that GA is somewhat dangerous overall. About 1 chance of a fatality per 100,000 hours of flight. So if you fly 1000 hours, on average, you just took a 1% chance of death. That is the average, and we have a lot more control than in something like driving, but that is the overall average.

I suspect the CO poisoning events are rare enough, particularly as noted by hindsight2020 with exhaust inspections, that there are likely bigger risks even in aviation to worry about. (I thought I had posted in another thread about some research that showed the actual level of risk previously but could not for the life of me find it.) Nonetheless, I would speculate that $100 and time and effort spent on CO monitors would be better spent on part of a lesson with an instructor or some type of training activity, if one is concerned about actual safety of flights.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Was looking for data on frequency of this type of event. It seems there has not been an attempt to analyze this systematically.

Here is an FAA document on the subject https://www.faa.gov/pilots/safety/pilotsafetybrochures/media/CObroforweb.pdf which identified 360 fatalities between 1967 and 1993. Mike Busch also identified a number in his AVWeb article https://www.avweb.com/news/aeromed/186016-1.html.

I suppose one could take the accidents in the NTSB database or those numbers from the FAA and divide by the same estimated hours of flight used estimate overall fatality rates to come up with something approximating the rate. Offhand, there are a lot of other types of accidents in the database each year whereas Busch's lists suggest 1 or 2 per year on average are due to CO poisoning.