General Aviation accidents

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Threads pop up from time to time by people who have concerns about flying. They seem especially concerned with non-airline flights. In the spirit of ‘fighting ignorance’, I decided to see what I could find in the latest Nall Report. The link is to the AOPA site, which contains a link to the (.pdf) report itself. The Nall Report is a comprehensive examination of General Aviation safety and accident trends. The current report covers 2002.

In 2002 there were 1,472 total fixed-wing accidents. Three hundred twelve of those accidents involved 518 fatalities. Estimated GA flying hours were 25.5 million. So:

21.2% of fixed-wing GA accidents were fatal (which means at least one fatality – not necessarily everyone on board).

The Air Safety Foundation, which publishes The Nall Report, does not count rotorcraft, gliders or ballons. When these figures are taken into account, the National Transportation Safety Board estimates 6.69 accidents per 100,000 flying hours.

Of the 1,472 total GA accidnets, 1,050 (71.3%) were in single-engine fixed-gear aircraft. Two hundred eighty-two (19.2%) were in single-engine retractable-gear aircraft, and 140 (9.5%) were in multi-engine aircraft. Half of the fatalities (259) were in SEFs, 156 (30.1%) were in SERs, and 103 (19.9%) were in MEs.

The report is 23 pages long and contains a lot of information; too much to post here. But the bottom line is this:

Chances are very small that pilots or passengers will be involved in an accident. (About one-in-15,000*.) Even if one is involved in an accident, there is only a one-in-five chance of it being fatal. (Over one-in-75,000*). In the last five years, 2002 has been the safest. With the exception of 1999 (12 more accidents than 1998) accidents have decreased every year. (And there were fewer fatalities in 1999 than in 1998. Fatalities have decreased every year except 2002, which had only one more fatality than 2001.)

So if anyone offers you an airplane ride (or helicopter, or glider, or balloon ride) go ahead!

*Method: 100,000 divided by 6.69 and 1.33, respectively.

2

I always just say, “small aircraft are safer than moortcycles”. That makes some people feel better and others hesitant but it paints an vivid picture.

What I am impressed with is the safety of the commercial airline industry. There hasn’t been a crash of a jetliner on U.S. soil since right after 9/11. That is pretty impressive (it still makes me wonder about that one and TWA 800 too).

3

To clarify, as on re-read this might be confusing: If one is involved in an accident (as can be seen, there’s a very small chance of that) then there is a one-in-five chance that there will be at least one fatality. If one goes up in a GA aircraft, there is only a one-in-75,000 chance that there will be at least one fatality.

4

I’m not a statistician, but 15,000-1 doesn’t sound as good as I had hoped. (I speak as someone who has gained a fear of flying in the past year.)

Your figures appear to be calculated on a per-hour-flown basis. Are there figures available on a per-flight basis? I suspect/hope they might be better - or is that a meaningless calculation?

5

The Nall Report (that much of it that I read) lists the total number of accidents and includes figures from the NTSB preliminary findings. 1/15000? Look at it this way: Suppose you fly for one hour every time you go up, and you fly every day. That’s 365 flying hours per year. Divide 365 into 15,000 and you come up with 41 years of flying before you will, statistically, be in one accident. If you flew every day, you will have to fly for over 200 years to be in an accident that involves a fatality. A single-occupant fatal crash is 100% fatal. A crash that involves an aircraft with four occupants in which one is killed is 25% fatal. I don’t know what percentage of occupants in a fatal crash survive, statistically. But it seems to me that one would have to fly for well over two centuries to ‘certainly’ be killed in a crash.

(I am not a statistician. I encourage people to check the report and check the figures, and to correct me if I am wrong.)

6

Well… dunno about that. I’ve come back from a trip in which I took 27 flights, which total roughly 109 hours in the air. Which by your calculations increases my odds of an accident to 1/150 roughly.

I don’t like them odds at all (especially as most weren’t FAA-regulated, and some of the carriers were cough less than reputable).

7

So these aren’t commercial airlines then?

What are the figures like for those - better, worse?

8

As I said, I’m not a statistician. But if statistically there are 6.69 accidents per 100,000 flying hours, or one accident in 14,948 hours, and if you have flown 109 hours, then you still have 14,839 hours left. :wink: :stuck_out_tongue: Still close enough to 1:15,000.

Of course, those are just the odds. Some people fly 20,000 or 30,000 hours without an accident. Some people crash on their first ride with a friend. But it’s pretty unlikely you’ll ever have an accident.

But if you’re in England, with all of that crappy weather :wink: then I don’t know…

Anecdotally, the FAA required Robinson R-22 pilots with less than 400 hours to obtain special training. Part of that training was watching a video. One R-22 pilot failed to maintain rotor RPM and fell out of the sky. (He suffered fatal injuries.) Another showed a child’s birthday party for which a pilot and R-22 were hired. As the pilot took off to go home the helicopter suddenly flipped, as if it were a football player that had been ‘clothes-lined’. Which is pretty much what happened. He flew into a clothes line or a cable or something. I don’t recall if he broke his leg, or if one person on board suffered fatal injuries and the other one suffered a broken leg.

Wanna guess where these crashes happened? Yup. England.

[quote=Atticus Finch So these aren’t commercial airlines then?

What are the figures like for those - better, worse? [/quote]

Commercial airlines have a better safety record. I don’t know what the numbers are though.

9

Presumably you were flying commercially, the safety record of commercial aircraft is many times greater than that of General Aviation aircraft.

What happened to give you a fear of flying?

10

I have here “The Killing Zone,” by Paul Craig which quotes accident statistics from 1998.

The GA rate is worst at 7.12 accidents per 100,000 hours.

Air taxi is next at 3.11 accidents per 100,000 hours.

After that come commuter airlines at 1.6 per 100,000.

Safest of all is the large jet carrier at .29 accidents per 100,000 flight hours.

Figure also that GA includes ag flying, air ambulance, SAR, power and pipeline patrolling, activities which tend to be fairly high risk and thus skew the statistics somewhat. To what degree is hard to tell.

The Nall report states that motor vehicles have 10 times more nonfatal accidents per mile than GA aircraft, but GA aircraft have 7 times more fatal accidents per mile than motor vehicles.

Wow MPSIMS is starting to sound like GQ.

11

A Doper e-mailed me to ask who the first aircraft fatality was. Lt. Thomas Selfridge was the first person killed in the crash of a powered aircraft, but as nearly as I can tell the first person killed in any aircraft was Pilâtre de Rozier, on June 15, 1785, when his hydrogen-and-hot-air filled balloon exploded. He was also the first person to go aloft in an aircraft, a Montgolfier balloon, on October 15, 1783.

12

Going over the Himalayas on CAAC ( :eek: ) and experiencing the greatest turbulence I have ever, ever seen, that didn’t let up for more than two hours - and suddenly realising that if something happened, and by a miracle we survived that something happening, it would be way worse for us than those poor guys in the Andes. And the thought of the terror I would experience if something did happen.

I’ve taken hundreds of flights before, but with those thoughts, and the very real fear I had experienced, my cosy bubble of deniability was burst, and every subsequent flight was permeated not with the statistical unlikelihood of something happening, but uncontrollable imaginings of the detail of what would happen if we had to put down.

13

Sir George Cayley was the first person to build a glider capable of carrying a person. In 1849 the ten-year-old son of one of his servants became the first person to fly in a heavier-than-air craft. In 1853 his coachman became the first adult to fly in a heavier-than-air aircraft, flying 275 meters (900 feet) across Brompton Dale before crashing.

I’m having trouble discovering the first person to die in a glider crash. So far I’ve found Otto Lillienthal, on October 10, 1896 on his 2,500th flight, when a gust of wind broke the wing of his glider. He fell 17 meters (56 feet) and broke his spine, dying the next day. His last words were said to have been Opfer müssen gebracht werden! (‘Sacrifices must be made’).

Still looking…

14

I haven’t been able to find any glider fatalities before Otto Lilienthal. I find it difficult to believe that no one was killed in a glider in the 43-year span between Cayley’s coachman’s flight in 1853 and Lilienthal’s death in 1896. I fanyone else wants to take up the challenge, I’d like to hear what you find.

In any case, modern aviation is remarkably safe and it’s getting safer every year.

15

Uh, Johnny, I thought Lillienthal died from an unrecovered stall, not from a broken wing…

Anyhow, I have to run off and do some household chores, but I know I’ve got references to folks dying in “gliders” pre-Lillienthal somewhere around here. Part of the problem, of course, is how you define “glider”. Lillienthal’s contraption clearly WAS a glider by modern definition… but some of the earlier stuff had characteristics more akin to kites or parachutes. I’ll see if I can find anything.

16

Every reference I found said it was a structural failure. I didn’t see anything in my searches that said it was a stall. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t though. Perhaps a gust caused him to stall, and the stall resulted in a structural failure? Please let us know what you turn up.

I thought about kites as ‘aircraft’ (the Chinese are said to have flown people on them), but I personally don’t think they are. I think Cayley’s designs, while kite-like, are actual gliders because they were intended to cover a distance in forward flight. I’d have to go mack to look, but I think both Cayley’s and Lilienthal’s gliders did not have control surfaces. John J. Montgomery’s did though, and his was the first to carry a person over 100 meters in controlled flight. (Going on memory here.)

17

Sounds like a horrible experience. I hope you can come to terms with it somehow, particularly if you do a lot of flying.

18

Here’s what Fred Howard says in his book Wilbur and Orville (which has an excellent reputation for accuracy):

19

There are claims to that effect. But some suspension of normal skepticism is required to accept them.

The first published reference to Montgomery’s early flight was in Octave Chanute’s 1894 book Progress in Flying Machines. Based on correspondence with Montgomery, Chanute wrote about a 40-lb glider with a 20-ft wingspan and a moveable tail. Using this, Montgomery made one glide of about 100’. The glider was damaged shortly after this flight and did not fly again. No date for this flight was given. Two other gliders of different design were built but not flown.

Montgomery and Chanute continued to correspond for some time after Chanute’s book was published. (Most of Chanute’s voluminous correspondence survives.)There’s no evidence of any dispute about Chanute’s account, which implies that Montgomery found it accurate. But quite some time later, Montgomery’s account of the flight would change.

In 1904, after a gap of some 20 years, Montgomery again took up glider experiments and produced a tandem-winged glider. He achieved some fame from this through flights made by lifting the glider with a hot-air balloon, then cutting it loose. The first such flight was on 29 April 1905 in Santa Clara CA. A flight on 21 May was not a big success, as the rope supporting the glider failed at low altitude, yielding a very short flight. A flight on 18 July ended with a structural failure and a crash that killed the pilot (Daniel Maloney). No further flights were made.

In 1909 the journal Aeronautics published an article by Montgomery. In it he makes reference to his experiments of some 25 years earlier - the first mention since Chanute’s book. For the first time, a date is given: 1884. And there is a claim that the greatest distance covered was between 100 and 200 yards, implying more than one successful flight. In 1910 this was further revised in a lecture he presented: the early experiments ran from 1883 to 1886, and the longest flight was “about 600 feet”.

Given that the only evidence for a longer flight (or flights) comes from Montgomery’s recollections very long after the fact, it seems necessary to accept his original account (reported by Chanute) as very much more probable.

20

Thanks. I have flown about 20 times since, with varying degrees of nerves. Being over the middle of the Pacific didn’t thrill me, and nor did being over the Alps. Thankfully on the last flight I took, from the UK to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I was relatively normal.