Plane crashes onto a Massachusetts highway, killing 2 on board and hurting 1 motorist
Plane crashes onto a Massachusetts highway, killing 2 on board and hurting 1 motorist
This was a week ago during the nor'easter, dumb idea to fly that small plane in the winds we had that weekend
Instructors will tell you over and over that one of the biggest killers of GA pilots is get-home-itis. You set yourself up for failure by feeling like you need to get home from a trip and making a poor decision under questionable flying conditions
Private single-engine planes (under GA) have somewhere around the same or worse fatality rates to riding a motorcycle. Don't think I'll go up in one, at least while my kids aren't yet adults.
Riding a motorcycle or flying GA is only 3x more lethal than driving and just as lethal as walking (75% of walking fatalities occur at night and are entirely due to cars).
The big difference is on a motorcycle, the danger is other drivers, whereas for a pilot, the danger comes from themselves as 90% of fatal accidents are caused by pilot error.
Eliminating pilot error is entirely possible as demonstrated by the commercial airline industry, which ends of being the safest form of travel by multiple magnitudes over cars. If GA pilots can hold themselves to the same rigorous standards as commercial airline transport pilots, then GA can absolutely be much safer than driving.
I'm reading pilot error is around 70% with 10% being mechanical? Either way, the amount of regulatory oversight, having 2 pilots on commercial flights is far safer. Leaving aside the fact that a single engine is a single point of failure while all airliners must be verified to fly with half their engines working.
I think while pilot error can lead us to believe we can train ourselves to be above the problem, we must also understand the nature of GA and single points of failure leave little room for error, again, unlike commercial aviation where there are often multiple levels of redundancy.
So for me personally, I just can't bring myself to do it. Especially considering that driving is already one of the most dangerous things we do on a daily basis and I only do that mostly out of necessity.
I checked the stats in my country, where 55% of contributing factors are assigned to motorcyclists in collisions involving them. Due to how this data is produced, that doesn't mean 55% of accidents involving them were found to be the fault of motorcyclists, but it means that a significant number of motorbike accidents are the fault of the rider, whichever way you slice it.
Rates of serious injury/death are about 2000 per billion passenger miles for motorbikes, of which 100 are deaths. Haven't been able to find the same stats for GA though.
There are arguments that comparing passenger-miles isn't reasonable for activities like GA and motorbiking which are done for pleasure as well as for transport, in which case flying looks worse.
That article seems really unfair. Sounds like the plane was trying an emergency landing and it didn't work. Boo to the author and editors