Jim Hanmer

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since April 5, 2002

If you were to log in, you'd be able to get more information on your fellow community member.

April 5, 2002, on General Aviation Safety:
As a co-techie contemplating aviation as a hobby, I carried out a similar back-of-the-envelope risk assessment recently, with similar conclusions. However, I approached it by trying to answer the question 'How likely is it that I will die in a plane during a lifetime of recreational flying?'. Assuming, say, 4hrs flying for just under half the weekends in a year, spread over 30 years of active flying gives an approximate lifetime total of 2500hrs. So the chance of dying is (16/10^6)*2500 - a rather scary 4%. But compare that to a lifetime of commuting 20,000 miles a year and you get around a 1.4% chance of dying in a car. So flying isn't so bad after all.