Just got my bill for next year’s airplane insurance. This is a vehicle valued at $200,000 and a typical minor accident, e.g., striking the propeller on an obstacle or the runway when landing badly, costs about $30,000 to repair. You can’t pause or pull over when flying an airplane. A few clouds in the sky and you can find yourself disoriented and plunging toward the water like JFK, Jr. Now that I’ve got 550 hours of experience in this type of plane and 750 hours of total time AVEMCO has cut my rates to… $1737 with a $1000 deductible and $1 million of liability coverage.
If I were to get a new minivan here in Cambridge, despite my lack of claims and tickets I expect that it would cost about the same to insure, with much lower liability limits. The minivan costs just over $30,000 with every conceivable option. A minor accident costs $1000 to fix. Many people are able to operate an automobile safely despite never having had any formal training.
Conclusion: To come to a situation where these vehicles are equally costly to insure, we must really be driving like idiots.
[Update: Okay, I answered my own question by driving to Mt. Wachusett today for some skiing. Rolling along the familiar ground in a quiet comfortable minivan, belted in and protected by airbags as well, it never crossed my mind that we were moving at a potentially lethal velocity and that death could be just around the corner. Whereas in the airplane I’m always scared and therefore cautious.]
Actually, I’d say it’s more likely that the average car driver spends much more time on the road than the average plane pilot.
Plus there are a lot more other vehicles to hit on the ground than up in the air!
The insurance companies don’t seem to think that extra hours = extra risk. In fact they prefer it if you fly frequently. A lot of enthusiastic airplane owners will spend 300-500 hours per year in their plane. If they did that in a car and were averaging 30 miles per hour that would be as much as 15,000 miles per year of driving.
So I don’t think it is as simple as hours of exposure.
I suspect the cost differential comes from the cost to repair the
soft parts inside. Car accidents probably have, on average,
much higher medical expenses than plane crashes which tend to have none (either you are fine or you are dead).
Pilots know that if they screw up they will probably die. Drivers do not seem to know this. Plus insurance fraud is a lot harder to pull off in an airplane.
I think that a major factor is lawsuit happy people. I’ve been hit (from tapped to hard whack) 6 times. The hitter’s insurance companies usually ask me about five times if I am OK. They are extremely concerned about lawsuits. Fortunately it’s only my vehicles that have gotten hurt.
PS – This is one of the several reasons I drive a SUV. My demure little 1800 lb rose coloured Subaru was whacked 5 times, my 4000lb Red Isuzu has only been tapped once. Anecdotal, but the red Rodeo says “I’m big and red. Don’t you dare hit me”.
While the experience gained through those extra hours on the road is undoubtably useful (note that for the first five or so years of experience, your rates steadilly decline), those hours on the road are spent exposed to the errors of other drivers. You are far more likely to interact with other vehicles on the road than you are in an aircraft.
Alternatively, the issue may stem from the overall accessability of vehicles and auto licenses. At least here in the lower 48, most folks would have significant trouble going about their business without some form of transportation. Most places (not cities) that means a car. That means that, while a driver’s license is certainly a priveledge, it’s not all that exclusive (ask your friends, people who aren’t licensed are usually so by choice or lack of need, not inability).
Further, vehicles themselves are much easier to obtain. Sure, a new car, if you’re being cheap will run you 16 K at a bare minimum. But open up the classifieds in your local paper and it’s not hard to find a piece of crap that will run and maybe event pass inspection for less than 1. I don’t know what the market is like for used planes, but I would imagine you would see less junkers in said market.
Between a driver not necessarily being guaranteed to be intelligent or at least have enough financial stability to deal with a loss, I’d say there is a big difference.
For reference, for full coverage on my 91 honda (high theft risk and all that) in Cambridge with a $500 deductible and a clean record is around $870 a year.
PS – who says you need plane insurance, the state or the FAA? Another factor may be that, on average, more pilots are insured than drivers as some states do not require auto insurance.
One other factor is casualness – I’ve never met a pilot who was as sanguine about the risks of flying as the average person is about driving. People “need” to go to places so they’ll drive tired, put off inspection/repairs, talk on the phone or otherwise allow themselves to be distracted, etc. Couple that with the enormous difference in the number of people competing for available space and it’s no surprise that accidents happen far more often.
Training is probably a huge issue too. I am guessing that by the time a pilot can fly solo, they have probably learned as much about technique as an average police officer has learned about driving (pursuit, collision avoidance, etc). The average Joe/Jane requires zero training and standard written/road test is a total joke, at least here in Canada.
Do you have to retest to maintain your pilot’s license?
Philip, Massachusetts drivers are legendary. What do you expect?
Insurance rates are (surprise) set by actuarial tables which are, among other things, set be loss history. The average age of General Aviation airplanes is 27 years! That gives you an idea of how safe flying small planes can be.
Check out this GA fact sheet: http://www.aopa.org/special/newsroom/facts.html
That will answer a lot of questions and give some idea why the insurance rates are what they are.
Peter
Woody: you do have to retest every two years to be a legal pilot. It is called the Biennial Flight Review (BFR). You can get a BFR from any certificated flight instructor in about a 1.5-hour flight if you’re any good at all.
Philip don’t you think it’s because the standards are higher? My vision is not great, and I took the vision test w/o any trouble. the woman let me guess my way through it. I know people who have had more mishaps at the DMVs where they live. when I think about how bad a driver I was when I got my license at age 17, it scares me to think how easily I aced it – you can be worse than I was and do fine. Don’t you just think it might be because there are more safeguards in place?
Philip — be glad you aren’t in a large club trying to insure six aircraft, including two Cessna C210’s. Retract insurance is through the roof!
Time to move our fleet to fixed gear, I guess.
I own a $35,000 sailplane, have 850 hours and a clean record, and it still costs around $1,100 to insure with comparable deductables.
It has a single seat, so no passengers or passengers’ family to sue me, and I’ve never heard of a sailplane crash causing major property damage.
Another interesting fact is if I want to put it in storage for a year and go to ground only coverage, they only knock a couple hundred bucks off my premium.
Any year now they’ll start giving out the written test (for a drivers license) in braille.
The political pressure is _immense_ to give a drivers license to anybody over 16 who hasn’t (yet) killed another driver or a pedestrian with their car. American society is completely based around the assumption that everybody drives everywhere…if you can’t drive and don’t live in one of a tiny number of places, you might as well just quietly kill yourself, because you’ll never earn a living, maintain a friendship, or procure nourishment. This situation appears to be irreversable.
Consider the impact of this on the average competence of the drivers on the road.
It’s harder to get a pilot’s license. Unlike driving, flying an airplane is not treated as if it were a fundamental right. Furthermore…well, it’s a big and generally uncrowded sky, and pilots have freedom of maneuverability in three dimensions instead of the two afforded to drivers, so pilots and passengers in airplanes are in far less danger of dying because of the actions of another airplane than drivers and passengers in cars are of dying from the actions of another car. Which means that a pilot’s demonstrated record of competence and safety has more of an impact on the risk he poses (and hence the premiums he will be charged) than is true for a driver. You can be the best driver in the world, but the half-drunk yahoo in the next lane over still has the power to (in ascending order, ranked by how much your insurance carrier worries about it) total your car, injure or kill your passengers, and possibly even drag you into the sort of cascade-failure crash where you end up with part of the liability even though you weren’t actually at fault.
And yeah…Philip lives in Massachussetts…nationally-recognized home of the worst drivers in the industrialized world, so all the globally-true stuff about the risks that drivers face is even _more_ true in the market where he shops for insurance.
nice