I was down at SIMCOM for Pilatus PC-12 recurrent training and, for the benefit of my pilot friends, posted the following on Facebook:
The plane is not performing very well here in Orlando. We have suffered a hung start, a hot start, five engine failures shortly after takeoff, a trim runaway, one engine failure a few miles from the airport, etc.
This was essentially more serious problems than the total number experienced by the Wright Brothers (book review) during their decades as aviation pioneers. From a statistical perspective, this would have been bad luck even in a piston aircraft (this article shows that for the newest piston engines the in-flight shutdown rate (includes failures and precautionary shutdowns on twins) was just 0.6 per 100,000 flight hours and is never worse than 10 per 100,000 flight hours even for older designs (9 per 100,000 is what the airlines got from their DC-3s)). The PT6 turboprop gets shut down about once every 400,000 hours, which means one would expect the above number of failures after 2.4 million hours of flying (2400 years of being an airline pilot).
Here are the comments, some from people with high levels of education and success (MIT professors, dotcom-to-IPO founders, etc.):
- That sounds awful!
- maybe stay on the ground for a while
- Sorry to hear!
- too many people are depending on you — would feel better if you were to spend the day at Dolphin Cove at Seaworld or Animal Kingdom at Disney (not a theme park fan, but highly recommend those 2 destinations)
- Yikes! Be careful Philip, don’t push your luck.
- That’s more than enough evidence you should have a mechanic go over it before flying it again, isn’t it?
- Please be careful!
- Fly safe. To paraphrase Satchel Paige: “Never run for a plane; there will always be another one.”
- Yuck
- Sounds like a mechanical problem.
- Be careful
It is no wonder that people are reluctant to go for a ride in a Cessna, Cirrus, or Robinson if this is what they think is a normal day in an aircraft that is not being operated Part 121 (airline).
Checklist on single engine failure:
+ Airspeed: best glide, flaps up
+ Best site to land
+ Camera selfie
+ Declare emergency
+ Eliminate instructor
I think you have experienced more simulated problems in a day than the whole PC-12 fleet does during a year. However, people should be reluctant to go for a ride in a Cessna.
You can use NTSB data, 355 fatal accidents during 2014 (each accident may involve several deaths). That is about one fatal accident for each 600 general aviation airplanes per year. It is difficult to approximate the total number of hours that a general aviation aircraft flies each year, with the exception of aircraft used for flight instruction or business it is probably very low. General aviation is and will remain very dangerous.
http://www.aopa.org/About-AOPA/General-Aviation-Statistics/Active-General-Aviation-Aircraft-in-the-U-S
http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/Results.aspx?queryId=57df3a85-84a7-4b92-a98e-8e8340398832
You can, of course, engage in dangerous activities and be relatively safe. I have been a pilot since I was 18 years old (that is a long time ago). I have enjoyed flying more than most things I have done in life. My son had his first solo flight in a glider a few months ago, he was 16 at the time.
Lastly, most general aviation accidents are not caused by engine failure.
This is a quote from an NTSB investigator published by Bloomberg Business:
“accidents involving private pilots in their own or rented planes, mostly small, single-engine aircraft, averaged about 12 per 100,000 flight hours during the same period, according to Jill Demko, an NTSB investigator who spoke at the forum.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-19/pilots-deadly-private-plane-crashes-prompt-u-s-call-for-basics
If a private pilot flies 60 hours per year for thirty years the change of being in an accident is not trivial.
@otlanzero
A few added points to make:
1) Planes are “owned”, “rented” or”provided by employer” – owned should not really be lumped with rented, because the rented accident stats are better than the owned. “provided by employer” and “rented” both have an inherantly higher level of proficiency and care by the the pilot and oversight by the owner.
2) Private in this case means the “private” certificate, as opposed to “student”, “commercial”, “airline” – so the least required training/oversight (instructors pay a lot of attention to their students). Even private with instrument rating is much better than just private.
3) A average across all private rated pilots of a 1 in 5 chance of bending a wing in 30 years is really not that much risk. Especially given that so much of the risk is under the pilots control.
Good points otlanzero, however, a couple of points to consider:
Accidents are not all fatal, in fact, looking at the statistics (http://www.aopa.org/About-AOPA/General-Aviation-Statistics/General-Aviation-Safety-Record-Current-and-Historic), it looks like roughly 20% of all accidents are fatal. So from your example – the private pilot who flies 60 hours per year for 30 years – has a roughly 4% chance of dying in an accident in an airplane that he’s flying, over his lifetime.
However, the top causes of these accidents tend to be factors that are almost entirely in the pilot’s control – weather (lack of proper preflight planning) and loss of control (lack of training to prevent, recognize, and recover from stalls/spins, poor decision making) topping the list. Maintenance causes tend to be at the bottom of the list, and even most of those can be prevented with a proper pre-flight inspection and good ADM.
Driving, statistically, is roughly 10 times safer (http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.pdf) – your chances of a fatal accident, over a 30 year period of driving 12000 miles per year is roughly 0.4%. However, a major portion of your risk comes from the other drivers on the road – you have little control over whether the driver on the highway next to you is drunk or texting, whether the truck you’re passing is about to have an unfortunate tire blowout, etc.
So – the tradeoff is – flying is statistically more dangerous, a statistic which is driven up by poor pilots and can be mitigated based on pilot actions; driving is statistically safer but you have much less control over whether you’re going to die today.
I had to read the post a second time before it occurred to where the “problems” were happening.
With that many problems they really should fix their simulator.