The 27th Nall Report, analyzing aircraft accidents in 2015, was recently published by AOPA Air Safety Institute. The publisher says “Imagine a year without a single fatal accident in GA [general aviation]. We aren’t there yet, but we’re getting closer every year.” The data plotted on page 6, however, show that the accident rate and fatal accident rate are essentially flat from 2006 through 2015. During that time the fleet has seen a lot of technological upgrades. Old Cessnas and Pipers have been retired in favor of some of the thousands of parachute-equipped glass-panel Cirruses produced during those 9 years. Datalink weather (XM or ADS-B) has been added to a lot of planes. Retrofit glass panels. Synthetic vision (a flight simulator-style view of the terrain out the window).
The fatal accident rate for GA non-commercial (Joe Average flying around in a Cessna or Cirrus) went from 1.22 per 100,000 hours to 1.13 between 2006 and 2015 (fixed-wing commercial was a lot better! Only 0.24 and that includes dangerous agricultural work as well as safe two-pilot charter work.)
It might be a statistical fluke, but the fatal accident rate for non-commercial helicopter operations was down to 0.57, well below that of fixed wing and barely higher than the rate for commercial helicopters (0.45 per 100,000 hours).
My take-away: we need radical change if we want to see radical improvement. Maybe it is “Ground Monitoring for Part 91 Operations”. Maybe it is aggressive envelope protection for existing flight control systems (see “Could the latest autopilots with envelope protection turn a deathtrap into a safe airplane?“). Maybe it is a retrofit fly-by-wire flightpath-based flight control system (see the U.S. Navy’s MAGIC CARPET system for landing the F/A-18).
Readers: What do you think? Would you have expected more from the improvements that have been introduced in the last 20 years?
I definitely would have expected more improvement. With synthetic vision, weather and terrain you’d think a lot of accidents would have been avoided.
Perhaps there’s some risk compensation going on: “I’ve got all these things protecting me (add parachutes), so I can take more risk.” Always a danger to more protections.
My Sling 4 will have a parachute, all of the above distracting goodies and (my personal favorite) envelope protection. I will try my darnedest to not let all that lull me into riskier behavior.
…dangerous agricultural work…
Are crop dusters still a thing? Some of the craziest flying I’ve ever witnessed, but I haven’t seen one in decades. I guess Christmas tree harvesting qualifies as agricultural work. Using helicopters to install Christmas trees is apparently risky.
So long as we’re really just guessing at the denominator (the hours flown by pilots who manage to avoid hitting things), all of this is just a horoscope with numbers, to paraphrase the old joke about weather forecasts.
I think somebody like ForeFlight could do a lot to paint a deeper picture about what flights are really being made, looking not just at the raw number of hours flown, but local vs. XC, VFR vs. MVFR vs. IFR vs. LIFR, and lots of the other fine details that really make the difference between disaster and “well I learned something new today.”
Personally, I’ve been interested in doing a review of accidents to see if I could extract a set of relatively objective rules that can be used to rule out significant classes of risk. For instance, night flight has a much higher accident rate and I’m generally inclined to avoid it altogether, even if it can be very pretty and/or convenient. Likewise, I feel like I could choose to never make a flight with less than NBAA reserves. Part of the reason I want a plane with more useful load than I need 80% of the time is so I can carry NBAA reserves or better without being tempted to think about it.
I also suspect that a rule-based system (which I think is similar to what the military uses) would provide some bounds based on things like IFR currency vs. probably weather, familiar vs. unfamiliar terrain/approaches, day of week, phase of moon, and spit out a relative risk assessment to help you understand how big a chance you were taking and provide links to Kayak.com to buy an airline ticket instead.
Sadly, the humans have not changed, and a large proportion of plane owners are older persons and more liable to error. And then there is (in America it seems) an irreducible minimum of those who are unlicensed and medically unfit, yet escape being grounded. These facts alone are enough to provide a baseline below which GA fatalities are unlikely to fall.
(Source, NTSB Monthly Accident Reports)
I’ve recently become fascinated watching Youtube videos off people flying paramotors.
What are the stats for GA twins? Too big for a chute and some awkward characteristics but more 2-pilot time…