wolit@alice.UUCP (Jan Wolitzky) (12/15/84)
> I've sometimes wondered whether general aviation is reasonably > safe or really quite dangerous. The three main issues seem to > be: > 1. The mechanical reliability of the aircraft. > 2. The ability of the average pilot to cope with a real > emergency (landing on trees, control surface failure etc. > as has been dicussed recently). > 3. The survivability of a typical crash. If these were really the three main issues, flying would indeed be very dangerous. Fortunately, only the first is of major concern, and the mechanical failure is the cause of very few plane crashes. The other two factors *PRESUPPOSE* an failure or an actual crash, which, happily, are rare. Most accidents are caused by errors in judgement, in one form or another. Continued flight into bad weather (when either the pilot or the plane is not properly trained or equipped), failure to maintain airspeed or altitude (whether buzzing your friend's house or busting minimums on an approach), running out of gas (because you didn't put it there in the first place, put in the wrong kind, didn't know how to switch tanks, or just didn't pay attention), failing to see and avoid other traffic, failing to catch the kind of problems that even a cursory pre-flight would uncover (control locks in place, no oil, overloaded plane, etc.): *THESE* are the things that cause most accidents. In fact, flying is in many ways safer than, say, driving, since your safety is much less dependent on other pilots -- no one's going to run a red light or sideswipe you without your being able to do anything about it. Flying takes far less immediate concentration than driving: you can look down at your charts or diddle your radios for 10 or 15 seconds, and know you're not going to run into anything in that time. Not that keeping up on emergency techniques isn't a good idea, or that planes couldn't be built a LOT more crashworthy than they are, but one of the things that attracts me to flying is that your safety is very much under your own control. As long as you realize that it's better to be on the ground, wishing you were flying, than it is to be flying, wishing you were on the ground, it's not nearly as dangerous as the raw statistics might lead you to believe. -- Jan Wolitzky, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ; (201) 582-2998