Another statistic quoted by the Kings, " 7 out of 8 accidents are pilot error." The other accidents are mechanically related. "Only 1 out of 8 accidents, the airplane let down the pilot, the other 7 the pilot let down the airplane.
In our homebuilts, my guess is a large percentage of the mechanical failures our the fault of the builder/mechanics lack of knowledge or lack of attention.
Maybe that why, when I hear of a Lancair going down, I assume it's not some unforeseen mechanical failure. I assume it's an error in judgement, either in flight or in maintenance. If only the people flying these beautiful airplanes were as reliable as the airplanes themselves.
Mike, I couldn't agree with you more. I made a post awhile back about Lancair accidents based on a review of Lee Metcalf's very helpful accident database. From 8/89 through 5/04 there were 85 accidents, 35 of which involved fatalities. I classified the 35 fatal accidents by 1) pilot error, 2) maintenance error, or 3) bad luck. I thought I was I was charitable toward pilots in deciding that some accidents were bad luck. By my classifications, 5 of the 35 fatal accidents were bad luck. Of these, one was a heart attack, something that could happen while driving your car. Another involved water in the carburetor float bowl (detectable during some pre-flight???). A third appears to have involved a stall/spin upon loss of power, which might have had a better outcome. Another involved an engine fire, and another the failure to reach the runway while trying to return to the airport after loss of power.
My conclusion was that Lancair pilots are not predisposed toward bad luck (though I don't know total hours flown, so I don't have a statistical analysis to back this up.) There were no alarm bells raised about the airplane that I detected (though I'm certainly no expert). Unfortunately, however, Lancair pilots DO seem to be predisposed toward bad judgement. It seemed hard to read the accident reports any other way.
Small planes generally are 10 times less safe than commercial planes in the sense that they experience one fatality about every hundred thousand hours, compared to one every million hours in commercial planes. If we could take out the 7 out of 8 times the pilot lets the plane down, we could approach the commercial safety record. (I realize that some of the commercial accidents are also pilot error, so it's a little unfair to say that we could take that out but that they couldn't. My point is that that if one has good judgement, small planes are pretty darn safe. Lancairs could be too.)