lml@lancaironline.net Mailing List Archive

Rick,

You have great points. Unfortunately we spend millions of dollars on the FAA data and don't get much bang for the buck. Here is an interesting statistic I did last year on the medical certificate issue for a comment I submitted the third class medical NPRM.

Which group of pilots have fewer per capita medically related accidents?

a. Pilots with medical certificates

b. Pilots without medical certificates

Answer is b. Pilots without medical certificates (glider pilots, balloon pilots) have fewer medically related accidents.

I asked the aviation medical panel at SNF why Private airplane pilots needed medical certificates and their answer was that they used this argument to support the light sport certificate no medical requirement. Unfortunately they could not extend the same logic to the third class medical although they just upped the third class to five years for those under 40 (but not changing a thing for the over 40 crowd).

Remember it is the FAA and their motto is "it does not have to make sense" ;)

Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Titsworth <rtitsworth@mindspring.com>
To: lml@lancaironline.net
Sent: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 8:51 pm
Subject: [LML] Re: Safety in our Community of Lancairs

All good info. But, as usually, we must be careful with the inferences from mis-used/mis-applied statistics.

To relate that private pilots make up 35% of the total pilot population and 48% of GA accidents is pretty useless by itself.

i.e. What percentage of airline and/or commercial flight accidents are attributed private pilots? Of course the answer is zero. That’s because the population of all airline/commercial pilots and the population of all GA pilots are not the same. Thus, relating the % of GA pilot type accidents to the type % of the total pilot population (GA, commercial, and airline) is on the surface inconclusive and perhaps mis-leading.

It could easily be that 60% of all GA pilots are private pilots and when associated with the 48% private pilot accident statistic above leads to the opposite conclusion that, in aggregate, the private pilots are actually less likely to be correlated with the accident rate (generally fly in better weather on local flights, etc).

I’m all for ratings and training – but Jeff said “food for thought” – so I couldn’t help but comment.

From: Lancair Mailing List [mailto:lml@lancaironline.net] On Behalf Of vtailjeff@aol.com
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 7:09 PM
To: lml@lancaironline.net
Subject: [LML] Re: Safety in our Community of Lancairs

Here is more food for thought.

Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: Giffen Marr <gamarr@charter.net>
To: lml@lancaironline.net
Sent: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 7:07 pm
Subject: [LML] Re: Safety in our Community of Lancairs

Jeff

What is the vertical scale??

Giff

From: vtailjeff@aol.com [mailto:vtailjeff@aol.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 7:03 PM
To: lml@lancaironline.net
Subject: Safety in our Community of Lancairs

Here is a pretty sobering chart.

Jeff

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