Somebody asked me a question a while back about how safe it is to fly. I gave a rather sweeping answers indicating that the main way people kill themselves is running out of fuel and flying into clouds.
I just found that Dan C. has a listing of all of the RV accidents and fatalities on his website here:
http://www.rvproject.com/ntsb.html
I figured that I would see for myself the safety record for RV's in general. There are about 100 accidents that caused 1 or 2 fatalities in RV's. There are about 4650 RV's flying as of July 2006 (www.vansaircraft.com).
I went through all of the NTSB pages and tried to categorize how the accidents happened (this is harder than it seems). I suspect if I ran through it again my numbers would be slightly different since some of this stuff is really grey*. Here is my breakdown (with rounding)
Acro 11%
Buzz 8%
Formation 3%
Fuel 7%
Engine 13%
IMC 7%
Stall 15%
Landing 8%
Drugs 2%
Airframe 4%
Prop 1%
Midair 2%
CG 1%
Unknown 18%
What struck me on this analysis was that common wisdom that says Fuel problems and flying into IMC are not the primary fatality causes since in fact for RV's they cause about 15% of the fatalities. Acro/Buzzing account for about 20%, stall/spin 15%, Engine Problems 13%.
Seems like the risks are higher than I figured AND many of these accidents can be prevented since the majority of the causes are in the pilots control.
Be careful out there...
I just found that Dan C. has a listing of all of the RV accidents and fatalities on his website here:
http://www.rvproject.com/ntsb.html
I figured that I would see for myself the safety record for RV's in general. There are about 100 accidents that caused 1 or 2 fatalities in RV's. There are about 4650 RV's flying as of July 2006 (www.vansaircraft.com).
I went through all of the NTSB pages and tried to categorize how the accidents happened (this is harder than it seems). I suspect if I ran through it again my numbers would be slightly different since some of this stuff is really grey*. Here is my breakdown (with rounding)
Acro 11%
Buzz 8%
Formation 3%
Fuel 7%
Engine 13%
IMC 7%
Stall 15%
Landing 8%
Drugs 2%
Airframe 4%
Prop 1%
Midair 2%
CG 1%
Unknown 18%
*I put each accident in one of these categories so there is a lot of judgment. For example, all but one of the airframe (wing folding) fatalities are in rv3's, doing acro, I listed those as airframe problems. All formation accidents are midairs but I stuck them in formation. One of the formation accidents was in IMC. Many of the accidents could be listed under multiple categories...
What struck me on this analysis was that common wisdom that says Fuel problems and flying into IMC are not the primary fatality causes since in fact for RV's they cause about 15% of the fatalities. Acro/Buzzing account for about 20%, stall/spin 15%, Engine Problems 13%.
Seems like the risks are higher than I figured AND many of these accidents can be prevented since the majority of the causes are in the pilots control.
Be careful out there...
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