http://www.pbase.com/geary/image/120224799
That's my mom and me when I took her flying on September 3, 1977. I have the logbook right here that I carried on that flight.
Sadly, this plane was involved in a midair in 1982, and the instructor and student pilot died:
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20020917X...
It's weird, if you sell a car and then it gets in a wreck and someone dies, you don't think about it much - or do you?
I guess you're not likely to find out it happened.
But it really shook me up that two people came to a tragic end in the same plane I used to fly.
R.I.P.
These skyrocketing costs make it so the fleet ages and becomes less reliable. So people get out. Or they die because they can't fly enough to get experience or the aircraft has a problem because it isn't flown enough.
And costs rise further because there is no market. It's a downward spiral. And it seems that the FAA is completely happy with the situation.
I've been out on beautiful days (low 80s, calm, 10 mi vis) and the CTAF is all but dead. Even 5 years ago there would have been 2-3 in the pattern and I would have heard a steady stream of traffic around the other 5 airports in the same frequency.
Yes, literally.
When I go to EAA meetings I'm the youngest by 15-20 years and I'm in my 30s. I don't think I've ever seen a privately owned certified plane that was newer than 25 years old.
It's all around a bad situation for general aviation.
I really don't know where the airlines are going to get the next generation of pilots from. Of course with the horrible pay and hours, I can't blame anyone from not choosing that career path.
Plus figure in "working" 60+ hours a week and only getting paid for 30-40 of them. It's not uncommon for airlines to fly pilots from city to city to stage them for flights. But they only pay them for the time they are actually touching the controls. So they get up at 3am to catch series of flights, then don't start getting paid until noon.
There is a trade off: fully automated transportation (planes or cars) will eliminate routine operator error, like falling asleep at the wheel. On the other hand, there will also be corner cases which humans could (sometimes) handle that the autopilot didn't.
And human psychology means that not only will we weight the losses more heavily than the gains, but when losses happen and people die, we will feel unimaginably guilty over the losses, no matter how many people were saved.
The military. As usual.
Right now the airlines have managed to talk high school grads into taking out huge student loans and drop 100K+ on a for-profit school, then take a job making ~ 20. There's no way that's sustainable though.
Interestingly, though, the navy is has a glut of pilots right now.
I was going off all the information that came out after the Colgate Air 3407 crash in regards to how feeder airlines treat their pilots.
I've talked to several CFI's who are moving into regional carriers and they report the same environments, i.e. high hours/low pay.
It sounds like maybe you're set if you can clear that hurdle and move directly to a "real" airline?
The major airlines love, love, love military pilots, especially ones that muster out around o-3, o-4 because they are in their late 20s/early 30s (lots of years left before mandatory retirement), they are already completely trained, have tons of time flying planes (compared to civilian pilots of the same age), and they are almost overqualified for ferrying passengers in terms of abilities/skills.
No real idea on how accurate that is, just stuff I've overheard in pilot lounges at airports :)
(Disclaimer: I have a frozen ATPL(A) myself, worked for one of the biggest airlines and know at least 100 of mentioned unemployed pilots)
It is more of a microcosm of the economy than anything else.
People still fly Cesnas because they are very stable and were not built with planned obsolescence in mind.
That's extreme. Is there any pattern? Where are you located?
Yes, it is extreme, not the average. I should have added that the pilots I knew were largely instructors, stunt pilots and skydivers (and pilots who flew skydivers to altitude). So not a typical population.
Yes -- all except the fact that I gave up the activity before getting killed myself. :)
Has the rate of people dying off fallen as the equipment (planes and instruments) has improved?
I had always assumed the decline has more to do with the economics of the sport and the amount of upfront investment necessary to get to the point where you can fly on your own.
The thing is that it's easy to make stupid mistakes operating and maintaining an aircraft, and unlike many other areas of modern life, there aren't training wheels to make it idiot proof.
Wow, that's certainly dissuasive.
By the way, are there some kind of autopilots on modern amateur planes? Or is that even possible to integrate any ?
By "amateur planes" do you mean ultralights or experimental homebuilts? The answer depends on which -- an ultralight could hardly tolerate the extra weight that a decent autopilot would require. And most experimental homebuilt owners probably want the pleasure of actually flying their planes.
Autopilots are more attractive to people who fly long distances and not for pleasure. I had a Mooney 201 years ago that I would fly on business, and the flights tended to be long and a bit boring, so I had an autopilot installed.
Picture of me putting my bicycle in the backseat of my Mooney: http://i.imgur.com/R5qVo.jpg
Where does most of the weight come from in an autopilot?
On all small aircraft (and some larger older ones, DC-3s for instance), muscle is the only thing that moves the control surfaces. They're very well designed and counterweighted so that the required effort is quite minimal.
At 254 pounds you want light and simple. FBW requires actuators. And controllers. And sensors. And power. And then you have to double up everything for redundancy. You would easily eat up 50 lbs or more making a reliable FBW system and it would cost 3-4x what the entire aircraft cost.
Even with normal light aircraft a FBW system is both unneeded and overly complex. Cables and pulleys are extremely reliable. They are inspected every year (along with the engine and various other pieces of the aircraft).
(I don't fly and know nothing about this but it sounds pretty cool)
Really helps when flying in congested airspace or while performing 'complex' arrivals.
How many pilots did you know?
Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream to go up to heaven in a flying machine The machine broke down and down he fell thought he'd go to heaven but he went to Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream ...
RIP Lincoln Beachey, drowned in SF Bay 1915
The rates for motorcycle accidents and deaths is really very high:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_safety#Accident_rate...
Quote: "According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in 2006, 13.10 cars out of 100,000 ended up in fatal crashes. The rate for motorcycles is 72.34 per 100,000 registered motorcycles."
That's about 5 1/2 times greater.
http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/jul12/clinical1.asp
I gave up my brief motorcycle career after having kids, which I'm rather glad of now, reading that.
Worse plenty of people own more than one motorcycle so the rate is probably higher than that.
The actual way you calculate the probability of an event with a binomial distribution is by taking the inverse probability and raising it to the power of the attempts, then subtracting from 1. So in the case of two coin flips, that is 1 - (1/2 ^ 2), or a 75% of getting a 'head'. That would mean, with a huge host of assumptions, that a motorcyclist's chance of dying over 30 years would be 1 - (99928/100000)^30, or (funnily enough), 2.13%.
edit: I said bimodal when I meant binomial.
By the binomial series [1], the true value is 1-(1-p)^n = np - n(n-1)/2! p^2 + n(n-1)(n-2)/3! p^3 + ...
So approximating it to just np corresponds to taking just the leading term of the series. Of course, this is only valid when p is small enough. To see how good the approximation is, we can compare it to the two first terms of the series, which is np - n(n-1)/2 p^2, or approximately np - (np)^2 /2.
So the approximation np is about twice the percentage difference between the approximation and the true value. In this case, the approximation np is about 2%, and that guess is itself about 1% wrong.
You set out to correct a naive statistical assumption, computed it properly, and the result was about the same (not at all common for such problems). But you posted it anyway, in the spirit of sharing useful information.
As the Australians say, "Good on you, mate."
In other words, the bulk of deaths on bikes are young, inexperienced, and/or unlicensed riders.
Also, bike deaths are far more likely to involve alcohol than car deaths; so if you're like me and you don't drink before riding, you've just improved your chances.
http://www.cdc.gov/features/dsMotorcycleSafety/
A significant reason for this is your far less likely to survive an accident as an older rider than a young one.
Note: The death rate statistics they quote include non motorcycle owners.
There's also a huge correlation between unlicensed riders and serious injuries. Motorcycle riders are far more likely to be unlicensed than car drivers - last I heard was something like 3-4 times as likely.
Unlicensed motorcycle riders are over twice as likely to be in fatal accidents than licensed motorcycle riders.
I ride 15,000-20,000 miles a year - I'm well trained, equipped, and experienced. A lot of bike owners ride weekends, occasional trips, etc. I actually don't ride much on the weekends - and when I do, I'm pretty shocked how bad (dangerous, rude, etc) the riders are compared to the commuters I mostly see.
That's a very weird statistic. Sure, since those riders spend most of their 30 years riding time over 25yo.
From your link: "The highest death and injury rates were among 20-24 year-olds, followed by 25-29 year-olds."
I firmly believe that 2/3rds of the fatality risk in GA is pilot-controlled and readily avoidable: weather, fuel exhaustion and "ostentatious display" (buzzing, etc) are relatively easy to avoid with nothing more than basic knowledge and firm discipline.
On a motorcycle, many risks are rider-controlled but a lot of your safety is in the hands of people near you that you'll never meet. Less so in aviation, IMO.
However I also believe that there's something about aviation that attracts the type of people who are uniquely unsuited for it. Daredevils, non-detail minded, and just plain incompetent.
When you read the NTSB reports and such it's just not pretty.
Pilot after pilot runs out of fuel or manages to run a perfectly good airplane into the ground / side of a mountain because they weren't observant.
I'm not sure what the solution is though. We've had 30 years of the FAA and all the associations preaching safety to no effect. More regulation won't help either since all the main accident factors are already against some regulation or another.
What's especially sinister to me is how long it took me to really get that. And how much my self-perceived skill is more about my ability to recover from error than my ability to avoid error in the first place. Especially when it's over time periods long enough for fear to wear off.
I'd never take up flying, because I know my attention would wander during those long periods of apparent calm but actual risk.
Regarding why aviation attracts the wrong sort of people, if you haven't read about the Dunning-Kruger effect, I think it'll ring some bells for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
As a programmer it's also taken me quite awhile to recognize that I'm not a perfect snowflake and am quite capable of writing code that contains horrendous bugs.
I've always recognized that while flying though, because I've always felt like a neophyte at it, and not a "real" pilot.
Statistically speaking, it's pretty safe to allow your attention to wander a bit while on a long uneventful flight. That's why there are auto-pilots. The real danger comes in whenever you're close to the ground or in bad weather.
Surprisingly the #1 thing you can do to avoid an accident is just make sure you have enough fuel. Which is a very low bar to clear.
2) What's the average mileage of a motorcyclist compared to a pilot?
On a quick look, the price of an hour of flying has gone up nearly 50% in the last ten years in the aviation club I used to belong to.
In real dollar terms, that price is very close to what it was 10 years ago.
"OMG, this cost went up 50% over ten years!" sounds like a dire situation, when in fact it's a tiny margin over whatever inflation measure you prefer.
If you take 2.5% as the annualized inflation, that's 28% over that 10 year period, meaning the other 17% increase is 1.6% "real dollar increase" per year. Hardly frightening, IMO.
I completely agree that nominal gas rates aren't the right measure, and the real price increase has indeed been tiny.
I started flying about 1980. By 1992, 12 years later, about half the pilots I knew in 1980 (instructors as well as students) had been killed in flying accidents. That's another reason for the decline in activity.