Missed Approach: FAA Says Flytenow Go-around (YC S14)

Re:Missed Approach: FAA Says Flytenow Go-around (YC S14) by idlewords on Saturday August 16, 2014 @05:50PM (#8187692)

The difference in accident rates between general aviation and commercial aviation is really striking, too:

"General aviation has the highest aviation accident rate within civil aviation. The rate is 6 times higher than for small commuter operators and 40 times higher than for transport category operations."

http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/mwl5_2012.html

For context, flying in a small plane with a private pilot is about as risky as riding a motorcycle. It's not incredibly unsafe, but it's not like getting into an airliner, either. Getting the GA accident rate down has proven a pretty intractable problem.

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Re:Missed Approach: FAA Says Flytenow Go-around (YC S14) by cge on Saturday August 16, 2014 @06:04PM (#8187720)

Even that page understates the difference. There has been no fatal crash of a major national US carrier since 2001, and there have been only a small handful of regional carrier crashes in the last ten years. There are fatal GA crashes all the time, and are common enough that they aren't even included on many online sites or covered much beyond local news. The most recent one seems to have been yesterday.

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Re:Missed Approach: FAA Says Flytenow Go-around (YC S14) by mikeash on Saturday August 16, 2014 @06:39PM (#8187828)

Just to put some numbers on this, in 2010 (the last year I could find stats on with lazy Googling) there were 267 fatal GA crashes with 453 fatalities in the US. There were no airliner fatalities in the US, just like most years in the past decade.

While I'm at it, there were 32,788 automobile traffic fatalities in 2010 in the US, although of course there's vastly more car activity than GA activity.

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