“Over The Airwaves” and the GA Fatal Accident Rate

Many of us in the aviation world have recently come to know the name Robert Miller.  Mr. Miller is an east coast CFI and the author of Over the Airwaves.  OTA’s masthead describes it as ”the bi-weekly journal for the proficient pilot”.

I’ve been reading Over the Airwaves for about a year and find that I agree with Mr. Miller on many points.  He’s obviously dedicated to the issue of flight safety and a proponent of realistic, recurrent training which exceeds the Practical Test Standards and embraces the real-world aspects of flying.

I continue to read OTA and learn a lot from it.  And I should note that his dedication to publishing Over the Airwaves is admirable.  One can’t help but stand in awe of the many hours it must take to put together each issue.  I commend him for venturing beyond the traditional CFI methods of providing information to pilots and hope he continues to publish OTA for a long time.

Having said that, I’ve noticed that OTA seems to spawn from a single raison d’etre, namely that the general aviation fatal accident rate is “worsening at an alarming rate” (OTA Vol. 3, No. 25).  Statistics, tables, and charts are proffered in support of this thesis, and I must admit the case looks compelling.  It begs the question:  have AOPA, the Air Safety Foundation, the FAA, and the NTSB been lying to us?  Are they glossing over the true story on general aviation flight safety?

I decided to look into this issue a little deeper, not to discredit Mr. Miller or his publication — remember, I’m an avid reader of Over the Airwaves - but because for some reason his theory just didn’t feel right.

I began by asking him where he got the raw data to support the claim that “We are marching down seven straight years of worsening GA fatal accident rates”, because the data I see from the Air Safety Foundation and NTSB suggest that the fatal accident rate has been in a long term hold.  In light of the fact that annual GA flight hours are estimated, the NTSB figures showing a rate hovering near 1.3 per 100,000 hours for the past decade indicate that GA fataility rates are not getting worse.  My source:  http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Table10.htm

Bob very kindly replied and referred me to the headline article in Volume 3, Issue 23a of OTA.  This article uses avgas sales to suggest declining flying activity.  He also pointed me to a linear regression analysis at the bottom of Volume 3, Issue 25 which suggests an increasing fatal accident rate:

After reviewing the data, I still suggest that his analysis is quite flawed.  Miller ties avgas burned to hours flown.  To be fair, the NTSB uses the same methodology.  However, the connection between the two cannot be a direct one, because the Department of Energy stats he references would then indicate that flying activity has declined 80% since 1983.  The table shows a drop from 418,000 gallons/day in 1983 to 98,000 gallons/day in 2004.

A more logical explanation is that there are various reasons for the drop in avgas fuel usage:

• Let’s begin with the pilot popuation.  Yes, there are fewer pilots flying today than there were in the 1980s.  I don’t really care how many are in the FAA registry.  Many of them don’t fly anyway, just as they didn’t fly in the 80s.  But the number of active pilots is down, maybe 10% I’d estimate.  Even if it’s higher, there’s no way it would come close to an 80% drop.

• There are fewer piston twins flying today than there were in 1983.  Who is even making piston twins these days?  The Baron, Seminole, and TwinStar sales combined total fewer than 50 airplanes per year.  Cessna is completely out of the piston twin market, and for the most part so is Piper.  No more 300 and 400 series twins, no more Twin Comanches, Apaches, Aztecs, Twin Bonanzas.  You name a piston twin, it’s pretty much been out of production for decades.  And the existing piston twin fleet is being decimated by the inevitable ravages of time, spar ADs, high operating costs, limited parts supplies, and so on.  Fewer twins flying = lower total fuel consumption per hour flown.

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