Flight School Crashes

[pelmet]

One thing that I have seen over the years of renting aircraft in various layover cities was the high rate of accidents. To be honest, I don't know how insurance companies can still provide coverage with all these accidents. I belong to a flying club which has had three members die in three years in separate accidents(all in their own aircraft) bringing two non-members to their death as well. And there have been more in the past. It is depressing. And those are just the fatal accidents.

Now I open my email and discover through the usual style of writing in a situation like this that there has been a fatal accident of an aircraft that I have rented, although it has been a while. Aircraft pitched up and crashed.

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news ... a-airport/

Use caution. General aviation is a risky activity.

[photofly]

The insurance claim for this won’t amount to much. The plane was worth nothing, the pilot isn’t covered by the insurance and the liability to the passenger’s estate is probably capped at half a million dollars. There isn’t even a federal requirement for small planes to be insured in the US - it’s left to states to set the rules.

More generally speaking, a big proportion of the cost of learning to fly is for the insurance, compulsory in Canada.

[Squaretail]

While the number of accidents may seem high, when compared to the amount of money the insurance companies are making off of GA, I’m sure if they weren’t we would see rates steadily climbing. Ultimately the payout rate per flight hours flown is still pretty low. One must keep in mind how many airplanes in the GA fleet are paying insurance and not even being flown.

Incidentally, when I dug up some stats on it before, flight schools account for a far less proportion of GA accidents, in all ways of comparison. Private flyers were way more likely to incur hull losses, fatalities, accidents per hour flown, accidents per year, you name it. The higher rate for flight school commercial insurance is that way primarily because there is no real competitive market.

The last bit came up when I got into a bit of a battle with a local flying club who insisted the school was unsafe and should be removed from the field. Made a lot of people uncomfortable when in turn around, it turned out the local flyers had an accident rate of roughly 35 times that of the flight school, yet accounted for only 1/80 of the movements at the airport.

Tell me who is unsafe again?

[fish4life]

GA isn’t risky, overconfident morons that don’t stay current yet think they can fly in anything are risky

[broken_slinky]

Incidentally, when I dug up some stats on it before, flight schools account for a far less proportion of GA accidents, in all ways of comparison. Private flyers were way more likely to incur hull losses, fatalities, accidents per hour flown, accidents per year, you name it. The higher rate for flight school commercial insurance is that way primarily because there is no real competitive market.

When you sit and analyze the data, it makes sense. The majority who are going through flight training are flying on a regular basis. Their muscle memory and piloting is more practiced. Compare that to the GA pilot who flies just enough to be legally current. Now the low time trainee may not be 100% at the controls when an odd situation arises but I'd trust them more than the rusty 5 hours a year pilot who claims to be proficient.