<100hr Pilot- A rant

The more hours you fly, the more mistakes you will make, and the more you will learn. You aren't necessarily less safe, but less experienced, and that, believe it or not, makes a difference.
 
somorris said:
The fascination with logged hours that we aviators seem to have can be a little ridiculous, because a lot of high time pilots spent a huge percentage of those hours droning along on long cross country flights repeating the same hour over and over. Kind of like someone said regarding "which airplane," when you make the ranks of pilot, you are already part of a pretty elite group. We should all respect each other.
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Well, I'm not high time, but the vast majority of my time is cross country, and long cross country at that, cross continental even. No one trip across the country has been the same as another, no hour like another. In nearly 3000 hrs I've hand flown all but a couple dozen and in all conditions. There is always weather to study. Sometimes I'll have to navigate through 3 systems in a day.
 
I post up to blow off some steam, go away a couple days and WOW! the volume of responses!

Thanks all for the words of wisdom, encouragement and advise. I read all of them.
 
somorris said:
The fascination with logged hours that we aviators seem to have can be a little ridiculous, because a lot of high time pilots spent a huge percentage of those hours droning along on long cross country flights repeating the same hour over and over. Kind of like someone said regarding "which airplane," when you make the ranks of pilot, you are already part of a pretty elite group. We should all respect each other.
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OTOH, if you fly a lot of XC you'd likely encounter a fair number of new and sometimes exciting experiences that may increase your flying knowledge if you're paying attention. IOW for an individual, total hours isn't necessarily a solid indicator of useful experience but statistically it does work that way for a large group.
 
Here are some statistics that I received from AVEMCO in their published newsletter on accident claims. It seems the data tells a different story.
 

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Jaybird180 said:
Here are some statistics that I received from AVEMCO in their published newsletter on accident claims. It seems the data tells a different story.
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There's an old saying about lies, damn lies, and statistics.

While that article is interesting, it really doesn't tell the whole story. I'd want to know the total number of accidents for each group (or each group's accident rate as a percentage of the total), the percentage of accidents in each category/phase of flight by experience group, and some way of correlating between weather conditions, experience, and hours flown. For example, a pilot that flies more may fly more often in the winter, when taxiways might be ice-covered and slick. Or wet and slick. The sub-100 group is more likely to be flying only when weather is good & taxiways in better condition. The higher-time groups are more likely to own planes (as opposed to rent), meaning hangars & close tie-down locations. And are the claims based on count (how many) or value (how much) - striking FOD in a taxi might be a different claim amount than overrunning the runway than a prop-strike.

Lots of questions - would be interesting to get the raw data & do more analytics.
 
That chart doesn't tell me anything about whether 100hr pilots have higher accident claims/flight hour (or flight op) than a 1000 hour pilot.

All it shows is that the claims get shifted as hours change. Says nothing about them going up or down.
 
Experience is directly related to mistakes survived.
 
It has been said that when you get your ppl, to think of it as if you had two buckets. One bucket is called "luck" and it is full. The other bucket is called "experience" and it is empty. Every time you fly and survive you are taking a little bit out of your bucket of luck and putting it in your experience bucket. Eventually you run out of luck and you hope that your experience will carry you through.
 
EdFred said:
That chart doesn't tell me anything about whether 100hr pilots have higher accident claims/flight hour (or flight op) than a 1000 hour pilot.

All it shows is that the claims get shifted as hours change. Says nothing about them going up or down.
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Well if they had enough hours they'd get out of the <100 group, don't cha think?
 
flyersfan31 said:
Experience is directly related to mistakes survived.
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One of my friends has a saying: "You attempt to fill your experience bucket before your luck bucket runs out."
 
Jaybird180 said:
Well if they had enough hours they'd get out of the <100 group, don't cha think?
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That statement totally ignores Ed's valid point. The referenced study only classifies accidents, it does not address accident frequency.

Be very careful when drawing conclusions based on studies like these. It is easy to be naive.
 
Although not specifically stated, I would imagine that if a pilot in any group had 1+ accident while still in that group it would be added to that group's statistics. But I agree, this is purely inferred.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
One of my friends has a saying: "You attempt to fill your experience bucket before your luck bucket runs out."
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I find that the money bucket runs out before either of the others get low or full.
 
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