This is the stuff that really freaks me out as a student pilot.
This is for you, and everyone else that has doubts about GA. I have copied the text of the reddit post, just in case it disappears, but link is below as well:
I had this same question a year ago and decided to “do my own research.”
I made a spreadsheet of every US fatal accident from 2016 and 2017 in “my type” of flying, which I defined as part 91, piston engine, non-experimental (n=~250). You know, flying for a $100 hamburger or to get the family from A to B or whatever. Im not assuming anything about the experimental accident rate; I just didn’t want to take the time to filter out parts of that world that don’t apply to me. I’m instrument rated, so I didn’t limit the search to VFR stuff. This turned out not to matter much.
I then read the NTSB final for each accident and capriciously and unilaterally categorized them into the following bins and brief descriptions:
Hold My Beer: this is for stuff like the pilot was on cocaine and drunk during the flight, the plane was over gross and 5 years out of annual, AND he took off VFR into IMC without getting a Wx briefing.
Stupid: Pilot ignored some fundamental steps in the process, but it wasn’t an obvious suicide mission from the get go. This is stuff like trying to make a 6-hour flight on 5-hour gas tanks, attempting a takeoff that even a glimpse at the POH’s Takeoff Performance page would have told you was never going to work, VFR into IMC that wasn’t intentional but should have known it was coming, and thrill-seeking. I mean no disrespect to the dead with the “stupid” title.
Swiss Cheese / Stick and Rudder: this is for stuff where with good training and skills, you should be able to fly out of it, but if you’re honest with yourself, it could get you. Unfortunate and atypical encounters with wake turbulence, nasty wind on landing, partial panel in turbulent IMC.
Fate Is The Hunter, with compliments to Earnest Gann: these are the nightmare-fuel ones, the ones that are uncomfortable to read because you know that despite whatever you might tell yourself about your skills and decision-making, there was no escaping death in that plane on that day. A bird strike by a bald eagle removed the horizontal stabilizer. Some NORDO idiot drops out of the sky onto your high-wing plane when you’re on final. Engine failure at 200’ AGL with no good options.
The final tally: HMB: 29% Stupid: 33% Swiss Cheese: 17% Fate is the Hunter: 10%
You’ll note they don’t add up to 100%. I set aside suicides, of which there were a surprising amount and reports where it was just really hard to figure out what on earth happened.
What have we learned here? People do astonishingly dumb stuff in planes. I would tell anyone who asked me to be very careful about who they get in a small airplane with.
On the other hand, you can handily disregard ~65% of this stuff if you are a pilot who uses even a modicum of care in your flying! Just don’t
10% in the “Fate” category is more than I was hoping, but whatcha gonna do? Not fly? Get real.
That 17% is what catches my eye. That’s the stuff you can really protect against by treating this thing more seriously than a hobby. Do the unfun, expensive, but important hours with a CFI, even when you’re not working on a rating. Deeply inconvenience and disappoint your passengers when taking off just really isn’t the right decision that day.
That’s all I’ve got!
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