Ferrying plane across the U.S. cost

[RyanShort1]

Would you be able to provide some examples? I asked the last person that made this assertion and he declined. @schmookeeg provided a few but I think some of those may prove tough for more seasoned pilots. I think the ability to deal with aircraft maintenance issues depends more on a pilot's mechanical aptitude and experience vs the pilot's total time. There are a lot of pilots that are appliance operators and always will be.

As far as making a safe XC, I have always believed that you're the most proficient after getting a new rating. A newly minted PPL is probably more safe than a LOT of high time pilots. They're more proficient and all I have seen tend to be very conservative when planning flights, making GO/NO-GO decisions and flying XC trips. Accident data tends to show that as well. I pulled this graph from a non peer reviewed FAA paper (https://www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/2010s/media/201503.pdf)

I gave two examples in my post. We all *should* be able to think of things that can go wrong and I don't feel like it's my job to list them all. I'll mention two more regardless...

My photo crew made a precautionary landing last Thursday. We were in a rental 172 and it started losing power - they still haven't determined the cause yet, but the engine started acting weak and just before landing it was only making 2100 RPM in a descent with power and combined with a vacuum system failure. The aircraft acted *fine* on the previous flights. We weren't fully able to troubleshoot the cause, did mag checks, tried carb heat, etc... We were about 10 miles away from an airport and honestly, I wonder what the outcome would have been if we were 50 miles from an airport. As far as I know, that plane is still sitting in Midland as I type... the owner and his friend weren't even able to start it when they flew out to check on it. We just decided it was time to put it on the ground. The one thing a low-time new pilot on a ferry doesn't have is a lot of muscle memory and proficiency in THAT aircraft, and practice on emergency procedures, knowledge of glide speed and ratio, and practice getting it into a short or soft field.

I just did a checkout for a 170-ish hour pilot who is about to take her new 150 from TX to WA and she doesn't have much time in anything that isn't fuel injected. We went over carb heat and icing stuff as part of the checkout - but that could bite a new pilot who trained in 172SPs. I'm pretty confident in her ability to get it home and she seemed to have the right kind of safety attitudes, but if she's were to have a hiccup at 10K between New Mexico and AZ, I hope the bit of training we did on emergency procedures and landings was adequate.

 

[idahoflier]

That's a fascinating chart. I always thought the "killing zone" was before 300 hours. I assume "accident rate" is normalized for hours in each bin, but I'm suspicious.

I thought that chart represented raw accident data but it appears the data was pulled from another paper from 8 datasets and it definitely had some normalization applied...

 

[MooneyDriver78]

Wasn’t there a book about this...IIRC the hump at 1000 hours was attributed to over confident pilots doing something stupid.

 

[idahoflier]

I gave two examples in my post. We all *should* be able to think of things that can go wrong and I don't feel like it's my job to list them all.

I completely agree. I can think of a lot of things that can go wrong on a flight. I'm just trying to understand the assertion that this XC is fraught with traps and perils (particularly regarding maintenance issues) for a low time pilot. Thanks for the reply...

 

[Ed Haywood]

Since he provided a link to the study, hopefully the methodology is adequately explained there.

It is well explained, but it has a lot of scary math and graphs, so here is the readers digest version. Conventional wisdom says that you are most dangerous at 300 hours of experience, but that is a misinterpretation of the data. It ignores the fact that there are more 300 hour pilots than there are 100 or 1000 hour pilots, so of course there are more accidents by 300 hour pilots. The author's proposed methodology normalizes for the number of pilots with a given level of experience, so you are looking at the accident rate for each experience group.

There are actually two curves provided: one for IR pilots, and one for non-IR pilots. The accident rate for non-IR pilots peaks around 500 hours, while the IR rate is closer to 1000 hours.

You could come up with a dozen plausible explanations for what that is so. My personal theory is that if you are susceptible to Darwinian de-selection, you will have had plenty of opportunity to prove it by the time you get to 500/1000 hours.