The reality is more like if you keep on flying, you will eventually crash and burn, unless you are lucky and your age (or medical) will get you first.
As sinister as it sounds, it is all logical, and we can only agree. The more one practices a risky occupation, the more one exposes itself to the inherent risks.
Of course, we all try to use mitigation tools in order get old and not (too) bold 
LeSving wrote:
The reality is more like if you keep on flying, you will eventually crash and burn, unless you are lucky and your age (or medical) will get you first.
This may or may not be true, but seems very fatalistic. I know lots of old pilots. In fact, spend a week in Oshkosh at the end of July almost any year, and you can meet literally thousands of them. My little flying club has many old pilots – assuming by old we mean over 70. Many still flying, and some who have decided that they don’t want to continue flying.
If I had to summarize the main risk in flying into one word, it’s complacency. In the end, it seems to be the root cause of most crashes. Avoiding complacency is hard.
“assuming by old we mean over 70. ”
I would prefer the term “du troisième age” 🙂
There is a big difference between UL and aircrafts, but it I believe it depends on the type of UL. From memory it’s about 10x as dangerous to fly a paramotor than to be a private aircraft pilot. To give a sense of the numbers you can compare everything to everything in number of deaths per user per year:
Multi-axis UL may be comparable to aircrafts, but I would guess UL hang gliders and helicopters are also much more dangerous.
Reflecting on it, it seems that cost-sharing in an aircraft would be comparable to ride-sharing in a motorcycle: cool, uncomfortable, slow, dangerous. Obviously it doesn’t exist because cars are so much more practical.
If you fly for 40 years, there’s about a 1.6% chance you’ll kill yourself (which sounds about right, and is still high as accidental rates go).
I read that here in the UK 15% die accidentally. I don’t believe the old/bold pilots proverb either; GA is full of these ex RAF sayings to excuse the p1ss poor PPL training which takes 10-15k off everybody without teaching them to even fly to N France.
In my experience life insurance does not cover private flying, no matter the certification of the aircraft involved.
In the UK it does.
What is difficult is if you applied for the insurance after you started flying, and didn’t disclose it.
Snoopy wrote:
In my experience life insurance does not cover private flying, no matter the certification of the aircraft involved.
My insurer (Ergo) quoted an additional 2€ per 1000€ coverage – so 250.000€ life insurance meant an additional 500€ annually. Surprisingly, they have also taken to offer special insurance for pilots who charter – for example, covering insurance excess in case of an accident….
If I had to summarize the main risk in flying into one word, it’s complacency
Yes. And the more one is getting experienced, the more one is at risk…. I’ve told the tale before: after my last line check (done annually by serious airlines) a few years ago the debrief contained the following remark by the training captain: “you’re now in the most dangerous captain category”… upon inquiry the same word came to light, complacency.
number of deaths per user per year:
and yet again some more useless stats. If one wants to compare the ratio of deaths/year, then please include the number of hours in the equation. Doing this will easily propel private GA flying to the top rank(s). Don’t tell your wife (or BF, GF, whatever)
Dan wrote:
and yet again some more useless stats.
They’re not useless. Obviously they assume you’re the same as the average user (which is generally not far from the truth, and a good hypothesis without further information). Of course it’s different if you fly 300h or 25h. Your behavior and proficiency also affect this. But given the orders of magnitude differences, I’d say they give a pretty good picture of the relative danger.
I’m really not sure the average (active) pilot flies much less than a paraglider or paramotor pilot. Everyone has the same amount of time in a year (and about the same free time), which naturally makes the number of hours land in the same ballpark (for the average user).
Also, redoing quick numbers for cars it’s closer to 1/15 000 (my mistake !). The rest of the numbers seem right.
What I don’t like about averages is the Daily Trash headline saying “Scandal: 50% of schools are below average” 
And in GA the average is not exactly great. PPL training is only barely enough to get you in the air and back without crashing. UK to Le Touquet? No idea how to do that! A few years ago a bunch of us met up at Le T and one UK pilot, hundreds of hours, based really close to Le T (not at Lydd but close) remarked it was the most complicated flight he ever did. And he is now RHS at Easyjet.
Each of us owes it to ourselves, our passengers and our dependents to be a lot better.
Sadly, the only way we are going to achieve it is by educating ourselves. Ourselves!
The main reason GA hangs together is Risk Compensation i.e. flights are readily dropped if the conditions are less than great.
In scheduled ops a departure is cancelled only if
If one tried to do scheduled ops using GA hardware (even if the pilot was a 20k hr ATP) there would be far more cancellations… or crashes!
Sure airline ops will always be safer than piston GA but there is a great deal we can do.
I fully agree with educating ourselves ! But there’s no saying if we will actually beat the odds or not (the tragic loss of Richard McSpadden comes to mind). Even with a lot of education, it would be really hard to lower the risk by 50%, and the risk order of magnitude would still be correct.
There’s no going around the fact that two pilots are better than one, and that the level of aircraft R&D, technical scrutiny, and operational precedures that prevail in the airline world dwarves what GA could ever pull off (because of all the resources and work required, which in airlines is all paid for by the millions of customers).
