It would be informative to know what MAC’s occurred under VFR as against IFR.
One is often told that 50% of PPL’s have an IR in the States compared with the minuscule number in the U.K.
Flying IFR must be safer for MAC’s.
It had always been our claim that: “Because IFR is always less accident prone, a more accessible IR is a Safety Feature “ – something which the CAA fails to acknowledge or implement.
More pinch points in the UK airspace, fewer airports with radar and air traffic control in general (as opposed to AFIS and Radio). Fewer runways as well.
This is all about geometry and density. Besides, the numbers are wrong. 20M is not 20 times more than 22M.
Anyway, lets say the UK is 22,882,072 hours and the US is 200,896,382 hours.
The area of the UK is 243,610 km2
The area of the US is 9,833,520 km2
In terms of density (hours flown per area) this is:
UK : 93.9 h/km2
US : 20.4 h/km2
The UK has 4.6 times higher flight density, thus a much higher probability of collision. By how much? Don’t know, but probably more of a cubic than linear relation? But, 4.6 * 293360/1084124 = 1.24. To me this fairly close to 1.
So despite having 4.6 higher GA density, the collision rate is still only 1.24 times that of the US. I see nothing spectacular about this.
Just goes to show, you can make statistics prove whatever you want them to prove.🙂
The US has much better ATC services for transit. In the UK most CAS is Class A and touching it is an immediate bust with generally dire results.
Re the stats, has anyone actually read the AAIB report in detail?
Yes; the US has some 20-40% IR holders (the figure depends on where you look) against around 1-2% in Europe. That alone translates to vastly different flying patterns because, in Europe, most of the benefit of the IR is to fly high (usually in CAS) and to get ATC to work for you, whereas under VFR the default position is that you have no right to be there. Under IFR you have an implicit whole-route clearance.
ADS-B is the best thing to reduce collisions that has ever happened in the US, in my view and experience. Most of the GA hours and collisions in the US are in localized regions with exceptionally high traffic density and I live in one of them. I fly from an airport with 600 operations per day, in a county with something like 2500 operations per day combined from about 15 local airports, and I can say without reservation that being able to ‘see and avoid’ 99.9% of them, often without seeing them at all with your eyes is a huge benefit.
Good ATC makes a difference in avoiding other traffic when you are in the airport traffic pattern, too busy to look at the screen. Otherwise ADS-B is much better and it works if everybody is broadcasting.
We’ve traditionally had one midair per year or so locally, and I’m expecting there will be a clear and likely dramatic decline in the record after 5 or 10 years of data are available since 2020.
Yes and again the mad CAA policy which incentivises people to fly TXP=OFF is not helping, but the AAIB is in the same position as every other “AIB” in that they will not criticise any national policy 
Even when the relationship is completely obvious.
