Reviving this thread. Not a good year (Cru) this year in France it appears with 18 deadly accidents involving GA aircraft, another 11 involving UltraLights 2 involving sail planes and 1 involving a helicopter. The year is obviously not over so this could still worsen.
Pretty decent read here if you do read French, in particular related to mountain flying and the dangers it implies. Most accidents seem to involve ‘terrain’. https://www.aerovfr.com/2021/11/les-dangers-du-vol-en-montagne/
Yes, this year has been bad in terms of accident mortality. It will be interesting to see the causal statistics.
I recently came across a statistic from the BEA that showed that 14% of accidents in 2018 were due to engine failure. Much higher than I would have thought.
Recently I drove up the M25 and then the M1 from the South of London. I used to do these sort of trips a lot when I worked in the UK.
I was on edge all the time and frankly terrified at other times. Would currency, driving in the UK have helped? Maybe, or it might just have made me more complacent, and often you have no control over what’s going to hit you.
My take on the situation was “I wish I had flown”.
Yes there are risks to flying GA, but apart from technical problems, the PIC is in control.Airborne collisions are thankfully still rare, and the PIC can mitigate many risks by good planning and airmanship.
So how do you get good planning and airmanship?
Reading this thread most seem to think that currency is the answer. But is it? And what sort of currency. A friend here has just marked 700 take off and landings in the past 2 years. He is one of three who flies the glider tow aircraft.
If a large proportion of fatal accidents are in take off or landing he would be really current, but the number of hours flown with those take off and landings is relatively low.
If we come at this from another direction, there are IMO three main factors which cause pilots turn away from GA ‘Time, regulation, cost.’
If you haven’t the time planning gets rushed and we all know about “get you homeitis” 2 of the biggest cause of accidents. Yet with a bit of practice one learn how to read the weather or to work out what altitude will be needed to avoid obstacles and how much fuel you neef for the trip can all be worked out relatively quickly and little or no cost. But the time taken here could go a long way to mitigating the risk of any flight. On the other hand it is not glamorous and many would rather turn to golf.
Regulation, the more rules you have the more people have to learn and then there is the cost.
In the certified world just look at the hurdles you have to jump through to install a new piece of equipment and the cost as soon as a piece of equipment needs to be certified.
We can see the effect of this with the number of enthusiasts turning to ULMs or to a lesser degree, perhaps the experimental market. Perhaps interesting here is as LFHNflightstudent mentioned above the number of ULM fatal accidents is quite a high proportlion of those in France. ULM pilots appear to fly more because of the lower costs per hour of flight and most ULM flown in France are equiped with parachutes. It could be argued that the ULM scene in France, Italy, and Spain has been the saviour of GA.
Finally there is cost. As Mooney pointed out above if the regulations called for double rhe number of hours every 2 years might well cause 90% of pilots to give up altogether. There are plenty of other ways to spend the money you have budgeted for leisure. And the less the number of GA practicioners the more the costs will rise. We already see how limited markets have led to increases in maitenance, fuel and avionics costs.
Here’s my take on this. Which probably won’t go down too well but there you go. No matter what I am doing, I always find a way to take it to / past the limit in the safest (oxymoron if ever there was one) environment I can. To be fair I’m clearly a bit of a lunatic, but I think there’s a huge amount of method to my madness. I do this with my children as well. I’ll take them to a racing track and take them past the limit. I’ll totally overload them in the cockpit. We’ll go flying when conditions are properly crap, including deliberately trying to find ice. My own view, rightly or wrongly, is it is imperative to exceed limits when you are in control (another fine oxymoron). More accurately, when there is an out. I’ve been lucky enough to be taught some things by some people much smarter than me (not a high bar admittedly) and one consistent theme is that under stress there is simply no such thing as multi tasking. But to move quickly and efficiently from one completely fulfilled task to another; this is the real art. Hence the overloading. That’s where the real practice should be. Go beyond your limit, induce absolute stress, fail, then do it again. And again. Because there is never any real achievement without constant failure. That lovely warm feeling of being your in comfort zone is the greatest irony of them all. That’s why pilots die. Because that moment of exiting their comfort zone is like being smacked in the back of the head by an unseen assailant.
I agree it’s really important to be pushed past your limit, overloaded, stressed and learn how to deal with the ressources you’re left with when most of your brain just wants to shut down.
That’s what good training should do. You can train yourself and make every flight, even a bimble, a training. Good instructors will know how to put you into situations where the fact you’ve got a reassuring presence right seat is more than offset by the conditions they set.
I wouldn’t do it with pax though, but that’s just my personal opinion.
Sadly, I don’t get to have much fun with with my pax sadly other than occasional hand flying cruise with rate one turns in benign IMC or some crosswind landings in 2km pavements, even my wife now is more risk averse with two babies 
When I am alone or other pilots I tend to keep the fun going, I have to fly the heck out of it: make every visual landing a glide approach, do stalls in IMC, climb my glider in convective clouds, cruise at 50ft, do 1.05*VS approach, aerobatics, fly different types…
One thing for sure is that one will rarely hit the jackpot when they take conscious risks it’s the ones they don’t know about that get them: you rarely stall an aircraft when you intentionally fly it slowly…
I should say when I say my children I’m not talking five year olds ! They are pilots too……. And totally agree about not with pax. Unless they ask…..
Unless they ask…..
Some always come and ask for more
Pig wrote:
No matter what I am doing, I always find a way to take it to / past the limit in the safest (oxymoron if ever there was one) environment I can.
I agree we don’t grow unless we are going outside our comfort zones. Just curious how you actually do this in an aircraft. In a sim, I’m happy trying weird stuff, like engine failure at 200 feet during climb-out. In my RV-8, not so much. Standard stuff like chopping power on downwind and “dead-stick” to a landing is fun and I think is good practice, and I’m interested to see what other things you are doing.
Pig wrote:
No matter what I am doing, I always find a way to take it to / past the limit in the safest (oxymoron if ever there was one) environment I can
I agree with the concept. I am not sure I would agree with your methods. Unless you have this kind of mindset, if you simply thing staying legal will keep you safe…well then, good luck to you (literally)
Beechtalk has a section on airplane accidents. I never fail to read it on a regular basis, just like i read the Guardian or Le Monde or the local papers. There is so much to learn from other’s mistakes. But what is remarkable is that the number of airplane accidents here in USA is astounding. Not a day pass without a major mishap. My own conclusion is that flying is dangerous. Pilot error being the major contributing factor, people like to get there wherever they are going and that is what kills them in addition to not enough fuel, poor maintenance, etc. But most of the accidents are weather related and flying into conditions for which the PIC is not prepared as in VFR into IFR. Again the numbers of hours flown is irrelevant. I have more than 10,000 hrs and the hours accumulated in my high performance airplane do not count since is a boring take off, go into A/P and then plan the landing which is in addition done semi automatically when i disconnect the A/P 200 feet above the threshold. To counteract that i fly my small airplanes (bucker, rv-8, etc) where all take offs and landings are done manually and they involve many landings and take off in small strips which are challenging. Plus the open cockpit airplanes are vfr day only which makes flight planning and weather a most. I have to say that 100 hrs logged on my bucker are worth 500 on the turbine.
