What I did is to look at the for-sale sites and put together a spreadsheet with the model year and TTAF for each tail number in the for sale listings. While it won’t give a full picture of usage (planes being sold are often not being flown), it will give a very accurate picture of the relative usage of various models. Using GAMA sales data, you can also figure out good numbers for accident exposure over time.

FWIW, the claim that’s been passed around about Cirri flying twice as much as other airplanes simply doesn’t hold water. When I ran the numbers as above, the SR20′s were flying 132 hours per year to the DA40′s 124 – Pretty comparable for the relatively-small sample size.

A note by one researcher analyzing NTSB data was that airbags were blamed for causing deaths in cars because they were sold as a substitute for seatbelts, which turned out to be a bad idea.

Airbags used in conjunction with a three-point harness help prevent neck injuries, but the data is far from conclusive for aircraft. I forget the numbers, but IIRC there was only one of about 30 airbag-equipped aircraft involved in accidents that MIGHT have reduced injury severity compared to a statistical unsurvivable head-on wreck. The rest had side loads, and you need a side airbag to protect against sideloads.

By law the USAF flies all fixed wing stuff (Ok, the Navy stood up to them, but the Army caved in exchange for permission to fly helos). The Hog is an Army close air support machine, able to kill tank crews with impunity, but by law the USAF flies and maintains it while holding their collective noses because it isn’t fast or sleek or go high or well, you get the picture. No glass either. Not a drop. Maybe there is now because USAF had plans to upgrade it a few years ago, parallel to plans to get rid of it.

It’s always a toss up which camp is winning. I expect a compromise where they will re-wing, engine and instrument the Hog, then send them to AMARC to wait for the next war or destruction, depending on the salvage value of titanium.

Too bad congress doesn’t just make an exception and turn the Hog over to the Army where they don’t seem to have a love affair going with high-tech stuff that doesn’t work. Take the F-22 oxygen generator system that causes hypoxia, or the F-35 that is so high-tech nobody can afford it. Ok, to be fair, the USAF denies the F-22 O2 system causes hypoxia. Instead it stops delivering oxygen. (Said with a straight face to those wimpy fighter pilots gasping for air). Similar logic blamed the F-22 pilot for crashing his ride when the system ‘stopped delivering oxygen’ at 48kft. The guy probably woke up just in time to say the fighter pilot’s prayer. Sometimes, technology is a solution in search for a problem. In the case of the F-22 O2 system vs a LOX tank seems exactly that. Could the ‘glass cockpit’ also be such a thing?

In that light I applaud ASF’s approach over that of the USAF.

I found the below link that compared high tech vs low tech and the A-10. Replace the asterisks with periods to get the link to work.

dcr*net/~stickmak/JOHT/joht11warthog*htm

I also fly lots of long cross country across multiple time zones and always encounter at least one frontal passage. A G1000 is wonderful for that. So is a Hand-held G-696 and a nav-tracking autopilot. Again, identical features as the G1000 rig except for the six-pack at a fraction of the price.

I’ve had gremlins disable the transponder in a G1000 plane. It only took a software reset to fix, but it also took a day on the phone finding the guy who could tell us how to do it.

I originally thought a G1000 would be cheaper to own, but that’s a myth. Instead of a vacuum pump or iron gyros any mechanic can fix, you get a Line replaceable unit that MIGHT fix the problem for $3000 plus an $11,000 core charge. Engine start using an APU making dirty power will do that. Suddenly that vacuum system starts looking pretty good.

What neither the report nor any of the articles or comments have touched upon, though, is the adverse effect that expensive glass panels may have on the ability to get new students who will become good, safe pilots. If the airplanes have $75,000 panels in them, that cost must be passed on to the students. But is a basic trainer that costs more because it has a $75,000 panel in it any better as a basic trainer than one that has basic VFR-only instrumentation? Considering how unnecessary all those bells and whistles are to learning basic operational skills and basic navigation, I would argue that $75,000 panel unnecessarily raises the cost of instruction, which has to impact whether a student will start or finish, and most importantly, whether that student will become a good, safe pilot.

As soon as I started instructing, I became painfully aware that the more complicated the panel, the less time the student spent looking outside. My favorite instructing tool became a dish towel, to put over the panel and force the student away from the panel. It was a lot easier to teach basic stick and rudder skills, if the student wasn’t being distracted by unnecessarily referring to the panel.

The report, articles, and comments seem to bear this out, and I would summarize it this way, as advice to a student: First learn to fly well, without reference to fancy panels, whether steam gauges or glass. Then spend sufficient time to learn the ins and outs of the panel that you’re going to be using. Then learn how to fly using that panel. For most, that means obtaining an instrument rating and then using it to fly within the ATC system. If you’re not going to fly on instruments, you don’t need a panel that allows you do that. But if you’re not interested in flying on instruments, you definitely don’t need a fancy glass panel.

Glass panels have their place, but in my view, not for students or low time pilots. Whether they are of any real benefit to the occasional IFR pilot has yet to be proven.