But there is another issue that keeps escaping notice that is driving me up the wall. Accident statistics only make sense when they are converted to a ratio (rate) relative to proximal cause. It makes no sense to consider falls in the bathtub per units of toast consumed and it is silly to do so. It makes very little sense to measure aviation accidents by unit time, say flight hours and it is ridiculous to measure EXPERIMENTAL aircraft accidents by calendar year and doing so reveals an agenda.

If the NTSB, FAA et al were serious about comparative accident rate they would measure it by flight operation (one take off, one landing) because that is the proximal cause, aircraft operation. They would also include fatalities per incident in their evaluation because this would give a clear indication of the level of hazard to the general population.

However, this will NEVER happen because to do so would reveal that most civil aircraft including EXPERIMENTAL aircraft spend a lot of time on short hop flights or performing touch and go landings and run up flight cycles like crazy. Compare this directly to airline operation where there may be many hours between take off and landing and hundreds of people will die in a single fatal event and suddenly you have a very different “safety” statistic.

The AOPA and EAA need to stop accepting purposefully skewed government safety statistics if they want to have any credibility with their constituencies on this issue.

If there is an issue with experimental accidents, it is often because pilots spend so much time BUILDING the aircraft that they often don’t maintain proficiency, or bother to gain proficiency with the unique flight characteristics of the aircraft.

If you are going to regulate–make the owner/pilot of the aircraft demonstrate that they are familiar with the systems and unique flight characteristics of the aircraft. This need not be much more than what is required on a biennial flight reveiw–in fact, the checkout would QUALIFY as a BFR.

Possible subjects–aircraft systems–especially fuel and non-certificated powerplants. The effects of high and low wing loading. The effect of low aircraft mass on glide characteristics. A checkout like this may have saved John Denver (fuel-related in a new-to-him aircraft). As always, EAA could take a leadership role in developing a suggested checkout.

Let’s put the emphasis on where the problem lies (pilots) and the cure for the problem (education, not regulation).

Flying, like walking, is inherently risky. For those of you who are not physics majors, that’s because you are moving. Safety is NOT the highest priority. If it was, we would all stay in bed all day long (without a partner). The highest priority is to achieve an objective, while understanding and possibly minimizing the risk. Sometimes that objective is just to have fun. And sometimes having fun means conciously increasing the risk of the activity.

So maybe instead of more restrictive regulations, what we need is a placard on the side of the aircraft that lists the risk for that particular type of aircraft, compared with a widely accepted risk, such as driving a car in Washington DC (withour a chauffeur – I know that will be difficult to relate to for NTSB and FAA types, but so be it.)

But if we’re going to do that, I insist we also do it for every new car sold. That’s right, I big ole placard right on each door telling people how likely they are to die in that car.