PaulH wrote:

Thank you for the link. The report shows for GA overall 1.33 fatal
accidents per 100,000 hours in 2002. If we use an average speed of
125 mph, we have 1.33 fatal accidents for 12.5 million miles.

Anybody have motorcycle data?

Much information is available in this report:

http://www.bts.dot.gov/publications/...003/index.html

As others have pointed out, you can compare risk using a number of
approaches. For example, if you consider GA and motorcycles to be
simply a mode of transportation, you would probably compare fatality
rates per passenger-mile. This yields the following:

General Aviation 0.036 / million passenger-miles
Motorcycles 0.309 / million passenger-miles

Making GA about 9 times safer than motorcycles to get from one place to
another.

You can also look at it by vehicle-miles.

General Aviation 0.122 / million aircraft-miles
Motorcycles 0.341 / million vehicle-miles

If you consider both to be forms of recreation, then time might be a
better basis, using vehicle hours, or passenger-hours. These numbers
are readily available for GA, (2.2 fatalities / 100,000 flight-hours or
0.75 / 100,000 passenger-hours) but one would have to either estimate an
average speed for a motorcycle, or dig through the data to calculate the
numbers.

For argument's sake, if you assume an average speed of 25 mph for a
motorcycle, then the rate would be 0.14 / 100,000 vehicle-hours, or 0.12
per 100,000 passenger-hours. This would make motorcycles 6 times safer
than GA as a form of recreation.