Recently, Peter Duniho posted:

Weight is not a good predictor of safe construction. But for a given
design, a stronger structure requires more weight. You can disagree
with that all you like, but you'll be wrong the entire time.

We actually *agree*, and have said the same thing in different ways: a
stronger structure is not necessarily a safer structure. The idea behind
sports & racing car chassis design is to transfer the energy of a crash
*away* from the occupant. Stronger structures transfer that energy *to*
the occupant, and current automotive design trends try to counteract this
problem by letting the occupants bounce of something soft. Cheap, but not
clever or necessarily safe.

I think this is the main factor that differentiates auto and aviation
fatalities. If you only consider accidents above 60 mph, I suspect
that automobiles will look a lot worse compared to aircraft, given
that many aircraft accidents at that speed, such as gear-up landings
result in no serious injuries.

A gear-up landing isn't an accident, any more than scraping a pillar
in a parking garage is.

A gear-up landing is not an accident, or not an *uncontrolled* accident?
Besides, it's more like scraping a guard rail on the freeway, no? It's
what happens next that counts.

In other words, if you want to count
aviation accidents like that, you need to count all the auto
accidents like that as well.

I agree. No problem.

If I'm going to crash into something at 60 mph or higher, I'd much
rather do it in a car than an airplane.

Doesn't it depend which car and which airplane, or would you let me pick
them and you be the crash test dummy? ;-)

Regards,

Neil