"Jay Honeck" wrote:
If you remove stupidity from one category, you'd have to remove
it from all of them. Then, you'd have a new piece of information,
the ratio of how many stupid idiots there are in each category.

Well, true enough. But "stupid pilot tricks" are not usually fatal if
they occur in a car.

For example, running out of gas in your Subaru is an inconvenience.
Running out of gas in your Cessna is probably going to bend metal -- or
kill you.

Squealing your tires in front of your girl friend's house might get you
a ticket. Buzzing your girl friend's house might get you killed. And
so on...

I guess the point is that flying is far less forgiving of "stupid
tricks" than driving. Extracting them from both sets of statistics
therefore WON'T result in a straight line, equivalent change of fatal
incidents.

But he's talking about removing only the stupid-drver-trick *accidents*, not
all the stupid drver tricks.

I suspect that if one removes all the fatal stupid-drver-trick accidents
from the record, one would have very few fatal accidents left.

This is not apples-to-apples, of course: in flying, one has less exposure to
risk of death from to the stupidity of other pilots than one does to the
stupidity of other drivers while driving.

Nevertheless, I believe you are making a grave error in attempting to
reassure yourself that you are beating the odds. Private GA flying is
dangerous; more dangerous than driving by two orders of magnitude, according
to the NTSB statistics you posted. That disparity is so huge I don't see
how you can convince yourself that you can reduce it to equality in your own
flying. If you do manage to believe this you are living in a dream world, a
dangerous place for a pilot.

--
Dan
C172RG at BFM