Regarding how data for incident reports are gathered. Someone had
mentioned the experimental that ground looped and was whisked away
before any pesky official types nosed around. Another guy I know lost
an oil line on his Rotax 912 and, after the engine siezed, landed in
the brush out near Hemet. He hiked out, and came back with a trailer,
nothing reported even though he made a call on the radio on his glide
down from 6,000 AGL.

I also understand that an emergency off airport landing is not a
reported incident if there is no property damage. So if I lose power
and land on a freeway, as long as I'm able to merge with traffic and
not hit anything, it doesn't end up in the statistics. So this means
the incident stats are showing a more rosey impression than is real of
the state of reliability of GA.

Ron Wanttaja wrote in message . ..
On Wed, 03 Dec 2003 10:59:02 -0700, Mark Hickey wrote:

Let's not rule out the one advantage of the fuel dump we haven't
discussed - that anyone who had to deadstick in due to fuel starvation
could then claim he had dumped the fuel to prepare for the deadstick
landing. Sure, he'd have some 'splainin' to do when the beast fires
right up when resupplied with go-juice, but he could always pull a
Unka BOb and claim it was just one of those evil intermittent auto
engine systems.

Actually, he might not have to explain too much. This sort of scenario
does happen (where the engine runs OK afterwards), and the NTSB usually
just chalks it up to "Engine failure for undetermined reasons."

Ron Wanttaja