planes vs cycles

"Greg" wrote in message
...
"PaulH" wrote in message
om...
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?

Is the 125mph a pirooma number? Is that a fair estimate of GA aircraft
average speed?

Good point. Does that include corporate aviation?

GA would be Cubs at 75MPH up to turboprops (ignoring the corporate big iron)
at 300MPH.

"Andy Fogg" wrote in message
...
Obviously distance travelled is a key issue and I do understand the need
for
an 'apples and apples' comparison. However, in the UK we have been
averaging 18 GA accidents a year (which icludes higher risk types such as
autogyros and balloons) compared to a steady 3,500 deaths a year through
road traffic accidents.

Those are absolute rates. They are meaningless without considering the
exposure to the risk. Which, of course, is what this entire thread is
about, basically.

18 fatal GA accidents per year would be a very big problem if there were
only 18 GA flights each year.


Only a serious statistician could make any
meaningfull comparisons from these different forms of transport but I do
think that things should be kept into perspective. i.e. if you are
concerned about accidental death where could your efforts save the most
lives GA or car?

It depends on who you are. If you are a person who will never fly in an
airplane, but who spends a lot of time on the highway, you will invest your
efforts in saving lives in cars. If you fly more than you drive, you
probably care more about GA fatal accidents.

The question isn't about where should safety measures be implemented. It's
about relative comparison of safety for various activities (motorcycling and
flying, in particular).

The analysis is, of course, very different if you're a person in charge of
public policy rule-making and budget-writing where you have to decide where
to invest your efforts. But that's an entirely different conversation than
the one we're having here.

Pete

"Kyler Laird" wrote in message
...
Hmmm...where do I find statistics for injuries while operating
motorcycles at 200MPH with five passengers...

Um, I dunno...the SSTGP (Superbike Side-car/Trailer Grand Prix) web site?

Pete

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 09:21:17 -0700, Peter
wrote:

http://www.magma.ca/~ocbc/comparat.html

There sure must be a lot of sky-divers, to make "living" more
dangerous than say "snowmobiling."

I see that "passive living" is a whole lot safer, however--safer than
anything except a house fire.

all the best -- Dan Ford
email: (put Cubdriver in subject line)

The Warbird's Forum www.warbirdforum.com
The Piper Cub Forum www.pipercubforum.com
Viva Bush! weblog www.vivabush.org

The usual method for comparing the safety of automobiles is *drivers*
killed per million miles driven. (The Toyota Avalon is the safest
automobile, BTW.) That eliminates the skewing you get with passengers,
for example when comparing Dodge Caravans with Mazda Miatas.

Strikes me this would also be the only fair way to compare a
motorcycle and a lightplane.

all the best -- Dan Ford
email: (put Cubdriver in subject line)

The Warbird's Forum www.warbirdforum.com
The Piper Cub Forum www.pipercubforum.com
Viva Bush! weblog www.vivabush.org

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.

"Cub Driver" wrote in message
...
Strikes me this would also be the only fair way to compare a
motorcycle and a lightplane.

It is fair if all you care about is the risk to the pilot.

It is not fair if you care about whether passengers survive. Just because a
vehicle carries more passengers, that doesn't mean it's unfair to take that
into account when comparing safety.

For example, personally, I think it's very relevant that an airline jet
might be carrying 100-300 passengers (depending on type) when it crashes.
They crash a lot less often, but when they do, they kill a lot more people
at once. That's not a fact you can just ignore, IMHO. (Of course, even
with this characteristic is taken into account, airliners are still way
safer than little planes).

Pete

Cub Driver wrote:

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 09:21:17 -0700, Peter
wrote:


http://www.magma.ca/~ocbc/comparat.html


There sure must be a lot of sky-divers, to make "living" more
dangerous than say "snowmobiling."

No, since the small number of skydiving accidents have very little
effect on the overall life expectancy of the population.

'Living' having a higher fatality rate than snowmobiling just means that
you'd need to have a group of people snowmobile for a cumulative total
of more than the average life expectancy (about 74 years or 650000
hours) before one of them would be statistically likely to have a fatal
accident.

Cub Driver wrote:

The usual method for comparing the safety of automobiles is *drivers*
killed per million miles driven.

Which may be one reason it took years for passenger airbags to become common.

Strikes me this would also be the only fair way to compare a
motorcycle and a lightplane.

I disagree. A fatal accident is a fatal accident, even if the fatality is a
passenger. Personally, I would be more interested in the number of fatal accidents
per 1,000 hours, or similar stats. The general public would probably be most
interested in the number of fatalities (both passenger and crew) per 1,000 hours, or
perhaps the number of trips per fatality.

George Patterson
None of us is as dumb as all of us.

Tom Sixkiller opined

"Greg" wrote in message
...
"PaulH" wrote in message
om...
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?

Is the 125mph a pirooma number? Is that a fair estimate of GA aircraft
average speed?

Good point. Does that include corporate aviation?

GA would be Cubs at 75MPH up to turboprops (ignoring the corporate big iron)
at 300MPH.

GA also includes helicopters. Break them out, and GA would look a lot better.
The real question, to my mind, is what is the figure for SE piston aircraft?


-ash
Cthulhu for President!
Why vote for a lesser evil?