Over the decades, one of the Air Safety Institute’s major roles has been trackin

Over the decades, one of the Air Safety Institute’s major roles has been tracking and analyzing aircraft accident data. In addition to the well-known joseph T. Null reports and other publications, the Institute provides data analysis in supportive safety education for pilots and cooperative safety efforts with the FAA and NTSB. We sat down with the institutes resident statistician, David Kenny to find out what accident data can tell us about the most common whether mistakes pilots make. The great problem with VFR flights is attempting to fly VFR an instrument conditions. This causes about 70 accidents a year on average, and a good 85% off them are fatal. We tend to see two major types of v-if aren’t I, I’m say accidents. The first is when you have the weather begins to close and typically on a longer cross-country flight, and the pilot is unwilling to landed an intermediate stop, we’re divert until conditions become dire. More difficult to explain are the non instrument rated pilots who decide to take off into what is obviously low IMC. A tragic example of this type of accident occurred in September of 2009. Eager to fly his friends to a football game, a non instrument rated pilot departed into 600 foot ceilings and four miles visibility. Within minutes, the aircraft hit the guy wires of a radio tower. When an instrument rating have prevented this accident and many others like it. Sadly, the data doesn’t necessarily support that conclusion. One of the things that has surprised us is that about a third of all the pilots who get into VFR, into IMC accidents are in fact instrument rated. We often don’t know whether they are current, what their level of proficiency is. But the instrument rating itself is not an absolute guarantee you, that you won’t be involved in this kind of accident. You might expect that most IFR weather accidents would result from pilots going below minimum SON approaches or perhaps encountering ice or thunderstorms. More typical on an IFR on in IMC accident is loss of control on route or an accident during the first approach or the initiation of the first missed approach. In many ways, these accidents look disturbingly similar to their VFR counterparts. I was prized when we looked into this to find that only about 40 percent of the IFR at IMC accidents are caused by the pilot continuing the descent below decision hired or minimum descent altitude. In more than half of them, about 55%, the pilot just loses control of the airplane. Such accidents testify to the inherent difficulties of flight without external visual references. Perishable nature of instrument flying skills. Solid answers about flight time and recent experience or hard to find. But for many pilots, it would appear that old instrument flying experience is little better than no experience at all. This is conjecture. But I suspect that a lot of these accidents involve people who have not flown in instrument conditions Regularly, recently. With all the new technology and cockpits and better information on the web, you might expect whether accidents to be on the decline, but you’d be mistaken. The number of weather accidents has track pretty much exactly in parallel with total number of accidents. And when we look at the breakdown of the types of weather accidents that’s been remarkably stable as well. The precise impact of improved technology on safety is difficult to quantify. It’s possible that despite similar numbers of accidents, more flights around whether are being successfully completed now than in the past. We can’t say that with any certainty. But recent accident narratives do make it clear that the old double-edged sword problem continues to play a role. When technology provides better information, there’s a tendency to want to use that to complete more flights rather than to provide a greater margin of safety on the flight’s already undertaken. Of course, it’s entirely possible that future technological innovations will lead to greater safety gains. Even so, whether will always demand respect from pilots. People need to realize that in difficult whether you can get yourself into trouble very, very quickly. By the time you realize there’s a problem, it may be too late to do anything about it. In the end, the best prescriiption is education, preparation, self-awareness. Even if you’re not especially interested in whether it was a phenomenon that you need to recognize it’s correct potential. And you need to take whatever steps are compatible with your psychology to make sure you give yourself an adequate margin away from the kinds of whether you or your aircraft yeah. > video
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