… I'd be interested in your perception (FrNash) of the reason for the drop in this statistic, whether it would be related to pilots becoming familiar with the aircraft, or...
improvements in the quality, performance and reliability of the the plane? …
On that I haven't a clue!
A few semi-random thoughts:
1. It has often been said that "The drive to the airport is much more of a risk than the flight."
2. I was always heavy into IFR skills. Although I had absolutely no intention of getting an instrument rating, nor incurring the additional expenses of a fully IFR equipped aircraft, nor of ever deliberately venturing into IFR conditions, I certainly wanted to ensure that if that should inadvertently occur, I could handle it well enough to extricate myself from the situation, preferably with ATC assistance.
3. I spent quite a bit of time working on a commercial pilot rating on the G.I. Bill, with the hope of being able to write off some flight expenses as "business expenses" (visiting actual or potential real estate properties, etc. perhaps?), in spite of the fact that I couldn't have any confidence that my vision would consistently meet the associated second class medical certificate requirements. I finally abandoned that plan when my flight instructor left to become an Alaskan bush pilot, and the FBO I was working with clearly was more interested in milking that G.I. Bill than in my commercial rating — they never consistently assigned me another flight instructor.
4. I have never permitted myself to succumb to "I've-got-to-get-home-itis", or to "press on regardless" in the face of deteriorating weather.
In fact, on one trip from Phoenix
Deer Valley Airport (DVT) to
Houghton County Memorial Airport (CMX), I spent three days at the old Denver Stapleton Airport waiting for a break in the weather. Although for most of that time I could have flown around the traffic pattern at Stapleton with no problem, the airport was located in a "bowl", with a solid overcast above and weather reaching to at least the SW corner of Minnesota. With a break in the weather, I was finally able to depart to the northeast, shortly to "VFR on top" conditions above a solid cloud layer at 1-2000 ft AGL and as flat as a pancake, which terminated as forecast about 15 miles short of my planned fuel stop at
Joe Foss Field, Sioux Falls, SD (FSD). All that IFR training was certainly helpful in that case. On an early evening arrival at CMX, the local weather had deteriorated a bit, with some lower level scattered to mostly broken clouds, necessitating something close to a "Special VFR" arrival — something I generally would not be wildly enthusiastic about without being intimately familiar with the area.
5. For many years it was frequently said that "physician pilots crash at a higher rate per flight hour than other pilots"[SUP]1[/SUP], for example (FWIW):
"… It is possible that physicians are more likely than other pilots to buy high-performance aircraft that require more time for mastery than their schedules may allow. In addition, physicians may take risks (e.g., fly when fatigued or in bad weather) in order to meet the demands of a busy medical practice. From 1986 through 2005, a total of 816 physician and dentist pilots were involved in general aviation crashes; of them, 270 (33%) were fatally injured. Physician and dentist pilots accounted for 1.6% of all general aviation crashes and 3.0% of pilot fatalities."
(Carol Floyd, BS, National Transportation Safety Board, written communication, February 2, 2007).
See the flip side also:
(click
→) Air Facts - Technique/December 9, 2015, by G. Stuart Mendenhall:
"Are doctors bad pilots?".
There are probably some valuable lessons in the above two items for
all of us.
[[SUP]1[/SUP] Booze CF Jr. Epidemiologic investigation of occupation, age, and exposure in aviation accidents. Aviat Space Environ Med. 1977;48:1081-1091.]
) from the OP's original question (as usual)!
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