Flight Training

  Sam, of Blogging at FL250, is living my dream. Right after I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up, I wanted to be a pilot. Sam will be flying jets for a ‘NewCo’ airline and he's currently going through flight training.

With all of 41 hours controlling a light aircraft myself, reading his latest post about the training hurdles commercial airline pilots have to jump, I can see why he thinks GA (General Aviation) pilots are woefully and perhaps dangerously under-trained.

Here's an interesting excerpt:

After American 587 crashed in November 2001, it was almost five years before there was another major fatal accident (Comair 5191 in August 2006). In the "golden age" of the 1960s there were single years with numerous major accidents. Even in a fairly recent five year period from 1986 to 1990, there were 14 major crashes involving US carriers which killed over 700 people. Since 2000, though, the fatality rate for scheduled Part 121 operations has held steady around .015 per 100,000 flight hours. To put that number in perspective: A kid born today could spend every second of their life on board US airliners in flight and still have only a one in ten chance of being killed in a plane crash by the time they reach age 75.

The same has not held true of general aviation. Although exact statistics are hard to come by because nobody knows exactly how much the GA fleet flies, the NTSB estimates a fatal accident rate of 1.32 per 100,000 flight hours. In other words, for every hour spent flying in General Aviation, you are 88 times more likely to die than on a Part 121 airliner. It's even worse if you look at fatalities per miles flown.

Fascinating.

Flying in Florida was a piece of cake compared to flying in Idaho where there are these really hard things called mountains in the way of everything. I'm a bit scared to fly here so I'll take my time and get really good instruction.

Most student pilots can't wait to become certificated, sometimes boasting to anyone within earshot how quickly after the required minimum of 40 hours they were able to achieve certification. Not for me; this is my life, I'll take my time getting the required experience.

Another thing that struck me reading Sam's post is how many TLAs (three-letter-acronyms) there are in aviation!