Hard truths about aviation safety, with Douglas Boyd

Thank you.

I've read dozens of your papers.

I'd happily talk about any of them, but if I had to sum up one of the key themes in your research, it's comparing the accident record of GA pilots and airline pilots and trying to learn from that difference.

So before we get into all the details and what differences those might be and what drives them, set the stage for us.

How are GA pilots doing overall in terms of safety, and how does it compare to airline pilots?

Well, there's, there's good news and there's bad news.

The, the good news about general aviation is that safety has improved, uh, uh, quite a bit over the last few decades.

Uh, the not so good news is that when you compare the fatal accident rate, again, rate is important, uh, it's anywhere up to about a 200-fold higher fatal accident rate for general aviation compared with commercial aviation.

And when I say commercial aviation, I'm re- referring specifically to Part 121, so the, the air carriers.

So to put it crudely, and this is more crudely than you would ever put it in one of your papers, but it seems like the central tension here is, is it the airplane or is it the pilot? In other words, is it the Cessna 172 versus the Boeing 737, or is it the pilot and their training and their experience and their recency of that experience? What do you think is the key difference there between those accident rates? What's driving that?

It's a little bit of both, but, uh, I would say it's more the pilot.

So remember with the aircraft, uh, the, uh, air carriers have to use aircraft which are certificated by Part 25, which requires a high level of redundancy.

You can't have a single engine jet, for example, doing airline operations.

But, uh, that's a minor difference.

The major difference, John, as you said, is, is the pilot.

Um, the general aviation pilot just doesn't have the opportunity, very rarely is flying as frequently, and of course doesn't require, uh, the, shall we say, re-examination via a flight review as a captain under Part 121, who has to do recurrent training every six months.

And that recurrent training is not one hour flight.

I mean, uh, commonly it could be three days, over a three-day period, and you're practicing all sorts of things in, in the, um, in the simulator on the last, uh, last day.

So that is largely the difference, to my mind, why airline, uh, safety is so much superior to general aviation.

Um, and that's the major factor to my mind.