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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

The point is, being a hobby pilot is extremely dangerous.

Being a lazy hobby pilot is dangerous. The majority of GA crashes are pretty basic pilot error/"gotta-get-there-itis".

Motorcycles are the same way, actually. An overwhelming amount of fatal motorcycle accidents involve alcohol at night, usually in combination with not wearing proper gear.

Bikers frequently get killed by other forms of traffic (at least as a major contributing factor), pilots typically kill themselves (usually unintentionally, of course), with rare exceptions.

Getting killed by running into a semi because you were weaving in and out of traffic at 90 mph and ran a red light is not really the traffic’s fault.

Is it?

In US General Aviation, there were 332 deaths in 19,454,467 flight hours in the year 2020.

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.as...

>Is it?

Yes, it is.

Very similar to how dangerous motorcycle riding is. Work out approx. hours of operation from miles driven (say avg. 30-50mph) and from there use annual fatalities. [1] Given that, death-per-hour for 332 deaths/19M in flight hours is roughly comparable to the 6000 deaths seen in motorcycle accidents. Much higher than automobiles, much higher than commercial flight.

[1] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...

Ok, so per hour it is comparable to motorcycles. But consider also that the average private pilot only flies 100-150 hours per year.

I don't disagree that it is more dangerous than automobiles or commercial flight. But I wouldn't characterize it as "extremely dangerous." Nor would I characterize motorcycles as such.

Google says "motorcycles are usually ridden for around 3,000 miles per year on average" so that's less than a hundred hours. Another result says the median is 1000 and 90th percentile is around 5000.

Neither one is "extremely" dangerous but it's a far cry from "all these strict regulations make it extremely safe" like with commercial flight.

I guess we disagree on motorcycle danger then. I consider motorcycles to be extremely dangerous (mostly to their drivers). A friend of mine died about 1.5 years ago on one. I'd had two other people (not as close) in my life die in motorcycle accidents so I used to cringe inside every time he told me he was going riding over the weekend, though I would just wish him well & to be safe. Riding made him happy, was a stress reliever for him. And as far as that goes there are probably worse habits like smoking & drinking to excess, but that doesn't make any of them non-dangerous.

Assuming all hours were flown at Cessna 172 cruise speed of 140mph, that gives about 2e7 * 140 = 2.8e9, divided by 332 gives about 8.4 million miles per fatality.

Compared to 85 million miles travelled per fatality on the roads in general, and about 4 million miles travelled per fatality on motorcycles.

2X better than motorcycles, 10X worse than road fatalities in general.

And that's being quite generous about the mileage.

I don't think miles travelled per fatality is a useful point of comparison for general aviation. This puts it about on par with pedestrian deaths per mile travelled, and I don't think most people would call walking "extremely dangerous."

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