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Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

It's important to say that the general aviation population has gotten much smaller over the last few decades. It was a lot more popular 25 years ago when I flew much more than I do now. A number of aircraft manufacturers have stopped building small general-aviation planes for a number of reasons including liability and a reduction in public interest.

I started flying about 1980. By 1992, 12 years later, about half the pilots I knew in 1980 (instructors as well as students) had been killed in flying accidents. That's another reason for the decline in activity.

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This was my favorite airplane from my old flying club:

http://www.pbase.com/geary/image/120224799

That's my mom and me when I took her flying on September 3, 1977. I have the logbook right here that I carried on that flight.

Sadly, this plane was involved in a midair in 1982, and the instructor and student pilot died:

http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20020917X...

It's weird, if you sell a car and then it gets in a wreck and someone dies, you don't think about it much - or do you?

I guess you're not likely to find out it happened.

But it really shook me up that two people came to a tragic end in the same plane I used to fly.

R.I.P.

That is an amazing photo :) Sorry to hear about the fate of the plane, but thanks for sharing the memory.

Airplanes are also more instantly recognizable than cars due to their tail numbers. I remember the day I turned on the news and saw the airplane I had first soloed in years before, upside down in a field. Happily both instructor and student walked away.

The private pilot is a dying breed. Skyrocketing costs make it all but impossible for most people to get into. Even getting your private pilot's license often costs $8k-$10k. And then you are looking at $150/hr to fly a 20-30 year old C172.

These skyrocketing costs make it so the fleet ages and becomes less reliable. So people get out. Or they die because they can't fly enough to get experience or the aircraft has a problem because it isn't flown enough.

And costs rise further because there is no market. It's a downward spiral. And it seems that the FAA is completely happy with the situation.

I've been out on beautiful days (low 80s, calm, 10 mi vis) and the CTAF is all but dead. Even 5 years ago there would have been 2-3 in the pattern and I would have heard a steady stream of traffic around the other 5 airports in the same frequency.

"The private pilot is a dying breed."

Yes, literally.

One alternative is to go the LSA route (Light Sport Aircraft) they are substantially cheaper to buy and operate, plus the instruction requirements and Medical test are easier too.

Most people I know who've done it are older and need a hobby and have spare money when their kids are gone and mortgage is paid off.

True. Or they bought the plane 20+ years ago and still own it.

When I go to EAA meetings I'm the youngest by 15-20 years and I'm in my 30s. I don't think I've ever seen a privately owned certified plane that was newer than 25 years old.

It's all around a bad situation for general aviation.

Same here. I'm in my late 30s and am by far the youngest at any pilot gathering I attend.

I really don't know where the airlines are going to get the next generation of pilots from. Of course with the horrible pay and hours, I can't blame anyone from not choosing that career path.

I've heard that starting pay for ATP or cargo is somewhere in the low $20s and schooling is in the mid $100s. Is there any truth to that?

Yep, that's about right. If you do it right, schooling can be quite a bit cheaper, but starting is sometimes even less than 20k.

Plus figure in "working" 60+ hours a week and only getting paid for 30-40 of them. It's not uncommon for airlines to fly pilots from city to city to stage them for flights. But they only pay them for the time they are actually touching the controls. So they get up at 3am to catch series of flights, then don't start getting paid until noon.

Maybe from overseas (mainly developing countries?). I don't know for sure, but I know some pilots from here (Brazil), including my cousin, who went off to fly for chinese and mid-eastern airlines, because the demand was high over there. Maybe the US won't be so far off?

Maybe I'm being a bit far fetched here, but what if someone up in management is banking on "phasing out the pilots." Autopilot has for a long time been "good at some things", and there's often debate here as to what purpose a human pilot increasingly does or doesn't have in the cockpit as the computerized solutions become more reliable. As there are fewer pilots, relegate the physical role to a babysitter; potentially cutting down on the initial educational costs and reopening the low wage employment doors without that first costly hurdle.

Pilots on todays big airline planes are pretty much babysitters to the autopilot. Still, it will be a long time untill the notion of flying a plane with no pilot is accepted by the public. Even though it will probably be safer, as you're taking a chunk of human errors out of the equation.

It's some combination of loss aversion and the associated guilt that comes from negative consequences of positive actions.

There is a trade off: fully automated transportation (planes or cars) will eliminate routine operator error, like falling asleep at the wheel. On the other hand, there will also be corner cases which humans could (sometimes) handle that the autopilot didn't.

And human psychology means that not only will we weight the losses more heavily than the gains, but when losses happen and people die, we will feel unimaginably guilty over the losses, no matter how many people were saved.

I can already see all the headlines when the first big accident happens involving a self driving car.

Unfortunately for a lot of the planes the cost of education isn't really any less. The reason you want that babysitter is for when something goes wrong and if the pilot doesn't know much then the only thing he's supplying is the comfort factor of a 'real' pilot. I'd draw a parallel to a sys admin. It's all well and good to have a comsci student fresh out of university as your sys admin when the system is set up and running correctly. However unless you have one with the right experience when an unexpected error pops up you may end up with significant losses and a much longer/no recovery.

Maybe the air force? They have tons of experience and the pay is pretty low for pilots. I don't think we're in a drought.

>I really don't know where the airlines are going to get the next generation of pilots from.

The military. As usual.

Eh, I'm not so sure that'll happen. Military pilots aren't getting as many hours as they used to, plus it's actually a pay drop for them to leave and work for an airliner the way it is right now.

Right now the airlines have managed to talk high school grads into taking out huge student loans and drop 100K+ on a for-profit school, then take a job making ~ 20. There's no way that's sustainable though.

Actually, the air force is paying out the ass to get high-TiG o-3s/ low-TiG o-4s to reenlist. Like, a $20k to $30k reenlistment bonus (that's tax free and on top of their salary of roughly $70k, not counting their BAH, which can be another $10k to more than $40k (it's $2500/month if you're an o-3 getting a master's at the naval post graduate school in monterey), also tax free). The reason they're not able to keep those pilots without the bonuses is because the airlines are offering starting salaries for those pilots around $90 to $100k; the bonus is designed to make the military pay roughly commensurate after BAH is included.

Interestingly, though, the navy is has a glut of pilots right now.

Really, I hadn't heard that.

I was going off all the information that came out after the Colgate Air 3407 crash in regards to how feeder airlines treat their pilots.

I've talked to several CFI's who are moving into regional carriers and they report the same environments, i.e. high hours/low pay.

It sounds like maybe you're set if you can clear that hurdle and move directly to a "real" airline?

Basically. It's kind of like how if you go to the right college for CS you can go directly to software engineer without having to spend years in IT or QA or working on your own side projects for fun, before finding someone who will pay you to be a software engineer, let alone someone like google or apple.

The major airlines love, love, love military pilots, especially ones that muster out around o-3, o-4 because they are in their late 20s/early 30s (lots of years left before mandatory retirement), they are already completely trained, have tons of time flying planes (compared to civilian pilots of the same age), and they are almost overqualified for ferrying passengers in terms of abilities/skills.

When my neighbor retired from the airforce, he moved on to flying planes for FedEx. He is paid VERY well for that.

I've always heard that FedEx and Southwest are the absolute best employers for pilots, and the regional carriers (who I was primarily talking about earlier) are the absolute worst.

No real idea on how accurate that is, just stuff I've overheard in pilot lounges at airports :)

Luckily there is an ample supply of unemployed CPL-holders dying to take that right seat in an airliner (and sometimes even paying to do so).

(Disclaimer: I have a frozen ATPL(A) myself, worked for one of the biggest airlines and know at least 100 of mentioned unemployed pilots)

I have a close friend who owns two new Cirus planes. There are tons of people who own jets as well. It all depends on your economic bracket. I think, though, that the private plane industry is going towards smaller, more expensive aircraft.

It is more of a microcosm of the economy than anything else.

People still fly Cesnas because they are very stable and were not built with planned obsolescence in mind.

> about half the pilots I knew in 1980 (instructors as well as students) had been killed in flying accidents.

That's extreme. Is there any pattern? Where are you located?

> That's extreme.

Yes, it is extreme, not the average. I should have added that the pilots I knew were largely instructors, stunt pilots and skydivers (and pilots who flew skydivers to altitude). So not a typical population.

Wow, you have had some extraordinarily bad luck. Not a single one of my flying acquaintances has ever been in an accident, and I've been flying since 1996. (I do have one non-pilot friend who was killed in a GA accident.)

> Wow, you have had some extraordinarily bad luck.

Yes -- all except the fact that I gave up the activity before getting killed myself. :)

Whoa! really? I never imagined that deaths were that frequent. What were most of the causes of the accidents? Operator error? Poor conditions? Equipment failure?

Has the rate of people dying off fallen as the equipment (planes and instruments) has improved?

I had always assumed the decline has more to do with the economics of the sport and the amount of upfront investment necessary to get to the point where you can fly on your own.

It is very rare that an aircraft falls out of the sky for any reason other than human stupidity. For decades, aircraft engineering has been well understood: the conditions for safe flight are known, staying in them is straightforward, and only very rarely does following the rules end badly. New technology has very little to do with this.

The thing is that it's easy to make stupid mistakes operating and maintaining an aircraft, and unlike many other areas of modern life, there aren't training wheels to make it idiot proof.

In the 1950s, test pilots were dying approximately once per week [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_pilot

There's a world of difference between the flying done by a test pilot, who's intentionally pushing the plane to its limits, and your average recreational pilot.

> about half the pilots I knew in 1980 (instructors as well as students) had been killed in flying accidents

Wow, that's certainly dissuasive.

By the way, are there some kind of autopilots on modern amateur planes? Or is that even possible to integrate any ?

> By the way, are there some kind of autopilots on modern amateur planes?

By "amateur planes" do you mean ultralights or experimental homebuilts? The answer depends on which -- an ultralight could hardly tolerate the extra weight that a decent autopilot would require. And most experimental homebuilt owners probably want the pleasure of actually flying their planes.

Autopilots are more attractive to people who fly long distances and not for pleasure. I had a Mooney 201 years ago that I would fly on business, and the flights tended to be long and a bit boring, so I had an autopilot installed.

Picture of me putting my bicycle in the backseat of my Mooney: http://i.imgur.com/R5qVo.jpg

>an ultralight could hardly tolerate the extra weight that a decent autopilot would require

Where does most of the weight come from in an autopilot?

Equipment to move the control surfaces automatically, I'm guessing. (I think the most common setup is to have a motor move the trim controls, and I'm not sure ultralights even have trim.)

I would assume the actuators to actually control the plane. I doubt ultralights are fly by wire.

Oh, that makes sense, although I guess I'm a bit surprised that FBW isn't common with ultralights, given its advantages.

I'm not aware of of any aircraft costing less than the 8 figures equipped with FBW. It's a LOT of added complexity/cost for very little gain in anything that isn't either dynamically unstable (e.g. modern military aircraft) or so large that the flight controls can't be comfortably operated by hand, and is rare even in the bizjet and smaller airliner market.

On all small aircraft (and some larger older ones, DC-3s for instance), muscle is the only thing that moves the control surfaces. They're very well designed and counterweighted so that the required effort is quite minimal.

In the US an ultralight has to be under 254 pounds and does not require any training or licensing to fly. In most other countries an ultralight is more like the sport class in the US.

At 254 pounds you want light and simple. FBW requires actuators. And controllers. And sensors. And power. And then you have to double up everything for redundancy. You would easily eat up 50 lbs or more making a reliable FBW system and it would cost 3-4x what the entire aircraft cost.

Even with normal light aircraft a FBW system is both unneeded and overly complex. Cables and pulleys are extremely reliable. They are inspected every year (along with the engine and various other pieces of the aircraft).

This is completely destroying my sense of living in the future. I have no choice but to delete this discussion from my memory.

From the makers of X-Plane: http://www.x-plane.com/x-world/hardware/seeker-avionics/

(I don't fly and know nothing about this but it sounds pretty cool)

That's amazing, think of all the lives it will save!

Excellent link, thank you!

My airplane has an autopilot which is connected to my GPS giving hands off enroute flying. Anything complicated, takeoffs, landings, etc is still done by hand. Really helps combat fatigue on my long trips.

Yes, there are autopilots. They vary in complexity from just keeping the wings level, to altitude, vertical speed, and heading holds, to fully-programmable routes.

I flew a Seneca V (twin engine, semi 'amateur' plane) during pilot training which was equiped with an autopilot.

Really helps when flying in congested airspace or while performing 'complex' arrivals.

You must be fantastically unlucky, by my research (I'm afraid I've lost the citation) the number of pilots who die in flying accidents is about 1/50.

How many pilots did you know?

A reasonable number, but many of them were stunt pilots -- or thought they were stunt pilots. I didn't mean to create a false impression. Also remember I mentioned that was a 12-year period.

Ah, the subset of stunt pilots will run a MUCH higher risk profile. That would explain a lot.

but many of them were stunt pilots

Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream to go up to heaven in a flying machine The machine broke down and down he fell thought he'd go to heaven but he went to Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream ...

RIP Lincoln Beachey, drowned in SF Bay 1915

[0] http://www.radiolab.org/story/159748-loop-loop/

That reminds me of something I heard once- "there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots."

And then, there's Jurgis Kairys[1] doing things like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWaSgofuD6g at 60.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurgis_Kairys

This would have been key information in your original statement for sure.

2% of pilots _dying_ is still pretty high -- higher than I expected. Someone mentioned it being akin to motorcycling riding, but I can't imagine that 2% of motorcyclists die from it.

> Someone mentioned it being akin to motorcycling riding, but I can't imagine that 2% of motorcyclists die from it.

The rates for motorcycle accidents and deaths is really very high:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_safety#Accident_rate...

Quote: "According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in 2006, 13.10 cars out of 100,000 ended up in fatal crashes. The rate for motorcycles is 72.34 per 100,000 registered motorcycles."

That's about 5 1/2 times greater.

That's on a per-vehicle basis. On a per-mile basis they're dramatically more dangerous: per mile travelled, motorcyclists are 37 times more likely to die in a crash than passenger car occupants:

http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/jul12/clinical1.asp

I gave up my brief motorcycle career after having kids, which I'm rather glad of now, reading that.

And still much less than 2%.

72.34 per year per 100,000 registered motorcycles * 30 years is 2.17%.

Worse plenty of people own more than one motorcycle so the rate is probably higher than that.

Those are not the same "motorcycles" each year, so you cannot multiply by 30.

How do you mean? The suggested calculation is: In any given year, a motorcycle owner has a 72/100000 chance of dying. So if you own a motorcycle for 30 years, the chance of dying is approximately 30*72/100000.

That is not how a binomial probability is calculated. Consider the case where you flip a coin twice - do you have a 2 * 1/2, or 100% chance of getting a 'head'? Obviously not – you have a 75% chance.

The actual way you calculate the probability of an event with a binomial distribution is by taking the inverse probability and raising it to the power of the attempts, then subtracting from 1. So in the case of two coin flips, that is 1 - (1/2 ^ 2), or a 75% of getting a 'head'. That would mean, with a huge host of assumptions, that a motorcyclist's chance of dying over 30 years would be 1 - (99928/100000)^30, or (funnily enough), 2.13%.

edit: I said bimodal when I meant binomial.

That's why I said "approximately". :)

By the binomial series [1], the true value is 1-(1-p)^n = np - n(n-1)/2! p^2 + n(n-1)(n-2)/3! p^3 + ...

So approximating it to just np corresponds to taking just the leading term of the series. Of course, this is only valid when p is small enough. To see how good the approximation is, we can compare it to the two first terms of the series, which is np - n(n-1)/2 p^2, or approximately np - (np)^2 /2.

So the approximation np is about twice the percentage difference between the approximation and the true value. In this case, the approximation np is about 2%, and that guess is itself about 1% wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_series

Rule 99732: When you can't admit you were wrong, argue on technicalities!

He wasn't wrong, he made an approximation.

You certainly deserve my upvote. :)

You set out to correct a naive statistical assumption, computed it properly, and the result was about the same (not at all common for such problems). But you posted it anyway, in the spirit of sharing useful information.

As the Australians say, "Good on you, mate."

I second the upvote. This is exactly the awesome part of HN.

If you own a motorcycle for 30 years, your chances are not the same every year - your chances of dying on a bike are higher when you're younger and when you have less years on a bike. So every year I ride, my chance of dying that year on a bike gets smaller.

In other words, the bulk of deaths on bikes are young, inexperienced, and/or unlicensed riders.

Also, bike deaths are far more likely to involve alcohol than car deaths; so if you're like me and you don't drink before riding, you've just improved your chances.

Not really, your odds do change as a non drinker but age is far less important than you might think. Your hypotetical driver that owns a motorcycle for 30 years is more likely to die over 25 than under it.

http://www.cdc.gov/features/dsMotorcycleSafety/

A significant reason for this is your far less likely to survive an accident as an older rider than a young one.

Note: The death rate statistics they quote include non motorcycle owners.

Also, one other note - I was talking about riding experience, not absolute age - something the CDC doesn't track, but other large studies I've seen do. There's a strong correlation between experience - whether gauged by years of riding or, even better, raw mileage.

There's also a huge correlation between unlicensed riders and serious injuries. Motorcycle riders are far more likely to be unlicensed than car drivers - last I heard was something like 3-4 times as likely.

Unlicensed motorcycle riders are over twice as likely to be in fatal accidents than licensed motorcycle riders.

I ride 15,000-20,000 miles a year - I'm well trained, equipped, and experienced. A lot of bike owners ride weekends, occasional trips, etc. I actually don't ride much on the weekends - and when I do, I'm pretty shocked how bad (dangerous, rude, etc) the riders are compared to the commuters I mostly see.

"Your hypotetical driver that owns a motorcycle for 30 years is more likely to die over 25 than under it."

That's a very weird statistic. Sure, since those riders spend most of their 30 years riding time over 25yo.

From your link: "The highest death and injury rates were among 20-24 year-olds, followed by 25-29 year-olds."

Wow, I knew flying light aircrafts was dangerous, but this really surprised me. And people tell me I'm taking risks riding a motorcycle.

If you factor in all risks (the "as experienced" rate), GA flight is about as dangerous per mile as riding motorcycles.

I firmly believe that 2/3rds of the fatality risk in GA is pilot-controlled and readily avoidable: weather, fuel exhaustion and "ostentatious display" (buzzing, etc) are relatively easy to avoid with nothing more than basic knowledge and firm discipline.

On a motorcycle, many risks are rider-controlled but a lot of your safety is in the hands of people near you that you'll never meet. Less so in aviation, IMO.

IFR rated pilot here that's been flying for ~ 10 years. I agree with you 100% on the risks being largely under the pilots control.

However I also believe that there's something about aviation that attracts the type of people who are uniquely unsuited for it. Daredevils, non-detail minded, and just plain incompetent.

When you read the NTSB reports and such it's just not pretty.

Pilot after pilot runs out of fuel or manages to run a perfectly good airplane into the ground / side of a mountain because they weren't observant.

I'm not sure what the solution is though. We've had 30 years of the FAA and all the associations preaching safety to no effect. More regulation won't help either since all the main accident factors are already against some regulation or another.

Doing user studies and paying attention to my own behavior, I grow more and more aware how rare consistent, no-error performance of tasks is. Stupid mistakes now seem more the human norm than the exception.

What's especially sinister to me is how long it took me to really get that. And how much my self-perceived skill is more about my ability to recover from error than my ability to avoid error in the first place. Especially when it's over time periods long enough for fear to wear off.

I'd never take up flying, because I know my attention would wander during those long periods of apparent calm but actual risk.

Regarding why aviation attracts the wrong sort of people, if you haven't read about the Dunning-Kruger effect, I think it'll ring some bells for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

That's a great point.

As a programmer it's also taken me quite awhile to recognize that I'm not a perfect snowflake and am quite capable of writing code that contains horrendous bugs.

I've always recognized that while flying though, because I've always felt like a neophyte at it, and not a "real" pilot.

Statistically speaking, it's pretty safe to allow your attention to wander a bit while on a long uneventful flight. That's why there are auto-pilots. The real danger comes in whenever you're close to the ground or in bad weather.

Surprisingly the #1 thing you can do to avoid an accident is just make sure you have enough fuel. Which is a very low bar to clear.

Surprising, astonishing, disappointing, and sadly, it's absolutely true...

1) Riding motorcycles is very dangerous:)

2) What's the average mileage of a motorcyclist compared to a pilot?

^ What he said

Fuel is also a lot more expensive now. And that makes up quite a significant chunk of the flying costs.

On a quick look, the price of an hour of flying has gone up nearly 50% in the last ten years in the aviation club I used to belong to.

That's what 4.1% annual inflation compounded over 10 years will do.

In real dollar terms, that price is very close to what it was 10 years ago.

Where do you get 4.1% inflation from? CPI for the USD hasn't gone up by that much in a single year for the last decade, annualized inflation is closer to 2.5% over that period.

4.1% is the 10th root of 150% minus 1.

"OMG, this cost went up 50% over ten years!" sounds like a dire situation, when in fact it's a tiny margin over whatever inflation measure you prefer.

If you take 2.5% as the annualized inflation, that's 28% over that 10 year period, meaning the other 17% increase is 1.6% "real dollar increase" per year. Hardly frightening, IMO.

Ah. I interpreted your statement as "we had 4.1% inflation in the last decade". Your intent was "it's as if we 'd had 4.1% inflation, not much more than actual inflation".

I completely agree that nominal gas rates aren't the right measure, and the real price increase has indeed been tiny.

Euro area inflation has been way lower than that, it seems. Including negative % on some years

Have fuel costs and taxes also done the same, though? Fuel will make the majority of operating costs if you fly with any frequency, I suspect.

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