Predicting General Aviation Accident Frequency from Pilot Total Flight Hours

Details

• Creators:
  Knecht, William R.
• Corporate Creators:
  Civil Aerospace Medical Institute
• Corporate Contributors:
  United States. Office of Aerospace Medicine
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  • General aviation
  • Air transportation crashes
  • Hours of labor
  • Working conditions
  • Structural equation modeling
  • Mathematical prediction
  • Human factors
  • Human error
  • General aviation
  • Accidents
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• Publication/ Report Number:
  DOT/FAA/AM-12/15
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  United States
• Corporate Publisher:
  Civil Aerospace Medical Institute
• Abstract:
  Craig (2001) hypothesized a “killing zone”—a range of pilot total flight hours (TFH) from about 50-350, over ; which general aviation (GA) pilots are at greatest risk. The current work tested a number of candidate modeling ; functions on eight samples of National Transportation Safety Board GA accident data encompassing the years ; 1983-2011. The goal was largely atheoretical, being merely to show that such data can be modeled. ; While log-normal and Weibull probability density functions (pdf) appeared capable of fitting these data, there ; was some pragmatic advantage to using a gamma pdf. A gamma pdf allows estimation of confidence intervals ; around the fitting function itself. Log-transformation of TFH proved critical to the success of these data-fits. ; Untransformed TFH frequently led to catastrophic fit-failure. ; Due to the nature of the data, it may be advisable to place the greatest prediction confidence in a middle range of ; TFH, perhaps from 50-5,000. Fortunately, that is also the range that captures the vast majority of all GA pilots. ; With some care, GA accident frequencies appear predictable from TFH, given data parsed by a) pilot instrument ; rating and b) seriousness of accident. Goodness-of-fit (R2) tended to be excellent for non-instrument-rated pilot ; data and good for instrument-rated data. Estimates of median TFH were derived for each dataset, which will be ; useful to aviation policy makers. ; These data suggest that the “killing zone” proposed by Craig may be wider than originally believed.
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• Format:
  PDF
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/25145/dot_25145_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 1.57 MB]
• Collection(s):
  FAA Civil Aerospace Medical Institute ; US Transportation Collection
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:fddbbbdcbc0bc95392b2e07124e9e34ba76bd46ecd4abad666d09c6958110d2b