Predicting Accident Rates from General Aviation Pilot Total Flight Hours

Details

• Creators:
  Knecht, William R.
• Corporate Creators:
  United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Aviation Administration. Office of Aviation. Civil Aerospace Medical Institute
• Corporate Contributors:
  United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Aviation Administration. Office of Aviation. Office of Aerospace Medicine
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  • Air transportation crashes
  • Aviation safety
  • Crash rates
  • Crash risk forecasting
  • General aviation pilots
  • Hours of labor
  • General aviation
  • Crashes
  • Accidents
  • Accident Rates
  More +
• Publication/ Report Number:
  DOT/FAA/AM-15/3
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  United States
• Corporate Publisher:
  United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Aviation Administration. Office of Aviation. Civil Aerospace Medical Institute
• Abstract:
  In his 2001 book, The Killing Zone, Paul Craig presented evidence that general aviation (GA) pilot fatalities are related to relative flight experience (total flight hours, or TFH). We therefore ask if there is a range of TFH over which GA pilots are at greatest risk? More broadly, can we predict pilot accident rates, given TFH? Many researchers implicitly assume that GA accident rates are a linear function of TFH when, in fact, that relation appears nonlinear. This work explores the ability of a nonlinear gamma-based modeling function to predict GA accident rates from noisy TFH data (random sampling errors). Two sets of National Transportation Safety Board /Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data, parsed by pilot instrument rating, produced weighted goodness-of-fit estimates of .654 and .775 for non-instrumentrated and instrument-rated pilots, respectively. This model class would be useful in direct prediction of GA accident rates and as a statistical covariate to factor in flight risk during other types of modeling. Applied to FAA data, these models show that the range for relatively high risk may be far broader than first imagined, and may extend well beyond the 2,000-hour mark before leveling off to a baseline rate.
• Format:
  PDF
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/57187/dot_57187_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 1.16 MB]
• Collection(s):
  FAA Civil Aerospace Medical Institute
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:e0b0b5eb8530728f684e7fc8f7538043e15ecf815b7db62c1290f454710fc8d1