I have no issue with flying commercial planes, but I guess I don't trust myself _and_ the smaller planes enough to do this.
RIP Claude, horrible way to die.
Stick and rudder skills aren't that useful with fuel exhaustion and bad weather planning. It's much easier to stay safer in a plane vs motorcycle.
I wish people treated cars and motorcycles properly, especially in the US. Until then, no motorcycles for me either :(
Of course the 6 months of winter in Toronto also make it less appealing to drive a motorcycle.
A large portion (half?) of crashes also involve alcohol.
Too bad the statistics say otherwise.
I am a motorcyclist myself. I just don’t have the will to lie to myself or others.
DanDanTheFireman is a good channel that goes over footage and analyses what was done well and what was done badly.
A huge danger for motorcycle riders is young/new car drivers who fall into this exact local minimum.
A relatively minor error can quickly develop into a situation well beyond your control, without any way out of it. That kind of fatal escalation is pretty much impossible with road vehicles.
I encourage you to read NTSB accident reports. The work the investigators do and the reports they assemble are unparalleled. There are also good parallels to complex systems in general.
I don't know if this was added in an edit, but it doesn't currently say the average person. I'm pretty sure the average person trying to become a pilot thinks about the danger.
OTOH, there are those, particularly those who actually get training and practice in the high-performance zone, who realize the physics of the situation, and feel positively naked driving out without a seatbelt/harness, or helmet where appropriate.
The guy who lives a dangerous life and has a ton of near misses probably thinks about it a lot more than average but it's not gonna change his behavior so thinking about it really isn't worth anything.
My father subscribed to a newsletter that summarized NTSB general aviation mishap reports when he got his Private Pilot license back in the late 80s. I read them too and was astonished at how many mishaps were very bad judgement calls made by pilots-- flying when the weather wasn't fit, not checking fuel levels, flying after having experienced engine trouble, etc.
I think it should be required reading for every new pilot.
What you need is discipline to say no. That's the root cause of most of these errors. And yes that can be learned.
Every flying club has a few of these people that are talked about in hushed tones at the end of the day when the beers come out. And almost never was the problem their flying skill.
Even if it was it's usually something preventable too. Trying to fix an approach when going around would have been the clear choice. Letting mistakes pile up and not restarting from a known safe position.
Humans make mistakes all. the. time., and you're a human. It is pretty much guaranteed that you are making the exact same kind of mistakes in your day-to-day life. It just doesn't kill you because a broken car merely leaves you stranded and a broken pipe in your home merely causes some financial damage.
Do the same with flying and you'll crash so you'll die. In my opinion private planes should be treated like they are actively trying to kill you, and it is only a matter of time before you will become complacent and make a mistake.
It does not give you 100% guarantees but nothing does.
Of course when you're dealing with a light twin with geared turbocharged engines, there are additional risks from mechanical failures (such as engine fires), as well as mistakes that can happen when addressing an engine failure (shutting down the wrong engine, getting too slow and doing a Vmc roll, etc).
To be honest I would never fly in any light twin other than a Seminole (which I did my multi rating in).
Pilot A might skip flying if the weather looks bad. Pilot B might go "well the storm's actually only at x location on my route, I'll fly around it". Pilot C might insist on more fuel but take the flight.
I'm not pretending it's possible to avoid (all) accidents with enough care - but if you look at NTSB stats, a vast majority of accidents were things that were quite easily avoidable.
Getting an instrument rating, flying in a plane with a weather radar that can go high (pressurized, beyond 40,000 feet or whereabouts), having another spare pilot and spare engine, and following the "big boy" scheduled airline (part 121) protocols and rules and minimums will almost certainly help avoid 50%+ (very conservatively) of GA accidents causes.
Yes, you still need to be careful and not fall victim to things like Get-there-itis (which pushes pilots to fly when they shouldn't because they want to get there). However... it's a swiss cheese model of accident avoidance. Remove as many factors from your side as you can, do your checklists, IMSAFE etc, and you're very likely to be (physically) okay.
Oh, and get a Cirrus with a parachute while we're at it. They've got auto land on their new planes too iirc.
Usually accidents are due to people taking too many risks. Yes it can happen but you can prevent a lot by being a stickler for safety.
And you can put down a GA aircraft in a field easily. When I flew gliders they always taught us to constantly evaluate every field you see as a potential landing site. This behaviour is not focused on enough for powered flying IMO. My instructor would suddenly put his hands over my eyes and say "emergency, where are you putting down right now?" And not having a good answer would have you off the solo list for a week or so. It really helped keeping this in the back of the mind. I've not seen that in powered flying at all.
It's not a safe hobby if you want to have fun flying the plane.
It's like the difference between sports car enthusiasts who are proud of how long their tires and brakes last vs the ones who are proud of how short they last.