David Megginson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > Gender equality does not rule in private flying. While a male driver > is only about twice as likely as a female driver to get into a fatal > car accident, a male private pilot is eight times more likely as a > female private pilot to get into a fatal plane accident. That > suggests that you're safer per mile flying in a small plane with a > female private pilot than you are driving in a car with a man.
Well not really, because the right way (IMHO) to measure safety is in terms of "safe trips" or "safe hours", not miles. You cover miles a lot faster in an airplane (usually). The commonly used "per mile" stats are suspect becuase it is a completely different kind of travel in most cases. For example even the whole car thing gets thrown off more when you consider that most fatal car accidents happen in intersections and on two lane roads where limited access highway travel probably racks up the most miles traveled. > just to be the young-buck thing. My guess is that (on average) men > just have a harder time admitting they're wrong than women do. Fatal > plane accidents can happen gradually, as the result of a long chain of > bad decisions and other problems -- there are often many points where > the pilot could have saved him or herself by turning back, waiting a > couple of hours for better weather, choosing a different altitude or > route, making an extra fuel stop, etc. Maybe women as a group are > just better at doing that kind of thing. > Gender based stats can be tricky, especially when there's a great imbalance in the number of participants (most pilots are men still). It could be that women have a strong survival instinct and probably won't do something like fly into 600ft ceilings at dusk into busy airspace in a single prop airplane, because it just doesn't make sense if survivability is more strongly valued than say making it to a meeting or getting home tonight. Perhaps to a woman, the more important statistic might be the frequency of fatalities under different weather conditions! But, more than likely the real reason is just that women more readily ask for directions and then actually listen and follow them. :-) BTW, Congratulations on hitting 200h! Best, Jim _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
