Right Seat: When things go wrong

The AOPA Air Safety Institute, in partnership with Liberty University, recently released a detailed report about the causes of fatal flight training accidents over a 15-year period (www.aopa.org/fataltrainingreport). The report sheds light on flight training’s relative overall safety record, why we have accidents, and a bit about what we can do to help curtail them.

Let’s start with the good news. Learning to fly is a relatively safe thing to do. In terms of the overall fatal accident rate, flight training has about 67 percent fewer fatal accidents than standard recreational flying. That makes sense given the controlled environment, generally better weather in which training flights operate, more forgiving equipment, and so on. We can also celebrate that the trend is continuing downward. Over the 15 years covered by the report, fatal accidents in training decreased an impressive 40 percent.

The bad news, aside from the crushing implications of a fatal accident on victims and their families, is that many of the accident causes are persistent. Loss of control remains the top risk, causing more than half the accidents. This catch-all term doesn’t really stand on its own, but the report parses down the causes further, and they include stall/spin, VMC rollovers, spatial disorientation, and structural limitation exceedance. Of those, stall/spin is the most important for a primary student. Typically, we hammer in the idea that the traffic pattern’s base-to-final turn is the most dangerous part of the airport environment. Either that’s never been true or we have done a good job mitigating the risks; takeoff and go-around accidents are a significantly bigger problem. Of the loss-of-control accidents, only 9 percent happened on the base-to-final segment, compared to 29 percent on takeoff, climb, or during a go-around.

You can also breathe a bit during stall practice. Intentional stall/spin practice accounted for only 5 percent of the loss-of-control accidents.

The report included a few surprises. Arguably the biggest was that midair collisions were the second-leading cause of fatal accidents. You can look at this two ways: Either midair collisions are practically an epidemic in flight training, or the rate of fewer than two a year—less than a fifth compared to loss-of-control accidents—doesn’t represent a big problem. I suppose both perspectives could be valid. Sure, they don’t happen often, but they are almost always preventable. Perhaps most surprising about the midair number is a detail that challenges our notions of their risks. We often say the airport environment is the most dangerous because that’s where everyone comes to party. Yet according to the report, 71 percent of the fatal flight training midairs happened outside the airport environment. And of those that were around the airport, the majority happened at Class D fields with control towers.

The rest of the accidents ranged from controlled flight into terrain to fuel issues or intentional low-altitude maneuvering.

It’s hard to say in the face of a report on fatal accidents that flight training is generally safe, but I still believe that. The trend is improving, technology is helping, and there’s a renewed focus on basic attitude flying. If we make smart choices, put fuel in the airplane, keep our eyes outside, our airspeed up, and our angle of attack low, we can avoid the worst.