Lessons learned

It’s a job that requires answering dozens of questions about things such as intent, result, and cause, and then painstakingly categorizing the information for the greater good of the community.

The result is the Joseph T. Nall Report, an analysis of accident trends from the most recent data available from the NTSB. Despite it being publicly available and having fascinating insights into the relative risk of what we do, most pilots unfortunately won’t read it. So, we’ve done the hard work for you and brought forward five things we learned from the thirty-first annual Nall Report:

1. Accidents are up, but trending at historically low levels. When someone waxes poetic about the good old days of aviation they aren’t talking about safety. Because general aviation is as safe as it has ever been. Yes, the accident rate was up slightly in 2019, the year of focus in the thirty-first Nall Report. But the rate is still lower than almost any time in history. Fatal accidents were 0.88 per 100,000 flight hours and the overall rate was 4.88 per 100,000.
2. We’re lousy at landings. In noncommercial fixed-wing flying, landings are by far the riskiest segment of the flight. They accounted for nearly a third of all accidents, and half of pilot-related accidents. Thankfully they are rarely fatal. That distinction goes to weather accidents, where 30 of 34 resulted in loss of life.
3. Tailwheel pilots need more practice. Despite being a relatively low percentage of total aircraft on the ramp, tailwheel aircraft were involved in more than 40 percent of all landing accidents. That’s striking, and significantly more prevalent than, say, gear-up landings.
4. Our engines are more fragile than we’d like to believe. In general, we think of our engines as reliable, but that’s a mistake. Of 2019’s 194 accidents caused by mechanical failure, 132 were powerplant failures. And that doesn’t include fuel issues. In fact, nearly 20 percent of all accidents were powerplant failures, not including many more that didn’t reach the high bar of an NTSB notification.
5. Having an instrument rating doesn’t protect you from danger. Conventional wisdom would say that having an instrument rating makes you somewhat immune from many weather accidents, such as the dreaded VFR into IMC. Yet an instrument-rated pilot was on board in more than 70 percent of the 34 weather-related accidents.

That’s just a sampling of the dozens of lessons that come from the report every year. Spend a few minutes to dive in and it’s impossible not to rethink risk and the way you operate your aircraft.

[email protected]

airsafetyinstitute.org/nall

NOTICE OF ANNUAL MEETING OF MEMBERS /
The annual meeting of the members of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association will be held at 9 a.m. on Thursday, May 19, 2022, at the headquarters of AOPA, 421 Aviation Way, Frederick, Maryland, 21701, located on the Frederick Municipal Airport (FDK), for the purpose of receiving reports and transacting such other business as may properly come before the meeting, specifically including the election of trustees. If you are not able to attend, but would like to appoint your voting proxy, please visit aopa.org/myaccount or call 800-872-2672. —Justine A. Harrison, Secretary

Legally Speaking

Notorious 18(v)

Get your background check straight

By Ian Arendt, Pilot Protection Services

The FAA’s application for airman medical certificate (MedXPress) is not your ordinary government form. Filling it out accurately is important. If the FAA alleges you made a fraudulent or intentionally false statement on the medical application, you will likely face emergency revocation of your airmen certificates (and, in certain cases, jail time). The entire form is complicated—but no question causes more confusion than the notorious 18(v).

In fact, the FAA once analyzed question 18(v) and found that a reader would need more than 20 years of education to properly understand it. Despite knowing this, despite the Government Accountability Office and the NTSB recommending that the FAA revise the application for clarity, despite AOPA providing comments to the FAA on the need to improve the application (and receiving no response), despite Congress reminding the FAA that the application should be “subject to a minimum amount of misinterpretation and mistaken responses,” and despite the database of NTSB opinions being replete with cases against airmen for answering the question incorrectly, the FAA has refused to meaningfully revise the application. Instead, the FAA has further complicated it by including additional information [+] boxes following each of the medical history questions and adding 856 words to the application. You must answer “Yes” if any of the following has ever occurred in your life:

1. You were arrested, detained, or taken into custody by any law enforcement or military authority under the suspicion of driving while intoxicated by, impaired by, or under the influence of drugs or alcohol (even if you were not charged or convicted and even if your record was expunged).
2. You were convicted (i.e., adjudicated guilty based on a jury, court, or military verdict or by a plea of guilty or nolo contendere/no contest) of any offense relating to driving while intoxicated by, impaired by, or under the influence of alcohol or drugs (even if you were not arrested, even if you were not sentenced, even if the conviction is being appealed or was overturned, and even if your record was expunged).
3. You were arrested for, convicted of, or subject to an administrative action based on any offense that resulted in the denial, suspension, cancellation, or revocation of your driver’s license or driving privileges in any state or country (even if the offense had nothing to do with alcohol or drugs).
4. You were arrested for, convicted of, or subject to an administrative action based on any offense that resulted in attendance at an educational or rehabilitation program (even if unrelated to alcohol or drugs).

The FAA has no guidance for how to correct a mistake if you have answered a question incorrectly in the past. If you have made a mistake, you should consult an experienced aviation attorney.

Ian Arendt is an in-house attorney with the AOPA Legal Services Plan.