wanttaja
En-Route
The problem is, *how* the number of flight hours is calculated. The process is broken, and too many people are making conclusions on bad data. The Aircraft Reregistration process hosed up the process, but few at the FAA understands that.That wasn't the point of bringing up how much people are flying. The point is that it's erroneous to assume that more total accidents equals decreased safety, because the way safety is measured is by calculating the number of accidents per 100,000 flight hours.
Let's examine how the FAA determines the number of hours GA flies every year.
Every year, the FAA sends out a survey to a subset of aircraft owners. Owners are asked to identify the type of aircraft, whether it is active, and, if so, how many hours it was flown the previous year.
A certain proportion of surveys aren't answered. The FAA ignores them (remember this...it's key!). From the rest, they identify what percentage of aircraft of each type is active, and come up with an average number of flight hours.
For instance, in the latest survey results I have (the 2013 survey), the FAA estimated that 84.9% of the fixed wing, piston-powered, GA aircraft with four or more seats are still active, and that they flew an average of 89.9 hours per year.
They then multiply that percentage by the number of registered aircraft, and multiply it by the average number of flight hours to produce an estimate of total flight hours. (For those keeping score, it came to 8,278,343 hours for the fixed-wing, recip-powered, 4+ seaters).
OK, we've got a value for 2013.
But what happens when we repeat the process for 2014? They repeat the surveys, they again multiply it by the number of registered aircraft, and come up with another estimate of total flight hours.
The big problem is, over 12,500 aircraft were administratively removed from the FAA registry during 2014. That's at least five times more than the number of new aircraft produced in the year! So the number of estimated flight hours decreases, and, since the same number of accidents occurred, the accident rate skyrockets!
So, what has happened? Most of the airplanes that were deregistered probably hadn't existed for years and mail to the owners...including surveys... bounced back as undeliverable.
And the bounced-back mail doesn't count....the FAA's estimate of the percentage of active aircraft is based *only* on returned surveys.
So the estimate of the percentage active aircraft is essentially unchanged from 2013 to 2014. But that means that 84.9% of the deregistered aircraft WERE ASSUMED TO BE ACTIVE AIRCRAFT IN 2013.
In reality, most of the 12,500 aircraft were inactive all along. But the survey process has assumed that over 10,600 (12,500 x 84.9%) of them had flown nearly 90 hours the previous year... and thus the computed total number of hours flown decreases by almost a million hours.
And of course, the ACTUAL number of hours flown is, at worst the same.
THAT'S why the accident rate spiked. Not because there were significantly more accidents (though the number does vary), but because the broken process assumed a significant drop in the number of hours flown.
There were 1519 accidents in 2015, and almost 300 more (1806) in 2009. But there were almost 90,000 aircraft removed from the rolls during that time (87,789). A bit over 16,000 were exported, at most ~12,000 were removed due to accidents (and not all crashed airplanes are removed from the database).
Using the FAA's 84.9% active percentage, that means that the FAA's process assumed about FIFTY THOUSAND ACTIVE AIRCRAFT were removed from the rolls over that five-year period.... when the vast majority probably hadn't flown for years. Yet that assumption is used when computing the accidents-per-100,000-flight-hours accident rate.
And THAT'S why "the accident rate has increased."
I attended the FAA/EAA Safety Summit last February; the Homebuilt accident rate "had increased" and the FAA was concerned. Of course, it was all due to the deregistration effort. I've attached some of the charts I showed at the Summit to explain the issue.
Ron Wanttaja