Page 4 - Volume 18 Number 8

2 • TWIN & TURBINEAUGUST 2014editor’sbriefingThe June 18, 2014 story in USA Today about general aviation safety, headlined “Unfit To Fly”, has touched off quite a firestorm of controversy and recrimination. Like most “agendamentary” projects, the conclusion was foregone, leaving only the carefully-chosen facts to be bent toward the outcome. Author Thomas Frank’spoint was that little aircraft are dangerous, and it’s all the fault of greedy capitalist companies and a government that won’t do its job of protecting us. Much of the story focuses on the hyperbole of litigation claims rather than the outcome of actual accident investigation.It is a fact that flying machines are dangerous, which the article pointed out with numerous pictures of crashes and victims. The article also stated that the accident toll (“45,000 lives in five decades”) continues unabated, which is patently false. The accompanying chart showed the safety record’s improvement over the years, some of which has been due to fewer hours flown, but also, significantly, due to better equipment and design.However, the story intimates that we can somehow create rules and standards that will take the risk out of general aviation, and that is misleading. There will always be a risk involved with strapping oneself into a vehicle that hurtles down a runway, lifts us thousands of feet above the ground and travels at hundreds of miles per hour. We who are direct participants in general aviation go to great lengths to manage the risks involved, including informing and preparing ourselves. Every issue of this magazine, as with most other aviation publications, carries safety-relatedarticles. Pilots always want to know what caused an accident, and what they can do to prevent it from happening to themselves.The only perfectly-safe airplane is the one that never leaves the ground, like the mythical 1987-1996 Cessna 182; no one has ever been killed or injured in one of those, because there were none built. The story makes, and then ignores, the statement that the U.S. has twice as many general aviation aircraft as all the rest of the world combined. There’s a reason for that leadership; it’s called freedom. We can fly what we want, when we want, with less strangling bureaucratic oversight than other countries impose.The USA Today article makes the case for updating certification rules, eliminating the “grandfathering” of type certification under which practically all aircraft are built and maintained. The notion is that armor-plating windshields so birds can’t get through them, or making fuel tanks that are somehow impervious to a crash, will save a lot of lives. There’s a mistaken parallel drawn with automobiles, which operate only on the surface at much slower speeds and are typically junked after a few years.The unanswered question posed by the story is “what do we do about aviation safety”? I must support the paper’s right to raise the issue, even if its approach was one-sided, and I think our response needs to be tempered by an admission that hazards exist and need to be managed. Should we trust government solutions to every aspect of our life, forbidding me to fly the 70-year-old airplane that I have in my hangar, because it has no shoulder harness, anti-collision lights, stall warning or TCAS? No! At some point, we have to make a choice to accept some risk – because without choice, there is no freedom.LeRoy Cook. EditorA Little Truth Hurts