Travelling Light - the risky business of flying light aircraft
Created | Updated Jul 14, 2006
Early on the morning of the April 11th 1996, a light aircraft took off from Cheyenne airport, Wyoming in a rapidly worsening thunderstorm. Within minutes the plane was in trouble. “Do you hear the rain?” the frightened pilot was heard to say. “Do you hear the rain?” Moments later, in what appeared to be a desperate attempt to turn back to the airport, the plane stalled above a group of houses and nosedived to the ground, killing all three people on board – two passengers and the pilot, 7-year old Jessica Dubroff.
The plane that young Jessica Dubroff was flying that day was a Cessna 177B, a compartively simple to fly, single-engine aircraft fitted with dual controls. It belonged to flight instructor Peter Reid, who along with Jessica's father, Lloyd Dubroff, was to accompany Jessica on her record-breaking attempt to become the youngest pilot to fly across the United States. Instead a fatal combination of poor judgement on the side of the adults, pilot error, apalling weather conditions, and a plane that was not only overloaded but arguably unsuitable for such a challenging journey – the Cessna 177 is considered by many experienced pilots to be without the necessary power for a long cross-country flight over high terrain – led to a record that nobody wanted to break: Jessica Dubroff became the youngest ever pilot to be killed in an aviation accident.
If it hadn't been for her tender years, the story of Jessica Dubroff's tragic last flight would have received little attention. Small aircraft have been crashing slightly longer than they have been flying. The first ever recorded aircraft fatality was way back in 1908, when Lt. Thomas Etholen Selfridge was killed in a plane piloted by aviation pioneer Orville Wright. Wright himself was also badly injured when the Wright Flyer Mk3 suffered propeller loss and plumetted to the ground from the less than dizzying height of 75 feet.
These two stories alone could serve to illustrate a single point about light aircraft, namely that whether your pilot happens to be one of the most experienced of his age or a 7-year old girl barely able to reach the controls, you are far more likely to die in a bouncy little aeroplane than by any other mode of air travel, perhaps with the exception of being fired out of a cannon. Furthermore, according to the American National Transport Safety Board's accident statistics, flying in a light aircraft is up to 26 times more dangerous than driving. This really goes against everything you think you know about aeroplanes. Surely air travel is by far the safest way to traverse this crowded and chaotic planet?
The answer to that is yes and no. Statistically speaking, in an average year more people are killed by donkeys than die in aircraft accidents, and more people die each year as a result of accidents involving trees than aeroplanes. They either drive into them, fall out of them, eat something poisonous that grows on one, or else they go to sleep at night and never see the one that comes crashing through the bedroom ceiling. Of course the figures that lead to those conclusions are, to say the least, a little skewed. In fact you could probably open a bottle of wine with them. For instance, it doesn't really account for the fact that, generally speaking, people don't travel by tree. Some people do of course travel by donkey, yet this simple fact alone does not explain how so many of them manage to come a cropper on one. Donkeys can be unpredictable and stubborn at times but savage attacks are all but unheard of. They are not generally known for their killer instinct, more so for their inexorable will to follow dangling carrots as well as a peculiar fondness for wearing sombreros. But then statistics can say what you want them to say. They can say that flying is the safest form of transport, and they would be right. They would also be wrong. What people actually mean when they make calm assurances relating to accident statistics is that flying by commercial jet airliner is the safest form of transport.
The British Civil Aviation Authority's own figures surmise that commercial air travel is 6 times safer than driving and twice as safe as taking a train. Though naturally, some operators are better than others. According to Richard Kebabjin's absorbing website planecrashinfo.com, the odds of being in a fatal accident differ quite alarmingly between those airlines at the top of the safety league and those lower down. For instance, flying with one of the top 25 airlines presents you with a 1 in 4.25 million chance of remaining in the heavens longer than anticipated. To put it into some kind of perspective, that's about the same as your chances of winning the jackpot prize on a scratchcard, and just slightly less than the likelihood of being inadvertantly circumcised during a routine hernia operation. On the other hand, fly with one of the bottom 25, the perennial relegation strugglers of the airline business, and the odds of being killed on a single flight close to just 1 in 386, 000. Would it worry you to know that your unnattended luggage is less likely to be stolen on a train?
The big worry with air travel of course is that accidents involving planes are so often catastrophically unforgiving. A runway collision between two planes at Tenerife airport on March 27, 1977 killed 583 people, whilst a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 crashed on Mount Osutaka on August 12, 1985 with the loss of 520 lives, the worst single-plane disaster in aviation history. On that occasion the cause was largely attributed to faulty repairs made to the plane some years before the accident.
Mechanical failure accounts for around 13% of fatal aviation accidents, though thankfully not all serious mechanical failure will inevitably lead to disaster. In 1982 a British Airways plane flying over the Pacific ocean entered a dense cloud of debris originating from a volcanic eruption. At once the windscreen became a useless sheet of glaucous glass, and yet it turned out to be the least of the crew's problems, as moments later all four of the plane's engines became clogged with ash and quickly shut down. At the time the plane was at its cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, though unsurprisingly did not remain there very long. The plane decended without power for more than 20,000 feet – effectively earning it, allbeit temporarily, the title of the world's most expensive glider - before one of the engines was restarted. The others quickly followed and the pilot was able to land safely at Jakarta.
This particular example of mechanical failure is one that highlights what is probably the most crucial safety difference between flying on a commercial airliner and a light aircraft. That it to say, big jets have more than one engine. In the event of a failure power can often be easily maintained by the remaining engine (s). Even if all onboard engines fail, as happened in the case of the volcanic cloud, the chances of regaining some power are significantly increased by numbers alone. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to work out that if the engine fails in a single-engine aircraft, there is nothing left to get you out of trouble but a pair of wings and a prayer. Pilot error, bad judgement and poor weather conditions were undoubtedly factors in the crash that killed child-pilot Jessica Dubroff, but untilmately her Cessna 177 came down because it lacked the power to keep it in the air. What came as a surprise to many at the time was that Jessica's age and inexperience barely figured in the outcome. As one experienced airline pilot noted: “Flying a single-engine aircraft is a bit like keeping your car keys and your spare car keys on the same keyring.”
If any of this has left you feeling a little nervous about your impending holiday flight, imagine what must have gone through the minds of the passengers of a Pan American flight out of San Francisco after it was forced to make an emergency landing at a nearby airforce base with half its wing torn off by a disintegrating engine. No doubt feeling lucky to be alive, they stood and watched as a replacement plane sent to ferry them on their journey crashed on approach. Understandably some of them may have chosen to continue their trip by car, and yet as the facts clearly demonstrate, the average commuter is far safer in the skies than on the roads. This of course is assuming you intend to travel with a reputable commercial airline, on a plane that is reassuringly somewhat larger and more powerful than a delux golf buggy. If not – if you still fancy the idea of learning to fly your own small aircraft – you should perhaps bare in mind the advice offered to pilot Wiley Post by aviation superstar Charles A. Lindbergh: “I hope you either take up parachute jumping or stay out of single motored airplanes at night.”
