Ya Know, You Can Get Killed Doing This Stuff

Over the weekend at the dropzone, I had a conversation with my friend TK, who runs the place. He asked me if I had really been riding motorcycles for 40 years and yes, I really have, although not continuously. He told me he was thinking about a bike, but at 55, was considering himself a little too old to start. I'll have more to say on the age thing in another blog, but he said something that's among the top three things people say that drive me up the wall. It relates to how people with minimal information about an activity attempt to assign it risk with a glib statement bereft of forethought.

For motorcycles, it's, "I worry about the fill-in-the-age-old lady running a red light." For airplanes, it's, "Aren't those little things dangerous?" with the favorite alternate being, "What happens if the engine quits?" For skydiving, it's the ever-clever, "I don't believe in jumping out of perfectly good airplanes," usually uttered by a pilot and followed by a proud grin as if to suggest he's sure I've never heard that before. For the ultimate in idiocy, there's always, "What happens if your parachute doesn't open?" Since I'm involved in all three of these high-risk activities, I've found that the most disarming response is to explain that I have a death wish. If, while riding to the airport, the old lady doesn't get me with her Chrysler, the engine on the airplane will quit while I'm flying to the dropzone and when I bail out, my parachute won't open. I think I've got the matrix of certain doom pretty well covered there. And if none of that stuff happens, well, I guess it just wasn't my day.

Being a sharp-eyed observer of the human condition, I have noticed that these comments are frequently offered by people who have placed into little boxes things they don't want to think about because they're not really interested in the risks involved. Fair enough, I guess. But on some occasions, I will engage people in my but-I-have-a-vote argument.

The airplane version is simple enough. If the engine quits, I'm not going to sit there like a quivering mass of protoplasm awaiting the inevitable end. I'll find a nice place to land and although the airplane might not be usable after that, I'll do my best to destroy it in a creative way that spares my own hide. If I'm in a Cirrus, I might just deploy the CAPS. "You mean whole airplanes have parachutes now? Do airliners have these, too?" Yes. No. For a patient listener, I might discuss weather judgments, instrument flight, proficiency and other things that reduce risk.

You may recall that when the Society of Aviation and Flight Educators launched in 2011, its overarching goal was to reduce fatal accidents and thereby attract more participants to GA by reducing the risk. I said at the time that I didn't think enough people paid attention to GA accidents to have an opinion or at least enough of one to keep them from participating. I still think that. Yet, admittedly, the daily press still does boneheaded coverage that distorts the risk factors, including the august New York Times. In that piercing piece of technical journalism, the author fails to note that 2014 saw the lowest fatal GA accident rate in history, although at 1.05/100,000 hours, it hasn't dropped much. People who don't take risks, don't understand risks.

When you're attempting to school a person unfamiliar with GA safety, it's helpful to keep these numbers in mind because as I've said before, gut feel, newspaper articles and cable coverage are the worst ways to understand relative risk because they assume common denominators and don't account for risk mitigation.

As for skydiving, pilots not familiar with the sport sometimes can't believe that it's probably lower risk than flying. The comparison isn't apples to apples for two reasons: We don't have a common unit of exposure and the data collection is hardly perfect. Nonetheless, using a single jump as an exposure unit, skydiving has a fatal rate of about 0.7/100,000 jumps compared to 1.05/100,000 hours for GA flying. They're functionally about the same risk if you accept normalizing the exposure unit, although I think the data suggests that skydiving is less risky than flying on a fatal accident basis. (This doesn't include BASE jumping; that's a whole ‘nother game.)

Using a mile, a jump and a flight hour as the exposure basis, my friend TK's worry about motorcycles is not entirely misplaced. According to NHTSA data, the fatal car accident rate in the U.S. is about 1.11/100m miles. Motorcycles are 39/100m—many times greater. Comparing car fatal rates to the GA fatal rate is difficult because of the different exposure units. But I think the cars come out ahead as being safer, not the least of which is due to improved crashworthiness that airplanes haven't quite matched.

But for those who use light aircraft for transportation, the GA fatal accident rate is 10 times higher than the scheduled carrier rate. If wives, kids and cohorts knew this, would they still crawl into the back seat? How can a pilot or owner justify that elevated risk? For the simple reason that these activities aren't entirely governed by the fear of dying. For many of us, the risk is part of the attraction and to keep it reasonable, we apply certain mitigations related to skill, experience and awareness. This is where my I-have-a-vote-in-this kicks in.

For light aircraft flying, you might limit your trips to benign weather, rule out night flying or you might fly a twin or a turbine and spend time and money to stay current. Or maybe you own a new or used Cirrus with CAPS. The point is, regardless of the fatal risk, you take what you believe to be meaningful steps to reduce it by some amount below what the basic data tells you. And if the basic data already paints low risk, you're reducing it further. While it's true that one man's risk mitigation is another's denial, some form of this mechanism is what propels us to remain in these risky activities.

Getting back to motorcycles—and it's relevant because many pilots also ride—the risk mitigation is really survival instinct. You don't sit stopped in the middle of an intersection waiting for Miss Daisy in her Chrysler to t-bone you. You ride defensively, looking deep into intersections for threats, eyeballing left turners like a hawk and you camp in the mirrors looking for cars trying to do you in from the rear. You scan the road for hazards and build in stopping distance in traffic. You plan escape routes and make head checks an autonomic function. You learn to corner and brake effectively and slow down to stay inside your own decision loop on a blind sweeper.(I actually practice these things.)And you wear all the gear, all the time, especially a helmet. That alone reduces the fatal risk substantially, despite a lot of misinformation to the contrary. Taken together, these things add up to a bubble of awareness that makes you safer than riders smoking cigarettes and riding bare headed with flip flops doing their very best to be the knuckleheads lending human dimension to that 39/100m statistic.

You're still at much higher risk than you'd be in a car, but you've made rational decisions to reduce the disparity. The rest you either accept or don't, just as with airplanes. For me personally, I find there's cross pollination in risk assessment between these activities. Motorcycling, because of its high risk, requires a 100 percent, always-on threat awareness mindset. I find that this consciousness of risk carries over for me into flying, into jumping and even driving. I remind myself of this every time a swing a leg over a bike.

And still, you can get killed doing any of this stuff because there are always surprises and random occurrences no one can plan for or mitigate. But then if there weren't, life would be pretty boring. Why give up living just to stay alive?