Lucas S

You can legally load your whole family into a single-engine plane and fly them over the ocean with about 40 hours of flying lessons. That's roughly one work week. Once you have the license, the FAA asks you to go up with an instructor once every two years. Airline pilots need 1,500 hours just to get hired, and they're back in a simulator getting tested every single year. You can see what that does in the crash data. Personal flights, meaning weekend trips and family vacations, had 21.1 fatal accidents per million flight hours between 2012 and 2021. Student pilots on training flights, mostly in the same kind of small planes, had 2.3. So the people still learning to fly crash about 9 times less often than the people who already passed. Compared to your car, personal flying in a small plane comes out about 27 times deadlier per hour. Worse than a motorcycle. When investigators go through the wreckage, about 69% of the time they pin the crash on the pilot. Mechanical problems caused 7% of the deadly ones in 2021. Even an engine quitting, which is what everybody pictures, killed people in 6 of 57 cases that year. The biggest killer is flying into bad weather, and it comes down to your inner ear. There's fluid in there that sloshes around when you turn, and that's how your brain knows you're tilting. Hold a gentle turn for about 15 seconds and the fluid settles down, so your brain decides you're flying straight again. When you can see the horizon you catch it right away. Inside a cloud there's nothing to look at, so the plane keeps tipping, the nose drops, the speed climbs, and your body keeps telling you everything's fine. Back in 1954, the University of Illinois put 20 pilots with zero instrument training into simulated clouds. Every one of them lost control of the plane. It took 178 seconds on average, a little under three minutes. Pilots still end up in clouds they were never trained for, and more than 75% of those crashes kill someone. No weather accident in small planes is deadlier. Small-plane people have joked about this since the 1950s. The Beechcraft Bonanza was one of the fastest single-engine planes you could buy, and so many wealthy doctors bought one and crashed it that people started calling it the "doctor killer." When people finally ran the numbers, the Bonanza crashed about as often as any other small plane. It just had a lot of rich owners with more money than flight time. Look at the back of that cabin. One teenager's asleep under a plaid blanket and the other one's buried in a book. The biggest safety feature on that flight is the judgment of whoever's sitting up front.