Robert, you say that glass panels and steam gauges have no difference in safety while Pia Bergstrom's article disagrees. Quote from hers: "In fact, newer glass cockpit airplanes had 'demonstrably higher rates of accidents during takeoffs, landings and go-arounds,' according to the study." Uhh, okay then, who's right?
In my house, the biggest, most-prominant clocks are analog. Not because I'm against digital, modern progress but because they're the easiest and most intuitive to use.
I've always been against the vertical tape presentation of altitude, airspeed and vertical speed in glass cockpit displays. These gauges NEED to be displayed in analog format (along with heading, obviously). We know this. A fast-moving vertical airspeed tape is confusing to read at a glance, unlike a conventional airspeed indicator which *immediately* tells you what your speed is, which way it's going (if it's changing) and how close the speed is to a critical one. As the kids write: Needs. No. Interpretation. Same with altitude. But this is neither breaking news nor rocket science. All these people who say vertical tapes are "better" are, in my not-so-humble-opinion, just plain wrong. Or they fly jets with autothrottles and always-on autopilots.
Give me reliable, digital gauges okay, but can we PLEASE put them back in the old, easily understandable format? Then...maybe...glass cockpits would show a measurable increase in "betterness" over steam gauges.
Those interested primarily in safety by brand will want to read the full report carefully.
What I found especially interesting resides between the lines. Essentially, the Diamond DA40 is so safe (was involved in so few accidents total and so few serious or fatal accidents) that they excluded it from the analysis; otherwise, it would have "made" glass panels look safer than traditional cockpits. The justification for excluding the Diamonds is as follows:
QUOTE:
"None of these (accident) patterns describe the record of Diamond Aircraft. In the decade from 2001 through 2010 (inclusive), there were only 13 accidents in single-engine DA-40s and one in a DA-42 twin. Three of the DA-40 accidents were fatal. Because the precision of the estimate depends on the number of events observed, accident rates estimated from these numbers cannot be considered reliable, but taken at face value they would be about two-thirds lower than those in other fixed-gear singles of 180 hp or less, and half those in the more powerful new composite designs. Since almost 80% of Diamond’s fleet exposure is in glass-cockpit airplanes, combining Diamond with any other category biases the comparison in favor of glass . . . their accident record is too sparse to analyze them as a separate category. For these reasons, Diamond aircraft were excluded from the remainder of the analysis."
ENDQUOTE
As a research scientist, methodologist, and statistician, I find the logic especially weak since more TAA Diamonds are being sold and flown than most of the aircraft that were included in most of the comparison bases (more than Hawker, Mooney, Piper, & Columbia). Moreover, there are statistical techniques for handling low sample sizes.
A cynical view is that including Diamonds in the tables would have made Cirrus and Cessna/Columbia look especially bad, which is probably deserved and, in part, may reflect Cirrus' reprehensible marketing strategy of targeting zero time pilots. Another category mistake in the presuppositions is that the majority of the Diamond DA40’s flying are DA40-XLS which are putting out more than 200 hp because of the tuned exhaust system engineered specifically for that engine and prop.
This is not a call for Cirrus owners to jump in to defend their aircraft. Cirrus are excellent aircraft. It is a call for the analysts to examine their own biases in framing the analysis and report. It is scientifically and to some extent logically indefensible.