There Are Apples and...
By Richard L. Collins
November 2006
 Observers of the general aviation accident picture use different things to stay abreast of what is going on. The FAA issues preliminary accident and incident reports every weekday. These are terse recitals of the bare facts that come in when an accident is first reported to the FAA. Thenthere are NTSB preliminary reports that come along a couple of weeks (or more) after the accident. These are used by responsible observers only for background. The final NTSB report, with all the facts and a probable cause, comes along a year or two after the accident. Some also use the news pages of Google or other services to search for information on accidents.
What is interesting is that you get entirely different pictures of what is going on from the different sources. In the end, only the NTSB final reports give a true picture.
Mac and I were discussing how, in the FAA preliminary reports, there are a humongous amount of forced landings reported. The FAA reports cover 10 reporting days (all weekdays; weekends are lumped into Monday) and in one such recent period there were 24 engine-failure related accidents or incidents reported to the FAA. Of these, two were fatal and one involved serious injury.
The only airplane type that stands out in these accidents is the Cessna 210, with three events, none involving injury. This makes the 210 engine a suspect, but we know from knowledge of the bigger picture that 210 pilots are notorious for using all of or mismanaging the fuel.
However you look at it, 24 forced landings in a time period like this is a lot. That would be well over 600 a year and whenever there is a forced landing there is a period of greatly increased risk that ends only when the airplane comes to a stop, hopefully a gentle stop.
How many forced landings make it to an NTSB accident report? The definition of “substantial damage” plays a role here. The failure of one engine on an airplane doesn’t qualify. Nor do bent fairings or cowlings, dented skin, small holes, ground damage to props, landing gear, wheels, tires, flaps, engine accessories, brakes or wingtips. So, for a forced landing to become an accident the airplane has to sustain a lot of damage.
Looking at the same calendar days covered by the FAA preliminaries that produced 24 forced landings, but two years earlier so the NTSB reports would be final, there were eight forced landings that qualified as accidents. That suggests that only one out of three forced landings makes it to the record book. That would also mean that any statistic on the subject based on NTSB reports wouldn’t reflect the true picture.
Of the eight forced landing accidents that the NTSB reported for this period, six were in retractable-gear aircraft. These airplanes tend to be heavier and have higher stalling speeds, so it is logical that they would suffer more damage during an off-airport landing. (Of the 24 in FAA reports, only seven were retractables, which tends to bear this out.) One of the NTSB’s forced landing accidents was fatal.
The question that comes up is whether or not forced landings have become a larger part of the risk found in general aviation flying. As far as fatal accidents go, looking back about 25 years we found 89 fatal engine-failure related accidents in a year. Looking at the two periods previously mentioned, it appears that the rate today would be about 40 fatal engine-failure related accidents a year. There are less hours being flown now, but not that many less, so either pilots are doing a better job of making forced landings without substantial damage, or engines are failing less often. Either (or both) would be positive, and let’s hope the picture gets ever brighter.
One other note on accident reports. Our son, Richard, is also a student of aviation. He has been looking at the correlation between accidents and the length of time the pilot has owned the airplane. Quite frequently, the airplane and the pilot have just gotten together. There is a message there. If the airplane is new to you, be extra careful. Insurance underwriters should take note, too. Hint hint. I have known my airplane for 27 years, so we are not exactly strangers.
When leaving Green Bay after attending Oshkosh there always seems to be interesting weather. For one thing, storms at that latitude don’t seem to behave like storms farther south. Maybe that is because there is often a stationary front up there that triggers strong afternoon storms that, instead of dissipating at night, tend to linger into the morning.
On this morning I looked at the radar on TV before leaving the hotel. It looked okay with perhaps a little deviation to the north required over Lake Michigan.
At Titletown Jet Center, an excellent FBO, I paid the bill but didn’t look at the radar in their flight planning room. Why? A distraction always works. There had been wind to 70 mph the day before, along with small hail. A Cessna 310 nose gear snapped and a Piper was blown over on its back. The distraction was that I was thinking mainly about seeing that my airplane was okay. It was. No hail damage and, fortunately, it had been facing into the strong wind and had not moved at all.
Bendix/King has a weather uplink station at Oshkosh and I was receiving it soon after takeoff. I had already looked at the ship’s radar and it showed some activity out over the lake. My first take on that picture was that a deviation north of course would be good, just as I had suspected from the TV an hour or more earlier.
When the uplink had loaded and presented the big picture, everything changed. There was a lot more weather out there now than earlier. Also, a detour to the north of course would have put the airplane in a less favorable weather place later on in the flight.
Air traffic control can’t be very flexible in the area during the show because of the amount of traffic coming and going from Oshkosh. This morning, though, they were amenable to whatever I wanted to do, which was go south of course, down over Muskegon, Michigan, and then go east. This wouldn’t avoid all precipitation but it would keep the airplane in green and yellow rain. I’m sure the controller was looking at his radar picture and could see why I had chosen this path.
I was flying at 17,000 feet and the visual picture was interesting. The airborne radar showed some rain off to the left but nothing that indicated a thunderstorm. Using it I would not have deviated as much, but I would have probably been bumped around pretty good. I could see cumulus building above my level well clear of anything shown on airborne radar.
A bit later there were clouds at 17,000 feet and some ice started accumulating on the airframe. Because a station close and ahead was reporting clear, I thought I’d stick with 17,000 for five minutes to see if the clouds went away. They didn’t, so I asked for and got 15,000 feet, which was clear of clouds but still below freezing. The boots did a fair job of getting rid of the ice, but they hadn’t been treated with Icex in a while so it wasn’t a completely tidy job.
To the east a ragged and nasty line of storms was just north of course and I used the Nexrad picture to give it a little extra clearance. Then free and clear on home.
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