Comments

Robert, I agree. While my example is off topic, it reflects a habitual disposition on the part of this administration. President Obama made even more disingenuous remarks about the several thousand for-profit colleges and universities that educate a range of students from A&P Mechanics to physicians and surgeons. In doing so, he caused billions of dollars of damage to the industry and further restricted access by the poor to higher education. His motive was to push the business to the community colleges even though every expert told him that they did not have the capacity and, with state budgets in crisis, could not possibly ramp up to meet even half of the demand. We see a similar pattern of behavior here. Tens of thousands of individuals fly on private jets much less expensively than any practical alternative. This includes everyone from the president to physicians performing emergency services in the nation's rural areas. President Obama's portrayal of private jet owners as "fat cats" rolling in cash goes against the facts and, if he knew this, constitutes lying. I hate to say it but this administration goes about its business by playing on latent class issues, attempting to pit one group against another in the hopes of securing votes. It is not inspiring.

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.