General aviation has a lot of good things going for it. Airplanes have gotten more capable, and wonderful avionics improvements have come along to give us amazing inflight information and make flying much more fun. But these good things tend to be overshadowed by a particularly large dark cloud. In an increasingly risk-averse and litigious society the general aviation accident rate is unacceptable. In fact, the fatality rate per mile for airplanes is 7 to 8 times that of cars and the rate hasn’t changed significantly in the last 10 years.
It is not like we don’t know about this and aren’t trying hard to fix it. We have tried all the obvious things and have redoubled our efforts to work harder at them. We’ve had magazine articles, symposia, and courses dealing with the subject, but still little, if any, change. It is becoming apparent that trying harder at the obvious answers won’t work. As for most complicated problems, the solutions won’t be obvious until after the problem is solved.
