(January 2012) Last month I reported the exciting news that the training required by the FAA SFAR issued in 2006 succeeded in turning the MU-2, an airplane that had been at the bottom of the accident statistics, into one of the safest turboprops in the air and, beyond that, into one of the safest airplanes of any type. One of the keys to the success of the SFAR is that it requires every pilot who flies an MU-2 to complete the approved recurrent training program every year. The FAA had considered requiring a type rating for the MU-2 but realized that “this alternative would not fully accomplish our safety objective and would not meet the FAA’s goal of ensuring that all MU-2B pilots receive continued training in the accepted procedures for normal, abnormal and emergency operations.”
As I was researching the accident statistics for that article, I was struck by what seemed like a glaring inconsistency. If people were horrified by the MU-2 accident rate of 3.78 per 100,000 flight hours, why were they not twice as horrified by the noncommercial fixed-wing accident rate of 6.60 in 2009, or the noncommercial helicopter rate of 7.40? And that led me to wonder if requiring completion of an approved annual training program can reduce the MU-2 accident rate from 3.78 to 0.75, what would the result be of requiring completion of an approved annual recurrent training course for all noncommercial pilots?
