Interesting discussion. You all probably know I fly year round in the FIKI Cirrus SR22T and have no problem encountering some ice while climbing out to cruising level or decending into my destination. That said, ice is rather hard to predict, that is, that I just returned home from a flying trip to Norway (Bergen plus Oslo) and picked up some ice while climbing out of Bergen enroute to Oslo. I have to say, I have a dispatch rate all year around of almost 100%, but I hate and fear CBs and Thunderstorm buildups and are very cautious of potential severe icing encounters.
I think that if you want to get your instrument rating, then get it from an IR instructor that actually has real IR experience flying through Europe. Lots of them don’t have the experience other than the training routes to fly the approaches and then back to the cup of tea or coffee at the airport where the lesson started. I was lucky to get an instructor who actually had lots of IR and IMC experience throughout Europe. I still remember flying with him and thinking that we encountered ice (which was not the case) and remember him smiling about it. You need to experience it and discuss it (ways out, the dangers of it, etc.) and I would favor it being done during the IR training IF the instructor has the needed experience himself.
That said, ICE can be dangerous and is indeed hard to predict. I will not avoid it all together and am accepting the risks involved with climbing through sub-zero cloud layers to fly on top to my destination in the wintertime in a FIKI certified aircraft. (by the way: the Cirrus cannot take a lot of ice).
No, there are very sophisticated stats about SINGLE ENGINE aircraft, and those came to the conclusion that flying in a single engine acft is about 12 x as dangerous as driving a car. While we all know that you can only trust statistics you have manipulated yourself this is a figure that is very well accepted at the moment. If you asked ME then I’d say that it’s more dangerous than that.
What the statistics also say is …
- that it’s not necessarily the beginners that make the deadly mistakes
- that the first 100 hours after getting the licence most pilots are careful and usually don’t kill themselves
- that weather is still the #1 reason for crashes (unbelievably it is, or at least was some years ago, followed closely by trying to fly without fuel)
You will forgive me that I have no time to give all the sources for everything, and the statistics for the last years might be different too, all this is about ten years old. I bet it hasn’t changed much …
Sjoerd,
yes, that seems like a sensible approach. I myself am very sceptical about flight instructors, because I am sure that there are very few FIs who are really good. My IFR instructor is a guy who’s flown his Cessnas (he has 12 of them) for about 20.000 hours, all over Europe, and I had a good feeling about him. Still the more I learned about flying MYSELF the more I realized that it can be a dangerous thing to completely rely on your flight instructor.
After some years of flying I understood that what works best for me (me!) is to make my own decisions and to stick to them. This started when I realized that when you ask five FIs a question you get about 10 different opinions, and really on EVERYTHING. So I started to distance myself from all those dogmatic opinions and every since I am making my own decisions. And I try to find the BEST sources for every question I have.
My approach to flying is very conservative in most aspects. I don’t see a point in risking my life in a GA airplane (not as long as they have € 20 flights at EasyJet from Munich to London). Although I worked as an aviation journalist for the last 20 years and have flown (minimum) 150 different aircraft types among them the ThunderMustang (from the back seat :-)), the B-25, all certified singles (except the TB20!!), all single turboprops in production and even the ATR72 for three hours (still proud about that landing :-)) ….. I have a lot of respect and I remember how the world’s most famous test pilot Bob Hoover once told me that he “doesn’t like to fly IFR in small airplanes” because he thinks it’s “too dangerous”.
NOW THAT really made me think! Bob Hoover? The guy who did the spin testing of the F-104? The guy who escaped a german prison camp and stole a german FOCKE WULFF 190 and escaped with it to France, who left falling jets with an ejection seat ten times… … that same guy really said that? I have also met Scott Crossfield. He was among the most famous pilots of his era, one of the pilots of the North American X-15. I still have the autograph he gave me. Scott Crossfield, the X-15 pilot, really killed himself in a Cessna 210, when he flew it into a thunderstorm and the plane disintegrated!.
So who am I to be bold in an airplane, or to “test how much ice it can carry”? You only die once and then you’re (opinion) dead for a pretty long time. When things get beyond my personal limits (which are low) I will turn back, land at home and play my guitar.
But maybe I have too little of that Testosterone stuff, who knows.
No, there are very sophisticated stats about SINGLE ENGINE aircraft, and those came to the conclusion that flying in a single engine acft is about 12 x as dangerous as driving a car.
If you asked ME then I’d say that it’s more dangerous than that.
I bet it hasn’t changed much …
Earlier this year, just after I received my PPL and non-pilot friends would always be talking about how dangerous flying is (“Have you heard about that accident some weeks ago…”) I pulled together some numbers from various sources to sketch up a comparison of deaths per hour of driving a car or flying an airplane (piston aircraft with MTOW < 2.000 kg, I think). My plan was to proof my friends wrong because I actually wanted to believe in the old tale (of the car ride to the airfield being more dangerous).
While obviously my numbers weren’t reliable (due to the variety of sources, low volumes of GA accidents compared to car accidents, and missing information where I had to make assumptions) the ratio that I calculated is about on par with your ratio.
This started when I realized that when you ask five FIs a question you get about 10 different opinions, and really on EVERYTHING. So I started to distance myself from all those dogmatic opinions and every since I am making my own decisions. And I try to find the BEST sources for every question I have.
Or you could ask on EuroGA 
That is only slightly tongue in cheek. It is quite scary to realise how little operational knowledge one gained from the flight training machine, relative to the internet. That was why I started writing up my trip writeups back in 2003, and is the main reason why EuroGA was started. The other (non US) aviation sites gradually became submerged in drivel postings, personal attacks and people bitting each other’s heads off over trivia, and lost their value for serious flying knowledge discussion/distribution.
Actually my trip writeups portray a far more conservative approach to flight planning and execution than what I wrote in this thread, but that is just a reflection of the fact that if flying for leisure (holidays, meeting up with friends, etc) one is not likely to be departing into totally sh*t conditions. Especially in the winter… I think the most controversial writeup I have is this one.
But there’s a good side to all of that too: MORE than on a motorcycle it really depends on YOU in the airplane. Don’t go testing “how much ice your plane can carry” (pun intended:-)) , don’t do the classic “VFR into IMC” thing and put FUEL into the tanks – and you have a really good chance of surviving. Riding a motorcycle you will need more LUCK than in the airplane.
Riding a motorcycle you will need more LUCK than in the airplane.
I’m not so sure. Even having flown as a profession for many years, I have probably more motorcycle hours than flying hours. I nearly got killed flying several times (one unforcast icing encounter and a couple of near misses) but never on the motorbike. Because I do not ride it for fun, but use it as a practical and economical means of transport. Very defensively, observing every speed limit (including my own absolute two-wheel limit of 150km/h), keeping it technically in perfect condition and avoiding ice ;-)
So who am I to be bold in an airplane, or to “test how much ice it can carry”?
I don’t know what to reply here. With the same logic, you could also refuse to do stall exercises (every stall can lead to a spin which might be unrecoverable under some conditions) or asymmetric flight training in a twin. Yet the latter two are an intergral part of every training syllabus. Having a little first hand experience with airframe icing can not harm, if acquired under controlled circumstances and as safely as possible. As I wrote above, I can see no danger in taking a student trough isolated clouds at FL70 or above with surface temperatures of more then 10 degrees celsius. If it starts getting bad you push the nose forward and one thousand feet lower it will already melt. Of course you do not wait until your aircraft starts behaving strangely.
Alexis,
All of flying is a graduated risk scale. Having an IR has been shown to substantially improve the safety record of pilots in a population. Whether you read Collins or The Killing Zone, the biggest problem for aviation is continued VFR flight into IMC leading to either loss of control or CFIT, or pilot handling errors (usually in the circuit). Carb icing actually seems to have been a much bigger problem than structural icing.
I think we all realise that flying is risky and as you say, we all should make our own minds up over the risks. But really the only way to reduce your personal risk to car type levels is to not fly.
There are a lot of areas that have come up on EuroGA where people have different views on how acceptable those risks are for them:
I suppose my perspective remains that the biggest risk to me when flying is me. So training and discipline in following whatever limits you have set for yourself is key. And the biggest lesson I have learned from reading a lot on these subjects is that people predominantly die when they lose control of the aircraft and stall/spin. Whether you have engine failure/partial power, run out of fuel, icing meaning you can’t maintain altitude, or are just operating in the circuit. You cannot allow your airspeed to decay to a level where you stall. Even in thunderstorms that have been inadvertently flown into where naturally you want to slow up to limit control forces, it is apparently very common for people to overdo that and stall/spin.
Like you I just set my limits and try my best to obey them and fly as accurately as I can.
(except the TB20!!)
Alexis,
As we are based at the same field and I happen to have a TB20 I think this could be remedied.
My plane is currently in for the annual so I’ll be in touch early next year.
JasonC – I absolutely agree (hey, it rhymes :-)
This is from german PCmet, a feature called “Crosssctions” which I really like, first shown to my by boscomantico when we picked up my SR22 in England and flew it back home. YOu get an idea where 0°C will be, and also about the tops, although sometimes not perfectly reliable it gives you a good idea about the conditions you will meet enrout.
