As More Pilots Take Wing, Safety Debated

Paul Rostykus knows the potential hazards of flying small airplanes--down to the most esoteric and grim detail.

As an emergency room physician, he sees the myriad ways a human body can be damaged in high-impact accidents. As the co-author of a recent study on pilot fatalities in crash landings, he can tell you that planes with a tail wheel rather than a nose wheel are involved in fewer fatal crashes. As a pilot for six years, the 45-year-old from Ashland, Ore., knows that weather from the coast can wipe away the horizon in minutes.

Yet once a week or so, Rostykus climbs into the cockpit of his Cessna 170 and, like a growing number of Americans who fly small aircraft for pleasure or business, goes for a ride.

“Everything has risks,” Rostykus said. “But it’s a different view of the world up there. And there are times when that risk is worth it and times when it isn’t.”

The investigation into the fatal crash of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane comes as general aviation, or noncommercial flying, enjoys a major resurgence following years of decline--and as piloting private planes becomes an increasingly safe enterprise, with the number of crashes dropping by more than half, to about 350 annually, over the last two decades.

Despite reams of facts and figures, however, quantifying the relative safety of general aviation is difficult.

When calculating the risk, one hour of low-level flying in a rickety crop duster is the same as one hour at cruising altitude in a multimillion-dollar corporate jet. The flights of a relatively inexperienced pilot like Kennedy, who had about 100 hours in the cockpit, are lumped together with the leisure flights of a former fighter pilot with 10,000 hours and the training to dodge surface-to-air missiles.

Mile for mile, flying a commercial airliner is safer than flying in a private plane--or taking a car, a boat or most other forms of transportation. About the same number of people are killed each year in animal-drawn vehicle accidents as in airline accidents, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Beyond that, however, the question of small-plane safety is as wide-open as the term “general aviation,” and policymakers already are beginning to debate pilot training standards, regulations governing night flying and a host of other issues brought to the fore by the deaths of Kennedy, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette.

Pilots, even many who have had close calls, argue that the current system is safe and appropriately flexible. And, they say, the pursuit of safety also must acknowledge the incalculable thrill of being airborne--the reason most pilots climbed into a cockpit in the first place.

“Once you learn to fly, you do things and go places where nobody else can go,” said Thomas L. Teilhet, a 61-year-old flight instructor from Arcadia who was forced to land on the Golden State Freeway in the San Fernando Valley last month when his Cessna 150 lost power.

After a decade and a half of decline, general aviation has begun to rebound substantially in recent years, due in large part to an economy that has given many Americans the money for expensive lessons and big-ticket toys like private airplanes.

Also, a 1995 change in a federal law put an 18-year statute of limitations on liability suits against airplane manufacturers, allowing makers of small planes to drop their prices. In 1998, manufacturers shipped 2,220 planes, the most since 1984, according to the General Aviation Manufacturers Assn.

At the same time, the number of pilots has been growing. In 1998, the FAA issued more than 616,000 pilot certificates--down from 1984’s all-time high of 722,000 but an increase of 13% over 1997.

The combination of more pilots and lower aircraft prices has led to a record number of private flights--37 million in 1998--as Americans increasingly fly, rather than drive, to a day at the beach, a lunch in a neighboring state or, as Kennedy planned, a relative’s wedding.

J.J. O’Reilly, 40, who builds houses in Arizona to help fund his preferred business--operating a small charter service at Van Nuys Airport--flies to dinner almost every weekend and knows the menus at airfield restaurants up and down the coast.

The resurgence of recreational flying comes after years of steadily improving safety records, thanks in large part to improved technologies and better-maintained airways, experts say.

Private pilots today benefit from stronger, lighter airframe materials, more reliable engine components and inexpensive global positioning satellite navigation devices that can mark a plane’s location within a matter of yards. They also reap the benefits of improved radar coverage, as well as weather forecasting technologies that allow meteorologists to track a storm in near-real time.

In 1946, at the beginning of what pilots consider the modern age of aviation, there were nearly 78 general aviation accidents and seven fatalities per 100,000 hours of flight time. By last year, after five decades of relatively steady decline, the rate had slipped to seven accidents and just over one fatality per 100,000 hours.

Still, general aviation’s safety record does not approach that of commercial aviation. In 1998, the airlines recorded just one death in 41 accidents. When the passenger miles are tallied, that comes out to a rate of less than 0.3 crash and 0.006 fatality per 100,000 flight hours, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

In the wake of the Kennedy crash, some critics have called for a goal of zero crashes. Many pilots, as well as the powerful general aviation lobby, call that goal unrealistic to the point of being counterproductive.

“In the case of high-profile accidents, there is often the rush to do something, to do anything,” said Warren Morningstar of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn. “In the world of aviation, that’s often the wrong approach.”

While commercial airliners operate at about 300 highly regulated airports, private pilots fly at more than 13,000--from Los Angeles International to a strip mowed into a wheat field not far from the town of Hell, Mich.

Private pilots often take off and land without assistance from a control tower. They frequently fly without filing a flight plan and sometimes perform jobs that are inherently dangerous, from carrying out search missions in bad weather to fighting forest fires. And while technology has improved greatly, few smaller planes carry the expensive safety devices of airliners, including everything from redundant hydraulic systems to weather radars.

Pilots of small planes are expected to check the sky, perhaps radio an FAA weather center and, in the end, decide on their own when it is too stormy, too dark, too dangerous to fly.

Although the cause of Kennedy’s crash will likely not be determined for months, the 38-year-old was flying at night in hazy skies, and the movements of his plane in the minutes before it disappeared from radar indicate he may have become disoriented.

Kennedy apparently did not violate any regulations, but many pilots question his decision to fly in such conditions, considering his relative lack of experience. Others wonder if the rules should be changed to take some of the responsibility for safety out of the hands of novice pilots and place it with government agencies, including the FAA.

Kennedy possessed a basic pilot’s license, which can be earned with 40 hours of flight time, including three hours of instrument training and three hours of night flying. He was not rated to fly by instruments alone. Still, regulations allow a pilot with such credentials to take off at night so long as visibility is at least three miles.

Many European countries require a pilot to be instrument-rated to take off after dusk. And England requires 155 hours of flight time just to earn a basic certificate.

But, many pilots are quick to point out, most European countries are tiny compared to the United States and lack the wide-open airspaces that allow American pilotsto tool around the skies for hours without crossing another plane’s flight path.

And few of those nations share America’s rollicking affair with the airplane, a romance that stretches from Charles Lindbergh to the barnstormers, from the bush pilots of Alaska to Noel Nicolle.

A 38-year-old Army major stationed in Oklahoma, Nicolle was in Los Angeles visiting an uncle earlier this week. As he performed the preflight check of his 1972 Piper Arrow before taking off from Van Nuys for his parents’ place in Louisiana, Nicolle paused to ponder aviation safety and his own chances in the sky.

“I’m more likely to get hit by a car, struck by lightning or get cancer” than die in a plane crash, he said. Besides, Nicolle added, “I like the freedom, the total independence. . . . Up there, you go as fast as you want to go.”

Slater reported from Chicago and Willman from Los Angeles.