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Commercial aviation gets to pick from the cream of the crop and fully professionalizes it’s pilots - it’s all they do, all the time. That means staying current (keeping habits fresh, remembering key details, etc) happen easier.

Considering how low the frequency is for your your typical GA pilot, it’s honestly a wonder it works as well as it does.



My understanding was that most GA accidents occur in the 50 to 350 flight hours of pilots. By this, perhaps the issue isn't of handpicking the best of the best, but more that they, by definition, survived the early filter.


Getting a basic (entry level) commercial pilot’s license requires 1500 hrs.

What I mean by the ‘cream of the crop’ is you have to be more experienced and pass far greater hurdles (including a far more demanding medical exam) than any GA pilots need to, just to be licensed to try to get hired as a commercial pilot.

It doesn’t mean there aren’t great GA pilots out there - there are! It just means that only the top x percent of GA pilots could pass the requirements to be a commercial pilot.


> Getting a basic (entry level) commercial pilot’s license requires 1500 hrs.

That's not correct. For a US commercial pilot's licence, the hours requirement is 250. It's 1500 hours for an airline transport pilot's licence.


Thank you much! Got my wires crossed apparently.

Applicable FAA Regs btw [https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...]


Flying is not simple and for everyone - it is complex, but many things are.. and when mastered it is actually not that hard - so disagree, no wonder here.


Flying is easy, flying safely is very difficult. GA inherently allows a great many things that significantly increase risks. Going solo inherently makes you a single point of failure so for example many significant but survivable health issue basically guarantee your death.

And that’s just the start. Pilots run out of fuel, fall asleep, they land on the wrong runway/field, and so forth across lots of very small risks that end up killing people.

I am not saying GA should be more regulated, it’s just important to understand the trade offs in terms of freedom vs safety.


We can also get away with lower GA regulation because there’s relatively few aircraft. If you scaled 1346x to equal the number of automobiles, we’d probably have even more than 1346x accidents, simply because of a self selected pilot skill bias. We’d have to have more regulation then.


Even just 1346x as many accidents is ~1/2 million deaths per year which is unlikely to be considered even remotely acceptable.




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