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Thank you for your input Scott, your wisdom is valuable as always.
On the point of your friends' safety perception, this is a universal problem with aviation and news coverage. We as people aren't naturally good at estimating risk generally, and especially not risks associated with operations where problems are rare and normal operations occur in the background. I think this is based on our inability to grasp the scope of the normal, incident-free operations.
For example, if a person takes a commercial flight 1-3 times per year, and they see something in the news about a commercial flight having a problem 1-3 times per year, their human brain erroneously equates those two frequencies. Because our brains have to weed out most input as noise, for those not in the air travel system, we forget that flights happen every hour of every single day and night, even the 360 other days of the year that an infrequent flier doesn't touch the system. On days when the person is working, sleeping, having a cookout in the back yard, or making a set of Bearhawk ribs, thousands of successful operations carry on. The brain of the usual traveler doesn't have any way to capture the scope of the sample size, at least not intuitively.
Relating it back to Bearhawk operations, the same is true, on a smaller scale naturally, but things get even more complicated. We know how many airline flights there are so we can do smart analysis of accident rates, but it is always a problem with general aviation that we don't know how many operations or hours are completed safely. This unknown number is the denominator in the fraction that makes up the accident rate. There have been three LODCOG incidents that we know of this spring, but is that three per 100 landings, per 1000 landings, or per 10,000 landings? There is no way to know and even the best estimate may swing widely. Those wide swings make it not productive to think of accident rates in a short term, even when disregarding the cognitive traps in risk assessment.
Another problem is that mishaps can come at random times. If you flip a coin 50000 times, you'll get really close to 25000 instances of heads. If you flip a coin 5 times, it is possible (merely 1 in 31 odds) to get zero instances of heads. The smaller the sample, the more noise we see. Toss in the seasonal nature of operations, which is somewhat mitigated by our friends south of the equator, and we should expect to see very strange patterns. We might go many months or even years without there being a problem, or there might be two in a week. That doesn't mean the sky is falling or that the safety of the airplanes has changed, it's just the nature of random occurrences.
So the reaction from your friends is at the same time very typical, and also not correct. That's not their fault exactly, it's their brain's fault. We get to decide in each case if it's worth helping them learn why they are wrong or not, depending on how good of friends they are and how much energy you have at the moment.
As to your point about brand and the public/private spectrum, thank you for that as well. This is for sure a style choice rather than a right/wrong choice, and while I do disagree I won't say I'm right and you are wrong. If someone reads everything and still feels like the Bearhawk is difficult to operate compared to other planes in the class, I feel like they haven't read everything, and indeed are drawing the wrong conclusions. If other brands work to stifle safety information and that makes them seem safer, I suppose that's a little like one brand exaggerating their performance numbers. Like the coin toss, it may work for a while, but eventually it will play out. People may be fooled but the ones that figure it out will be quite opposed.
Having said that, the Bearhawk is more difficult to operate than the Skyhawk, and I don't think we should kid ourselves or potential customers that it isn't. Especially as off-road airplanes have become internet-trendy, I fear there is a type of pilot who has only ever flown trainers who sees the videos of STOL contests, those pilots yanking controls back and forth and slamming airplane parts on the runway, and thinking the shape of the airplane is the only thing that is different about a taildragger vs a tricycle. Videos of off-airport operations tell the story of the adventure but seldom tell the story of the practice, testing, and work that got them there. The "grind" has a way of getting left out of the story but it's what keeps those operations relatively safe.
We get a whole bucket of "better" our of our Bearhawk than we would out of a Skyhawk, but it takes a little doing and knowing to operate a Bearhawk. I feel like the more open we can be about those differences, the more we can save each other from having to learn from the same mistakes. This can happen with or without members-only access, as can insurance companies reading discussions.
On the point of your friends' safety perception, this is a universal problem with aviation and news coverage. We as people aren't naturally good at estimating risk generally, and especially not risks associated with operations where problems are rare and normal operations occur in the background. I think this is based on our inability to grasp the scope of the normal, incident-free operations.
For example, if a person takes a commercial flight 1-3 times per year, and they see something in the news about a commercial flight having a problem 1-3 times per year, their human brain erroneously equates those two frequencies. Because our brains have to weed out most input as noise, for those not in the air travel system, we forget that flights happen every hour of every single day and night, even the 360 other days of the year that an infrequent flier doesn't touch the system. On days when the person is working, sleeping, having a cookout in the back yard, or making a set of Bearhawk ribs, thousands of successful operations carry on. The brain of the usual traveler doesn't have any way to capture the scope of the sample size, at least not intuitively.
Relating it back to Bearhawk operations, the same is true, on a smaller scale naturally, but things get even more complicated. We know how many airline flights there are so we can do smart analysis of accident rates, but it is always a problem with general aviation that we don't know how many operations or hours are completed safely. This unknown number is the denominator in the fraction that makes up the accident rate. There have been three LODCOG incidents that we know of this spring, but is that three per 100 landings, per 1000 landings, or per 10,000 landings? There is no way to know and even the best estimate may swing widely. Those wide swings make it not productive to think of accident rates in a short term, even when disregarding the cognitive traps in risk assessment.
Another problem is that mishaps can come at random times. If you flip a coin 50000 times, you'll get really close to 25000 instances of heads. If you flip a coin 5 times, it is possible (merely 1 in 31 odds) to get zero instances of heads. The smaller the sample, the more noise we see. Toss in the seasonal nature of operations, which is somewhat mitigated by our friends south of the equator, and we should expect to see very strange patterns. We might go many months or even years without there being a problem, or there might be two in a week. That doesn't mean the sky is falling or that the safety of the airplanes has changed, it's just the nature of random occurrences.
So the reaction from your friends is at the same time very typical, and also not correct. That's not their fault exactly, it's their brain's fault. We get to decide in each case if it's worth helping them learn why they are wrong or not, depending on how good of friends they are and how much energy you have at the moment.
As to your point about brand and the public/private spectrum, thank you for that as well. This is for sure a style choice rather than a right/wrong choice, and while I do disagree I won't say I'm right and you are wrong. If someone reads everything and still feels like the Bearhawk is difficult to operate compared to other planes in the class, I feel like they haven't read everything, and indeed are drawing the wrong conclusions. If other brands work to stifle safety information and that makes them seem safer, I suppose that's a little like one brand exaggerating their performance numbers. Like the coin toss, it may work for a while, but eventually it will play out. People may be fooled but the ones that figure it out will be quite opposed.
Having said that, the Bearhawk is more difficult to operate than the Skyhawk, and I don't think we should kid ourselves or potential customers that it isn't. Especially as off-road airplanes have become internet-trendy, I fear there is a type of pilot who has only ever flown trainers who sees the videos of STOL contests, those pilots yanking controls back and forth and slamming airplane parts on the runway, and thinking the shape of the airplane is the only thing that is different about a taildragger vs a tricycle. Videos of off-airport operations tell the story of the adventure but seldom tell the story of the practice, testing, and work that got them there. The "grind" has a way of getting left out of the story but it's what keeps those operations relatively safe.
We get a whole bucket of "better" our of our Bearhawk than we would out of a Skyhawk, but it takes a little doing and knowing to operate a Bearhawk. I feel like the more open we can be about those differences, the more we can save each other from having to learn from the same mistakes. This can happen with or without members-only access, as can insurance companies reading discussions.
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