Cross-country VFR crashes: pilot and contextual factors

General Aviation (GA) cross-country crashes, particularly those involving weather, continue to be a major source of fatalities, with a fatality rate more than four times greater than for GA crashes in general. There has been much speculation and little solid evidence on the causes of these crashes.

We have designed a program of laboratory and database research into the causes of cross-country weather-related crashes including an analysis of air crashes in New Zealand between 1988 and 2000. There were 1308 reported occurrences in this period. We examined in detail 77 crashes where it could be determined that the aircraft was on a cross-country flight.

In our first analysis we compared the characteristics of crashes that occurred in response to externally driven failures with crashes where the aircraft continued to be flown at the pilot's discretion up until the point of the crash. Clear differences were found for visibility, altitude, crash severity, and for several pilot characteristics. These differences are highly consistent with those found for previous research on pilot characteristics and crash involvement. In the second analysis we made comparisons between the weather-related and nonweather-related crashes in the discretionary control group and between subcategories of weather-related crashes.

These data show that weather-related crashes occur further into the flight and closer to the planned destination than other kinds of cross-country crashes in GA. Pilots involved in these crashes are younger and have more recent flight time than pilots involved in other crashes. Their increased involvement cannot be explained simply by exposure (flight-time) but must be due to other factors.