General aviation accident rates and pilot community population size: an examination of rural-urban differences

Most investigations of general aviation accidents involving human factors have emphasized biomedical and psychological concerns, with comparatively few contributions from other disciplines. This study derives from a social science orientation and investigates the relationship between general aviation accident rates and the population size of the involved pilots' communities of residence. After excluding agricultural, air taxi, and commercial helicopter operations, an analysis of 48 Colorado communities reporting at least one 1978 accident-involved pilot revealed a correlation of -0.51 between accident rate per 1,000 pilots and community size. The smallest, and generally most rural, communities produced total and fatal accident rates of respectively 2.55 and 5.36 times greater than those for the largest metropolitan areas. A similar trend characterizes U.S. nationwide general aviation accidents and appears as well for automobile mishaps, thus lending additional support to the present findings. Discriminant analysis of individual-level data for 92 of the accidents revealed that the conventional explanations of airport facilities, terrain, pilot qualifications and exposure, and aircraft complexity failed to exert substantial effects on differences among the categories of accidents grouped by community size. Two alternate explanations are offered which speculate that: 1) the rural-urban accident differential may represent a function of variations in "pilot density," and 2) the observed differences may be attributed to attitudinal differences between rural and urban pilots produced by the former group's exposure to a type of "rural subculture."