Reply To: Why do people get nervous when they fly?

I tried posting a link to a website that compares the statistics for aviation and car accidents, but it didn’t go through. On that website they say most of the aviation accidents could easily have been avoided. Many times pilots take off into bad weather after everyone warned them not to. Most accidents are cases like that. The pilots do things that will obviously not work.

Joseph
Every car is driven by someone who a DMV examiner saw drive and was issued a drivers license. I don’t know about other states, but in NY everyone knows the road test is a joke. It usually takes around 5 minutes and pass/fail is based on the examiners mood. Yet people get in cars with random people all the time.
The pilot “road” test, called a checkride, is a lot more official. It can take around 3 hours and is actually based on whether the applicant is a safe pilot or not. These same FAA examiners test the airline pilots too, yet everyone will fly with an airline, even if they don’t know who the pilots are. They trust that they were trained properly.
When it comes to general aviation, for some reason people don’t have that trust. All airline pilots start off flying small planes. Once they move on to bigger planes, they suddenly receive this unexplained trust.
And airline pilots get the airline license with the same small planes that I fly. Even when it comes to learning how to fly the plane they will fly (747, a380…) they only learn how to fly on a simulator. Their first time actually flying the airplane is on the job with passengers. It is the captains job to train him in.

Which would you rather fly with.
A licensed pilot who flies small planes who only learned in a real plane, or a pilot who is flying a plane for the very first time, who only trained on a very realistic computer game?