I looked at 232 Cessna 172 accidents in Florida — the deadliest phase isn't what you'd think
I lost a close friend in a small plane crash near Fort Lauderdale a few years ago. After that I started going through the NTSB eADMS database trying to understand what actually kills GA pilots. I'm a software developer, not a pilot, but the data is public and the patterns are pretty clear.
I started with the C172 in Florida because that's what my friend flew. Since 2008 there have been 232 C172 accidents in Florida. 21 were fatal, killing 44 people. Here's what the breakdown by phase of flight looks like:
Landing: 88 accidents, 0 fatal. The most common accident in a 172 in Florida and nobody dies. Ground loops in crosswinds, hard landings, runway excursions. Metal gets bent, pilots walk away.
Maneuvering: 14 accidents, 7 fatal. A 50% fatality rate. Low altitude, too much bank, airspeed drops, stall/spin, not enough altitude to recover. Pilot hours in the fatal ones ranged from 65 to 2,311. A 2,000-hour pilot in a 172M stalled during an excessive bank angle at low altitude. Same outcome as the 65-hour student.
Cruise: 23 accidents, 4 fatal. Engine failures over water and the Everglades, fuel exhaustion from bad planning.
Climb: 9 accidents, 3 fatal. Density altitude, engine failures after takeoff.
Takeoff: 23 accidents, 0 fatal. Common but survivable, same as landing.
The thing that jumped out at me is the maneuvering number. From what I can tell, pilots spend training time on crosswind landings and engine failures on takeoff. Those happen all the time in Florida and basically nobody dies from them. Meanwhile the low pass, the steep turn over the beach, the sightseeing bank — that's where the 172 actually kills people in this state.
And experience doesn't seem to help. The NTSB writes almost the same probable cause every time regardless of hours: "failure to maintain adequate airspeed while maneuvering at low altitude, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall."
I'm not a pilot so I'm curious — does this match what you see in training? Is maneuvering flight risk something that gets enough attention relative to how deadly the data says it is?