Transport: Airsumptions

Last February an outspoken little monthly pamphlet called Air Facts set out on a career dedicated to safer nonscheduled aviation. The facts it faced were these: of some 10,000 airplanes licensed in the U.S. for private flying in 1937, about 150, or one in every 67, figured in crashes killing 283 pilots and passengers. Air Facts’ thesis: 90% of crashes in nonscheduled flying are due, not to the familiar bugaboos of aviation—motor failure, structural failure, weather—but to faulty flying, traceable in most cases to limited experience or incomplete instruction.

On the theory that safety is a meaningless word unless all the hazards are properly understood. Air Facts has undertaken, to report every 30 days full details and “assumptions” concerning every private flying crash of serious consequence in the U.S. Last week Air Facts presented its score for this year’s first nine months: 175 pilots and passengers killed in 109 accidents, 81.7% due directly to pilot mistake or faulty judgment. It found only 4.6% due to structural failure. More than half the accidents resulted from stalls (failure to maintain minimum flying speed), mostly during low altitude acrobatics (in which, comments Air Facts, no pilot excels).

Founder, publisher, editor and author of Air Facts is a lean, sandy-haired, 36-year-old Texan called Leighton Collins, who wages his safety crusade with dogged persistence and pointed homespun humor. Graduate of the University of the South (Sewanee), he spent a year at Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, then, ten years ago, learned to fly and started out to be a flying insurance man. Depression I drove him out of insurance, and he tried selling airplanes. For the next several years he flew from coast to coast, from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande, piling up flying hours and getting a comprehensive view of private flying such as few short-hop and Sunday fliers get. Sometimes selling several ships a month, but more often finding territories soured on flying because of local accidents, he finally quit and started a flying school. Then this year, with 2,250 flying hours to his credit and a hatful of information on what makes ships crash, he started publishing Air Facts.

To many of Air Facts’ subscribers its reports and “assumptions” have been lifesavers. When the March issue, noting that “the laws of Gravity haven’t been repealed,” cited a few warning examples of the treachery of March winds and told what to do about them, there was a flurry of grateful new subscribers. There was another marked customer response to the June number, which explained the dampening effect of hot, thin summer air on engine power, propeller thrust and wing lift; the consequent higher stalling speed; the atmospheric didos to be expected; the effect of heat on pilot reactions. But Air Facts’ main theme is the folly of “slow-low” flying: “When the time comes . . . to nose down to secure proper control of an aircraft at low altitude, there are only two kinds of pilots: 1) the quick, 2) the dead.” Says Publisher Collins: “No sane man can read Air Facts and then stunt at 500 feet.”