Accidents Edge Up in 2019: NTSB - AVweb

Fair point Larry regarding the fatality rate, but from what I have seen with my own to eyes I actually believe GA can improve the accident rate by just going back to basics, and decreasing the overall accident rate has a chance of decreasing the fatality rate.

At my home airport someone flying too wide a pattern lost an engine and had to put down off airport totaling the airplane. That in itself was unnecessary. An hour later while visiting the owner’s hangar I found an entire kidney tank amount of oil on the ramp in front of the hangar door and instantly knew the rest of that story. He had just completed an oil change by the way.

I recently watched heart in mouth as an attempted takeoff with a rough engine , not using the entire airstrip, ended up in rolling pasture. Looking in the cockpit after the crash I noticed the ignition key switched to one mag only and figured out immediately the rest of that story.

One more: An acquaintance filled his underpowered 4 place airplane with passengers on a warm day and using less than the entire length of a 2000 foot airstrip never got airborne. Scratch one more nice airplane off the rolls.

If people would simply pay attention to this kind of basic stuff which we all learned on day one I believe the overall accident rate would be reduced, hopefully also impacting the fatality rate.