Flight instruction is considered to be one of the safest categories of general aviation. AOPA Air Safety Foundation's 2006 Nall Report (3 MB Adobe PDF file) calls flight instruction "... relatively safe ... result[ing] in just 13.2 percent of all [NTSB-reported] accidents and only 6.5 percent of fatal accidents." AOPA attributes this to "... the high level of supervision and structure in the training environment."Yet a surprising number of aircraft mishaps happen with an instructor on board the airplane, including many that do not meet the reporting requirements of NTSB 830 -- and therefore never get into the database from which the Nall Report and similar studies are derived. This includes gear-up landings and fuel-related or other engine failures that result in a glide to a runway or a successful off-airport touchdown. The "unofficial" record also includes instructional loss-of-directional-control mishaps on takeoff or landing, in-flight airframe overstresses and any number of other events that for one reason or another are not reported to the Federal government. My own research shows -- in one type of high personal/business use aircraft -- many "instructor-on-board" mishaps occur outside the NTSB reporting environment.With two pilots aboard (the student in mishap accidents is not always a "student pilot") and in such a controlled environment, why are so many accidents occurring? Instructional aviation seems particularly immune to weather-related mishaps, a leading factor in aviation mishaps overall. This is probably because it's so easy to agree to cancel an instructional flight when the weather is bad. With adverse weather all but eliminated from the record, then, what might be the reason so many instructional mishaps take place? I think it's related to two human factors: what I call "instructor-induced stupidity" and flight-instructor complacency.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/features/leading-edge-6-instructional-hazards