Lately on the Car Crash Detective, we’ve expanded the scope of the site somewhat to issues of aviation safety. In particular, I’ve been taking a closer look at the 2020 Calabasas crash that took the lives of Kobe and Gianna Bryant, John, Keri, and Alyssa Altobelli, Sarah and Payton Chester, Christina Mauser, and pilot Ara Zobayan. Zobayan on January 26th, 2020. My theory behind the analyses is that there’s something to learn from every discipline, and that connections can be drawn between best practices in auto safety and those in aviation safety, including in the risks we undertake when we are unable or unwilling to follow such practices. We first discussed the intersection of experience and expertise, followed by a review of the costs and benefits of safe systems in pilotage and helicopter safety.

As noted the other day, the three principles behind safe road use (individual behavior, vehicular safety, and societal infrastructure) have easily relatable manifestations in aviation safety. You need pilots with expertise in risk reduction, which comes from experience. You need sufficiently safe aircraft (in this case, helicopters) to permit the pilots to reduce risk and effectively aviate (fly), navigate (deduce where they’re going), and communicate (relay positions to air traffic control and ask for assistance as needed). You need well-designed infrastructure (air traffic control) to allow pilots to do all of the things mentioned above without flying into other aircraft.

Today, I want to continue that discussion and application of best practices in one field to another, retaining the underlying belief that at a core level, these principles may be applied to reduce risk in nearly any potentially dangerous environment. This is part of an ongoing series (see part 1 and part 2). With these tenets in mind, let’s take another look at the comment section of this article on the crash from the Daily Mail.

Aircraft chartering and leasing vs ownership – which is done, which is better?

While there are a range of comments in the article, there were a few that particularly stood out to me weeks ago just after the crash. A user called “Manda” responded to a user called “SlingingStickyGoo” who had stated…

$800 million? Wrong. Also, he didn’t own these. Leasing is a better option anyhow. Nobody owns airplanes or helicopters. They are all leased

There are four main positions in SSG’s post above: 1.) Kobe had a lower net worth than $800 million (which was the value quoted in the top comment that I responded to in the previous post in this series), 2.) Kobe didn’t own the helicopter, 3.) Leasing was a better approach to private aircraft use than purchasing, and 4.) No one pursued private ownership.

The first point is debatable. As previously discussed, Kobe’s net worth before his death may have been anywhere between $500 and $770 million; it’s quite possible it may have been more. At any rate, as noted earlier, even using a mid-range estimate $200 million lower than the $800 million estimate, the price of the helicopter would still have been insignificant.

The second point was accurate. Kobe appears to have leased or chartered the helicopter or its services, much as one would lease a car or charter (rent) an Uber, for a number of years. It isn’t clear which he did. What is clear is that he didn’t own it.

The third point is debatable. I’d argue (and did) that it makes far more sense to purchase a vehicle and personally maintain it if it’s important enough to use as a regular form of transportation than it is to rent it and rely on third hand parties for its upkeep. This goes for cars and aircraft alike. I’d make the same argument for the use of full time chauffeurs and pilots instead of chartered ones.

The fourth point is inaccurate. Private helicopter ownership is lower than leasing and chartering, but that doesn’t mean that they are never privately owned. And private airplane ownership is certainly alive and well among the top 1%, and by all accounts, significantly more popular than private helicopter ownership. Forget CEOs and celebrities; physicians buy planes because they’re within reach of their salaries, simpler to fly than helicopters, and offer significantly more speed and range.

With that said, there was a particular response to SSG’s post that I found fascinating and quite on point. And that’s where we’re going next.

He chooses to control what he can [regarding] safety

As noted above, a user named “Mandy” responded to SSG. Here’s what she had to say:

Sling, I disagree. My husband is one of two pilots who fly for a LA millionaire. His is probably half as rich but employees two pilots exclusively. He owns a 20 million dollar plane. Next week it goes into annual maintenance and updates. He chooses to control what he can in regards to safety. Two pilots, his own plane and over 60,000 hours experience between the pilots. Expensive? Yes. But safer than contract pilots and leasing to save a buck. Honestly what difference does the cost make when it is your life and you are writing it off as business expense. 60,000 hours knows when to say No, cant fly this morning.

This is why I wrote today’s article. This post contains an awful lot of wisdom without using an awful lot of words. Let’s unpack it.

First of all, Mindy noted her disagreement with SSG’s fourth point above, and immediately invalidated it through the experience of her husband. She goes on to note that her husband is one of two pilots employed by someone who might well have been a neighbor of Kobe, albeit with half the net worth. Using our prior estimate of $600 million for Kobe, this places the mystery LA millionaire at $300 million. Not too shabby.

What are our mystery millionaire’s expenses?

Next, we learn that he has a $20 million dollar airplane. But he doesn’t lease or charter it. He owns it (as I suggested Kobe could have with his helicopter).  As with Kobe, this amounts to a small amount of his net worth: specifically, a $20 million dollar plane is only 6.7% of his life savings. It’s a larger part of his net worth, yes, but it’s the equivalent of having $10,000 in savings and buying a $670 limousine. It’s something you can afford if you aren’t pinching pennies, especially if it’s a form of transportation you use on a daily basis.

His is probably half as rich but employees two pilots exclusively. He owns a 20 million dollar plane.

On top of the vehicle’s cost, he has two full time pilots employed. Mandy doesn’t note that they’re full time, but if they fly him exclusively, this suggests they’re paid sufficiently to work with him exclusively and are available on a daily basis. We’ve looked up pilot costs before, so let’s use those again and estimate $200,000 for a pair of pilots. We also looked up maintenance costs for helicopters, but interestingly, those don’t necessarily apply for business jets, which are more expensive to maintain. A better estimate appears to be on the order of a whopping $4.5 million a year.

Now we’re talking. We’re up to $20 million to buy the jet, $200,000 a year to pilot it with loyalty and redundancy, and $4.5 million a year to keep it in legal and working order. The rolling costs are $4.7 million a year. With our $300 million war chest, that’s roughly 1.6% of our net worth earmarked under “business jet expenses” each year.

That said, while it’s bigger than our Kobe estimates, it’s still not that bad. With a $10,000 net worth, it would mean spending $160 a year on a pair of full time drivers, annual maintenance, insurance, and a private garage.

That’s really not that much money in the scheme of things, particularly if you’re still employed and adding to said net worth. But we’re not done yet.

What you pay the most (or the least) for is experience. Expertise. Judgment.

Two pilots, his own plane and over 60,000 hours experience between the pilots.

This is the crux of the article. Mandy goes on to note that the two pilots hired by the millionaire (one of which is her husband) have a whopping 60,000 hours of combined flight experience.

That is huge.

This is exactly what I talked about earlier–about how expertise was the application of experience, and how the experience of pilots is most commonly measured through flight hours. Remember how Captain Sully, whose expertise led to 155 lives saved, had 20,000 hours of flight time?

This man’s pilots each have 50% more time in the cockpit than he does, presuming they have relatively equal amounts of experience. And in either case, when their hours combine (hello Captain Planet!), they have three times as much experience as a pilot renowned for his exceptional judgment.

Ara Zobayan–Kobe’s pilot–had 8,200 hours. A fellow pilot noted that he was rated to fly through instruments but didn’t have any actual experience flying in clouds. These two pilots have more than seven times as much combined experience as he did. They have almost as much experience when combined as the most experienced pilot in history, Ed Long, who racked up more than 65,000 hours (the equivalent of flying nonstop for more than 7 years and 4 months of one’s life) between the ages of 17 and 83.

Mandy knows the value of experience, and she knows her husband’s boss does too.

Two pilots, his own plane and over 60,000 hours experience between the pilots. Expensive? Yes. But safer than contract pilots and leasing to save a buck. Honestly what difference does the cost make when it is your life and you are writing it off as business expense.

Here she drives it home. The millionaire knows he could be spending less money if he cut corners. He doesn’t have to own the plane. He doesn’t have to maintain it as thoroughly as he does. He doesn’t have to have two pilots with three times as much combined experience as a retired airline captain. But he does spend the money because he values his life. And he values the expertise of the people he hired to keep him alive.

60,000 hours knows when to say No, cant fly this morning.

It is difficult to have judgment without expertise. It is difficult to have expertise without experience. Sixty thousand hours of judgment, of expertise, of experience won’t leave the ground on a suicide mission. That many hours won’t keep going instead of turning around if that’s what’s best. That much time in the air is what you want when the only thing that matters, ultimately, is if you land alive.

Look at the passenger manifest. Hundreds of years of life were lost across those nine souls. Even if we just looked at the three children on board, it’s hard to fathom. The average US female life expectancy at birth is around 81 years. A 13 year old would have been cheated out of 68 years of her life. Two of the girls (Gianna and Payton) were 13 while Alyssa was 14. That’s 203 years gone, simply because the pilot flew beyond his competency and lacked the safety systems in his helicopter that could have helped him when he needed them most.

What do we take away from this?

I think Mandy’s summary of her husband’s boss’ mindset is as good as anything else to take away from this tragedy. Choose to control what you can regarding safety. Do so intentionally. To me, that means following best practices to the best of my ability, whether in how I drive, what I drive, or where I drive.

If you find my information on best practices in car and car seat safety helpful, you can buy my books here or do your shopping through this Amazon link. Canadians can shop here for Canadian purchases.  It costs nothing extra to do so, but when you shop through my links, a small portion of your purchase, regardless of what you buy, will go toward the maintenance of The Car Crash Detective.

The other day, we discussed the Calabasas helicopter crash that killed Kobe and Gianna Bryant, John, Keri, and Alyssa Altobelli, Sarah and Payton Chester, Christina Mauser, and pilot Ara Zobayan. Zobayan on January 26th, 2020. Zobaya flew a 1991 Sikorsky S-76B helicopter. Specifically, we looked at the intersection of expertise and experience, and drew analogies between the three principles behind safe road use (individual behavior, vehicular safety, and societal infrastructure) and their manifestations in aviation safety.

Today, I want to continue that discussion and application of best practices in one field to another, retaining the underlying belief that at a core level, these principles may be applied to reduce risk in nearly any potentially dangerous environment. This is part of an ongoing series. With these tenets in mind, let’s take a look at the comment section of this article on the crash from the Daily Mail. There’s often a lot of questionable content there, but at times, I’ve come across thoughts as insightful as anywhere else on the Internet.

To what degree could money have bought safety in the Calabasas crash?

The top comment on the article is as follows:

If I’m worth 800 million I’m buying all the safety options for my chopper and paying for a 2nd pilot.

It’s hard to argue with “TheTruth9922”, particularly in light of how the flight turned out. But more broadly, there is much to learn from his comment. First of all, the wealth estimate he posited for Kobe Bryant appears to be roughly accurate; figures floated at the time of his death ranged from 500-770 million. Let’s use Forbe’s estimate of $600 million.

For reference, a Sikorsky S-76 cost approximately $13 million in 2014. Since we’re in 2020, let’s add a million to that and presume one would cost $14 million today. Let’s also add $35,000 to that for a Terrain Awareness and Warning System, or TAWS, per FAA estimates. That figure is small enough to be a rounding error; if a helicopter cost $1,400, it would be the equivalent of an extra $3.50, or an amount small enough to be unnoticeable. So we’re not even going to include it in future calculations. Just know that it’s there.

What about flight recorders, or “black boxes”?

The helicopter also lacked a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder, both of which are known in common parlance as black boxes. Neither will save you in a crash, but both will help people figure out what was going on in the last minutes of your flight if you don’t make it home. A flight recorder can cost up to $15,000, and you want two of them. Incidentally, N72EX, the 1991 Sikorsky S-76B on the ill-fated flight, was originally fitted with both flight recorders when used as a governmental helicopter in Illinois. However, when Island Express bought it from Illinois in March 2016, they removed both. But let’s say we installed them. Add $30,000 to the $14 million. It’s still irrelevant.

How do you keep it from smashing into the ground?

So we’ve got a brand new S-76 with TAWS and flight recorders. TAWS, by the way, is a terrain awareness system. They’re required on all commercial flights in the US and present in 95% of airlines around the globe. Much like flight recorders, TAWS aren’t required on helicopters in the United States. This is still the case despite the fact that the National Transportation Safety Board recommended in 2004 after an S-76A crash involving a controlled flight into terrain (i.e., a situation where the pilots erroneously flew the helicopter into the sea) that they be outfitted in all helicopters meant to seat at least 6 passengers. The FAA ignored the recommendation, although they eventually mandated TAWS systems on air ambulances in 2014, ten years later. The point of such systems is to alert pilots of an imminent risk of flying directly into the ground or sea. We want that.

You can buy helicopter safety, but you can also buy pilot safety through redundancy

At this point, we’ve got a good helicopter with modern safety features. All that’s left is the pilot. But we’re safety oriented, so we don’t just charter one; we hire one–full time. We want someone who isn’t thinking of working somewhere else while working with us, and who knows our specific helicopter like the back of his or her hand. And we don’t just want one, because we want to reduce risks related to health issues in pilots. We also want pilots to be able to get second opinions and have help in complex situations, such as when relying on instruments to aviate, navigate, and communicate in dense flog. So we’ve got two pilots. If they’re full time pilots, we want to pay them enough to ensure they stay well trained and well rested and aren’t moonlighting as Uber pilots or drivers on the weekends or after their shifts end. Per the BLS, in May 2018, a commercial pilot had a median annual wage of around $82,000. Budgeting for two of them, then, brings the salary expenditures to $164,000 a year. Let’s round that up to $200,000. We want happy pilots.

What about maintenance and insurance? Wouldn’t that add up too?

Great point. While values will vary, let’s use the figures from a discussion on a helicopter forum. Including insurance, inspections, fuel, oil (they need oil changes just like cars do), hangar rental, and other random bits of maintenance, $20,000 a year looked like a safe estimate in 2010 for a private helicopter. However, it’s 2020, so let’s make that $22,000 a year. In fact, we’re not going to cheap out on insurance, especially since we may be transporting other people, so let’s just bump the figure up to $30,000 a year to make sure we’re not skipping steps on maintenance or on insurance coverage.

But wait. A different site–one specifically targeting aircraft maintenance costs–with additional information on the S-76B charts maintenance as much more–to the tune of more than $900,000 a year. So to be on the safe side, let’s use a round figure of $1 million for maintenance, fuel, and insurance. It’s a lot, but it’s apparently the price of safety.

How much would it have cost in total to have a safe pilot and safe helicopter setup?

In total, we’re looking at an out the door cost of $14 million for the helicopter and rolling costs of $1.2 million a year for pilot pay and maintenance.

Now let’s look again at Kobe’s net worth.

At $600 million, the helicopter would have immediately sliced off 2.3% of his net worth; the equivalent of buying a $230 limousine (with modern safety features, remember) through $10,000 in savings. In other words, it would have been irrelevant. To extend the analogy, the rolling costs of $1.2 million at his pay grade would have been the equivalent of our $10,000 high roller dropping an additional $20 each year on a pair of full time drivers, annual maintenance, and a private garage.

This has become too ridiculous to type. Which makes it all the sadder.

The dangers of being penny-wise and pound foolish

None of these prices had any meaning whatsoever at his income level. He could have had two trained, full-time pilots, a brand new helicopter (which itself would have been unnecessary, as a maintained helicopter can be used for decades, just as a maintained airplane) with modern safety features, and all maintenance-related expenses cared for without thinking twice.

Two full time pilots might have had the judgment to stay on the ground that day. Had they flown, the additional set of eyes, ears, and brains might have led to safer decisions–including that to turn around or switch to instrument-based flight. Two full time pilots who intimately knew their helicopter and had any and all safety features they could ever have asked for might have been able to avoid crashing into the ground with what appears to have been a complete loss of control and orientation of the helicopter that day.

Sometimes, safety is worth paying for. When driving, that doesn’t mean buying the latest vehicles. It does mean following best practices as a driver (which might mean spending money on high-weight car seats or winter tires if you see snow each year). It does mean using vehicles with, at a minimum, ESC and side impact airbags (and not simply buying the cheapest vehicles possible for your adolescent or college-aged drivers). It does mean choosing safe infrastructure whenever possible (even if that means spending a bit more on gas to find safer roads).

Part 3 in this series is here.

If you find my information on best practices in car and car seat safety helpful, you can buy my books here or do your shopping through this Amazon link. Canadians can shop here for Canadian purchases.  It costs nothing extra to do so, but when you shop through my links, a small portion of your purchase, regardless of what you buy, will go toward the maintenance of The Car Crash Detective.