As the average age of general aviation pilots continues to climb—during a “hard” insurance market—we hear horror stories of pilots being unable to find coverage, having coverage canceled or facing premium price increases they simply cannot afford.
As we started our look into the matter, we found consistent evidence that once a pilot hits 70 it’s increasingly difficult to get aircraft insurance and prices go up, sometimes painfully. However, as we looked at available data on the actual accident risks for aging pilots we found inconsistent results—published studies showed the accident rate for aging pilots dropped (but if an aging pilot had an accident it was more likely to be fatal), while AOPA, not providing citations, said that studies showed “older pilots are not as sharp as younger pilots who had similar amounts of experience” and “given sufficient experience, older pilots performed better than their younger counterparts.”