With their large, comfortable cabins, the Cessna 190/195 series airplanes are delightful cross-country machines—and amazingly safe in that role. Our survey of the 100 most recent 190/195 accidents revealed an almost astonishingly low number of accidents one would expect to see in airplanes used for traveling such as engine failures, VFR into IMC crashes and fuel-related events. They totaled only 15 percent of the accidents—for flat-engine airplanes, we’d expect to see at least that many accidents from engine stoppages alone. We only saw seven engine stoppages in the 190 and 195.
Of those 15 accidents, there were two in-flight breakups, one due to pilot incapacitation and one after the owner flew his airplane into a line of thunderstorms. Only one pilot ran his airplane out of fuel, but that was because he didn’t get a fuel cap on correctly, siphoned the tank dry and didn’t believe his sagging fuel gauges. Two pilots didn’t drain the “rusty water” out of their tanks before departing and things got quiet up front.