Hello again and welcome to Aviation News Talk, a weekly show with relevant news and flying tips for pilots and student pilots to help keep you safe. I'm Max Ruscott. For our main topic today, we're going to be talking about instrument flying gotchas, those subtle little details that are easily forgotten and couldn't get you in trouble. Plus, I'll talk about my recent six-day trip

teaching in the Circe Vision Jet, and we have listener questions about getting the IFR rooting you want,

and what to do when ATC dumps you while you're still in a class, Charlie. Last week in episode

166, we talked with Steve Bush, owner of Lone Star Helicopters, about how to get a helicopter

certificate. So if you didn't hear it, you may want to check it out. And if Aviation News Talk

podcast is new to you, well, in whatever app you're listening to us now, just click on the

subscribe button so new episodes will download for free each week. I think you'll enjoy your

discussion today about IFR gotchas and you won't want to miss future shows. This week in the news, the Null report shows a drop in

GA accident rates. And there are conflicting stories about how easy it might be to catch COVID on an airline

flight. And a pilot is sentenced after pleading guilty to attempting to operate

an aircraft under the influence of alcohol. All this and more, and the news starts now.

From Aveweb.com, the Null report shows a drop in accident rates. AOPA and the Air Safety Institute have launched a new platform designed to provide access to more current accident data in near real time.

According to AOPA, the new platform will allow accident data to be updated on a rolling 30-day cycle.

It will also let users select and compare accident analysis graphs for multiple years from

2008 through 2020. ASI Senior VP Richard McSpadden said, I'm excited that this major effort

has significantly accelerated the accident analysis process. This allows us to release the 29th and 30th

Joseph T. Null reports, which provide a snapshot in time for 2017 and 2018 data respectively.

Digging into that data, the 29th NOL report found that the total number of GA accidents in 2017 decreased from 1227 in 2016 to 12004.

The 2017 analysis also saw an improvement on 2016's overall accident rate of 4.98 accidents per 100,000 hours, coming in at 4.8 accidents per 100,000 hours.

The 2017 fatal accident rate also dropped slightly from 0.78 per 100,000 hours

the previous year to 0.76 per 100,000 hours. The 30th edition of the report covering 2018 data,

noted an increase in total accidents to 1224. However, it found a further drop in the total accident rate

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