Scott Haufe

It disappoints me when people blame AOPA or EAA for insurance rates. These are membership programs for all pilots, not just older pilots. They don’t sell insurance or at most they are middlemen. Insurance companies are businesses and I am sure most of you older pilots are also ex-businessman. I am sure most of you would not run a business losing money without changing things. Insurance companies do the same thing. They are in the business of making money much like you were when you were working and buying your expensive airplanes. They obviously have found that older pilots are at higher risk of accidents. You may not like this information but it must be true. If older people had lower accident rates than their insurance would be lower. A perfect example is how young drivers pay more than older people until they hit their eighties. It’s all based on tables of risk. My suggestion is that if you feel that you are of such low risk then you might take a group of older pilots and form your own self insurance company. We used to do this in medical groups instead of paying big insurance companies. You could get 100 pilots and spread the risk amongst those pilots. At $2000 per pilot, you would have $2,000,000 per year to hopefully save the money. It isn’t that hard to do and there are still many large medical groups who do this and trust me your risk is much less than most specialists whose malpractice is in the tens of thousands of dollars. Lawsuits are stupid and you wouldn’t win since they aren’t discriminating against you since they are offering you insurance. This argument is really moot.