The Three Bands: the record behind the figures
Individual flying is not a point on any scale. Each band on the Institute's landing page shows a span, where the activity sits between its disciplined best and its worst corner, and where an operation falls inside it is settled by decisions the operation makes. This note states what each span encodes and which issued cases stand behind its ends.
Risk · fatal risk per participant-hour, log scale, span 1 to 150
The unit is driving: the band is indexed so 1.0 is the fatal risk per hour of the private car. The typical privately flown light aircraft records roughly four times that figure, and the span's lower end, routine, marks the disciplined operation: planned flying, regimes current, a second competent occupant where the flying demands one. The upper end, improvised, marks the corners the record prices at and beyond the most hazardous recreational activities: low improvisation, unrehearsed regimes, the whole load in one mind. The span is wide because the licence does not set the number; the operation does. The concealment of that spread inside official aggregates is SM-01; what moves an operation along it is the burden architecture of SM-02, the occupancy differential of SM-04 and SM-03, the expansion and recency discipline of SM-05, the regime preparedness of SM-06, and the calibration honesty of SM-07.
Cost · value share of price, linear scale, span 25 to 68
The band reads each unit of money spent for what it buys: the share purchasing the machine and its function against the share purchasing the structure around the transaction. At the certified counter the function share runs near a quarter; the owner-built route reaches toward two thirds; and even that upper end sits below what a car returns for the money. The parts and services imbalance is priced in CC-01, the capability share of the owner-involved routes in CC-02, the one-way growth of the structure share in CC-03, and the pooling conditions that keep the insurance line structural in CC-04.
Benefit · productive use open to the capability, linear scale, span 18 to 52
The band measures what the capability lets its holder productively do, indexed against the working private car at 100. The lower end, basic, is the activity as the framework files it: recreation, with productive use fenced to near nothing. The upper end, equipped, is the same capability with its lawful productive envelope actually used, and it still clears barely half of what the car returns, because the fence, not the aircraft, sets the ceiling. The fence itself is CW-01; the classification that holds it is CW-02; the capability discarded at career's end is CW-03; and the transformation withheld from the existing layer is CW-04 with CW-05.
Honesty conditions
The spans are order-of-magnitude readings, not measurements of any single operation: the risk figures are occupant-hour comparisons from the published record, the cost shares are composition estimates from the price analyses in the cases, and the benefit index is an argued comparison against the car as the reference personal capability. Each figure's derivation, its sensitivity, and its limitations are in the cited case papers, which are the authority wherever this note compresses them. The bands publish no claim about any individual operation; where an operation sits is the operation's own record to keep, per the proposals.
What these readings ask of the operation that holds them: Institute for Individual Aviation. The System of One.