Good point... so I did...
A data base search over the same five years for
"nose" and "collapse" for all Cessna products produced 65 hits.
After the retractable Cessnas were removed, the list is 36 long.
Given that the Cessna reports highlighted students a lot, and also included the off airfield, hit culvert/runway sign, etc type accidents... and given that there are a h#@* of a lot more fixed gear Cessnas out there that RVs, I think RVs are over represented... but again, YMMV.
I sampled over half of the reports, and none happened while taxying.
FWIW Cessna made over 75,000 C-172, C-150, C-152 planes, and a lot stayed in the US.... ...and we are comparing numbers to Vans "A" models only.
Perhaps now you can see why statistics collected by us armchair quarterbacks are almost useless. You see, Gil searched for what he though he wanted - and he got exactly that. The problem is that the FAA is far from standard in their reporting. Some inspectors will call the nosewheel a nosegear, some put spaces between the "nose" and "wheel" or "nose" and "gear", etc.. Then, some use the word collapse, and some say collapsed, some say failed, fail, failure, broke, bent, retracted, etc..
The point is Gil got EXACTLY what he was looking for - no less and no more. Those of you who know databases know they do exactly what you ask of them, no more and no less.
So, if you take Gil's search and add a wildard (*) to the end of 'Nose' and 'Collapse' the result balloons from 65 results to 267 results. If you then throw in "fail" with a wildcard (*) along with 'nose' and 'collapse' or 'fail', the results balloon to 1541 results.
The search could go on and on with various results, but my point is that it's nearly impossible for us laymen to get a really accurate idea of comparable failures without a good reporting tool.
What I'm trying to say is that 90% of statistics can be make to say exactly what you want 50% of the time, depending on how you go about deriving your set of parameters and results. For example, if you leave the same search Gil did with "nose" and "collapse", then remove Cessna and tell it to show you ALL experimentals with those two words in the result, you get a total of 10 records..., but if you add the wildcards back into the search, you now get 56 records for ALL experimentals verses the 267 results for the same period/terms/criteria for "cessna". Add Piper, you get more. Change the search to "air carrier" and you get 12 records. Do the search for "General Aviation" and you get 548 records for non experimental and 56 for "amateur built" without changing any other parameters.
If you are trying to get an apples to apples comparision, run some of the above scenarios and you'll see that experimentals as whole are about 10 times less likely to show up in a search with the terms "nose" and "collapse" then certificated General Aviation planes....at least based on those search parameters - what does that tell us?!?! Depends on what you're searching for!
Take all the statistics for what they are - no more and no less. Sorry for the rant.
My 2 cents as usual.
Cheers,
Stein.