This is probably the most reasonable answer for most sports from skiing, to motorcycling, to cycling, to light/general aviation. You only get one brain and it doesn't care how dorky you look when it keeps you from dying or being a locked-in veggie. Back in fire/EMS days I saw plenty of organ doners that probably would have lived with a helmet, also plenty of survivors very broken and road rash but alive though the helmet was destroyed. I would wear my old flight medic helmet myself but being new and a foreigner, social pressure prevents me, for now, from using a known lifesaving device. Once I have my license I will probably sneak the helmet out to the aircraft, since I already have it. I will have to balance the embarrassment of being seen on the taxiway vs by obligation to my wife and kids, and once they can ride maybe some light DOT rated motorcycle helmets or even bicycling helmets would probably do the trick with some 300ohm modded David Clark fire engine intercom soft top headsets.MrMorden wrote:Because maybe...head trauma is far more likely than hypothermia or road rash in a plane crash?
Most GA aircraft have a pretty low stall and landing speed but still faster than a bicycle and other bad stuff like collision can happen in landing or takeoff legs, airplanes are not the high-speed steel crash survival cages modern automobiles are and even so we invented airbags for cars as a work around specifically because normal people from the pre-seatbelt age simply couldn't be convinced to wear helmets in cars.