Regarding an enquiry into accidents. In the early 50s there was a very high accident rate among trainees, especially jet pilots and the Meteor gained a very bad reputation, “phantom diver” etc. Winston Churchill was quoted somewhere of raising this in the house of commons. He got an answer along the lines of “A pilot has a 16 to 1 chance of being killed during his first 18 months on jets. This is considered acceptable”
Churchills answer was along the lines “That may be acceptable to the civil service, but it is not acceptable to me”. There was then a considerable drive to include safety training and awareness apparent in the early 50s. See Colin Cummings book “Last Take Off” which details almost 1200 deaths in RAF accidents in the 4 years 1950 to 1953.
It is shocking to see the large number of peacetime RAF Officer fatalities listed on the 1950’s wall at the National Arboretum monument nr Lichfield. Assume the vast majority were aircraft accidents? Korea excepted.
Regarding WW2 non combat losses, I would suspect a major factor was loss of control following inadvertant entry into IMC. Particularly lethal in the vicinity of high ground but potentially disasterous anywhere. It soon becomes hazardous very quickly and the stall/spin angle of attack can be soon encountered with recovery difficult without an external horizon.
Another dangerous zone would have been loss of power at or very shortly after take off. Again stall/spin can easily result normally following an ill advised attempt to turn back to the airfield.
Mid air collisions were not uncommon.
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