"I've somehow managed to survive all of my competition years so far
without meeting an untimely end. That includes a good number of
landouts in the early years which, would you believe with decent
training and without an unfounded and inflated percetion of risk
were carried out incident free."

"I put this revolver to my head, pulled the trigger 3 times and it hasn't gone off yet. It must be safe"

I thought we in aviation got rid of this sort of thinking about safety a long time ago. Two words: selection bias.

I read Sailplane and Gliding, the wonderful UK publication. The incident reports in the back of the magazine are full of landout damage, much of it in contests.

I would be curious whether the fraction of UK pilots who fly contests is any greater than the number in the US. My impression from S&G is an active contest scene, like the east coast of the US -- and a whole lot of pilots who do not touch the stuff.

John Cochrane