On Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at 1:24:23 PM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
I'm with Eric.

"Poor airmanship" can pretty nearly be defined as being the PIC of an airplane that crashes - which isn't super helpful. The question I ask myself is: are any of us such great pilots with such impeccable airmanship that we are practically immune from accident - or even at significantly lower risk? We all like to tell ourselves we are good enough pilots not to make a fatal error but obviously some of us end up dead wrong.

I pretty regularly hear assessments of poor flying or poor decision-making following accidents of all kinds, but particularly those with fatalities. Since these accidents are only in the rarest of instances associated with pilots about whom I've also heard "that guy is going to kill himself one day" I can only conclude that we are terrible at predicting who suffers from chronic "poor airmanship" of sufficient severity to kill themself - and we are particularly bad at predicting this for ourselves the ones who end up dead wouldn't fly. So we tend to rationalize about accidents and how we wouldn't do such stupid things and it was all oh so easy to avoid. If hindsight is 20/20, hindsight about someone else's accident is 20/10.

Do I think accidents are totally random and there's nothing that any of us can do about it? No. I wouldn't get in the cockpit, close the canopy and launch if that were the case. But, I do believe there are a significant number of cases where circumstances overwhelm what 99.9 times out of 100 would be an uneventful flight or flying maneuver.

Yes, if you never thermal below 1,500' AGL, never get out of 25:1 gliding range of an airport, never fly slower than 65 knots and never bank more than 30 degrees you might reduce your risk, but not to zero by any stretch and you will likely sacrifice other flying goals in the process, so you shave a little bit here or there while still trying to be careful and safe. Then you end up is a situation where the options aren't what you'd prefer and you have to choose (simple one - land at this airport and call for a retrieve or head to that cu and risk a field landing but if it works you get the altitude you need to get home). So you choose and things can get better or they can get worse. Then you choose again, and again.

We like to think there are absolute limits and rules we can fly by to stay safe, but those are all built on a presumption of predictability - and prediction is a probabilistic exercise. Rule and procedures take you only so far. We all choose where in the probability distribution we think we are flying, but we don't really know because our accumulated experience is insufficient to know exactly where 100% safe is - and if you fly enough you only need to find the 0.01% likely really bad outcome. I know a number of highly skilled pilots with excellent airmanship who through a series of decisions that had unexpected outcomes found the 0.01% - a sequence of events that ultimately exceeded their abundant airmanship skills - in some cases only for a fraction of a distracted moment.

If everything were simple and predictable and seemingly low risk decisions didn't occasionally tend to compound in the worst possible ways, we could all just take a training flight, learn the secret of flawless airmanship and accidents would mostly be a thing of a past. I think we all know it's not so simple, which is why so many of us hunger to learn precisely what happened in each accident - what accumulation of tolerances in the wrong direction cost someone their glider or their life - so we can get a better sense of where the 0.01% is.

Andy Blackburn
9B


On Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at 11:16:46 AM UTC-8, Eric Greenwell wrote:
I think "poor airmanship" is such a broad term, it tells us nothing useful.
Perhaps the term "pilot error" is more specific and useful, particularly when
talking about pilots that clearly are good airman, yet have an accident.. It gives
you a specific reason that you can avoid or learn to control. I think Ramy is
pointing out what we all know: all pilots make errors, and it is the margins we
use that determine the consequences of the error.

Somewhere near the start of this thread, it was posited that margins can erode
over time for a number reasons, and previously safe pilot becomes, unknowingly, an
unsafe pilot.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1

Andy,

I recommend that you do what I did: review ALL of the fatal glider accidents for the last two years and get back to me. Hint: those accidents did not fall into the 0.01% category.

Tom