On Nov 1, 1:20 pm, Martin Gregorie wrote:
Ian wrote:
On 31 Oct, 23:08, jeplane wrote:
On Oct 31, 2:11 pm, Marc Ramsey wrote:

How many cars are on the roads you use to get to the gliderport?
How many gliders fly at at the gliderport?
So you are telling me driving is safer than flying? Not sure if I
would drive or fly with you!...:-)

There are about 30,000,000 licensed drivers in the UK. About 3,000
people get killed on the roads every year. That's 1 fatality per
10,000 drivers.

From memory, there are about 5,000 members of UK gliding clubs. About
2 - 3 people get killed gliding per year, on average. That's 1
fatality per 2,500 pilots.

The everage driver does 10,000 miles per annum, which is 200 hours at
50mph. The average gliding club member does something like 10 hours
per annum.

So that's 1 fatality per 2,000,000 driver-hours against 1 fatality per
25,000 pilot-hours.

I'd welcome correction on the figures - I'm doing this from memory of
stuff I looked up ~10 years ago, but I'd be very surprised if driving
risk came within an order of magnitude of soaring risk.

10 hours/year sounds low to me. I'd have guessed 20-30 hours at least.
In support of that figure I did what seemed like very little flying this
year, but found to my surprise that I'd managed 35 hours. I'd guess that
I'd do 50-70 hours in a year with more normal weather.

I thought I'd read that the UK had around 8000 active glider pilots but
I won't argue with you over a change that has relatively little impact
on your argument.

Ian is basically on the money. The BGA has just under 8,000 members
but that's not the same as active pilots - 5,000 is probably as good a
number as any other. The number of vehicle occupants killed annually
is about 1,700 (another 1,500 die by being hit *by* vehicles). I have
no idea what the average hours-of-flight-per-year is - must vary
enormously.

Of course, in the UK, to get *killed* in a glider is pretty rare -
going back through the AAIB reports for the last ten years or so
there's certainly no pattern in cause, experience, site etc.

Off the top of my head:
Two lost wings (structural failure and at high loads, probably outside
placard, though the wings were understrength)
Two collided with other gliders (three if you count a tug pilot who
hit a Cirrus)
One flew into a parachute DZ and was hit by a skydiver (who also died)
Two? had heart failure (a tug pilot died this way too)
Two died in winch launches, one however was inexplicable (maybe
medical, see above)

A couple of those were in two-seaters where both occupants died.

Two more people were on the ground and were struck and killed by
gliders. One of those gliders was later destroyed in a seperate crash,
though the occupants survived with serious injuries.

Injury accidents are probably frequent enough that statiscally valid
conclusions can be drawn. Early this year the BGA published an
excellent supplement looking at this data, I can't find my copy but
iirc, winch launching (up until the very successful Safe Winch
Launching campaign), low-level stall/spin (though some winch accidents
are really stall/spin, so this probably should be higher), and bad
field landings (selection too late/badly executed) were top of the
list.


Dan