Hi Bill

Just to pick up one other point. You said

"If one simply takes the BGA report supplied earlier in this thread which states there is one accident in the UK every 13,000 launches as true and compare it with the German BFU/DAeC data showing one accident in 180,000 launches you have a ratio of 13.8:1 in favor of Germany - well over an order of magnitude difference. "

I don't have all the data, as you clearly have, but others have expressed surprise about an apparent 10:1 difference in accident rates. So a little bit of a back of the envelope calculation to see if the ballpark is right. Whether accidents are reported equally, I don't know, but fatalities probably are.

From he http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/wi...n/message/9553

"Germany did 712,000 winch launches in 2009.... Only three accidents with 2 pilot fatalities occurred during the actual launch." So that's one fatality per 356,000 launches.

From the BGA stats I quoted in the previous post - UK fatalities 4 in 7 years, with 180K launches per year (from your earlier post). That's one fatality per 315K launches. And that's before we add back in the RAFGSA launches that Don mentioned.

Whilst in no way wishing to be complacent, that doesn't suggest to me that winch launching in Germany is currently an order of magnitude safer than in the UK.


Paul