On Tuesday, June 25, 2013 9:24:36 PM UTC+1, Bill D wrote:

Lets try different data sets. For consistency, lets use only serious injury or fatal accidents which should be reported in every country.

Go to this site: http://rdd.me/oj4xenk5 and download the BGA "Safe Winching" PDF Look at Figure 2.

For the 17 years ending in 2004 the UK suffered 18 fatal and 36 serious injury accidents. (379 total accidents or one every 8074 launches) If we assume the current 180,000 launches a year, that is one fatal/serious injury accident every 56,667 launches.

Here are reported German accidents in 2011 in which the DAeC reported 900,000 launches. That's 1:180,000.


That looks pretty consistent with my first post (about 5 posts ago). You've quoted here the UK experience up to 2004. But my point was that a great piece of safety work reduced the number of winch launched fatality / serious accidents after 2006 by a factor of 4 (and for long enough to be statistically significant). If we include fatals and serious, that's 5 between 2006-2012. At 180K launches per year that's 1:250,000. That puts the UK and German numbers in the same ballpark - actually the UK comes out better, but I don't suppose it's significant given one year's German figures and the uncertainty on the number of launches.

You said something earlier to the effect that the UK should pay attention to the differences and do something about it. I'm pointing out that we did..

Paul