On Saturday, April 12, 2014 6:36:49 PM UTC-4, JJ Sinclair wrote:

If memory serves me, the passenger tried to climb down from the tree and fell to his death.

That's truly useful to read. I've made a mental note to think twice about climbing to the ground when I find myself in a glider in the trees.

I assume that this useful tidbit was omitted from the NTSB report. The NTSB report style serves a narrow and important purpose and perhaps it needs to remove detail, speculation, and unprovable conjectures.

But it seems that detail and speculation can be instructive. I wonder if we will ever see a deliberately unofficial wiki style compendium of glider accident reports, a wiki that accommodates multiple contributors, that is community reviewed, and where the write up is not constrained by the narrow goals of an NTSB report. NTSB reports are official and they need to be circumspect.

There is many reasons why NTSB reports are the way that they are and I don't want to change them. But I wonder if a wiki approach to accident documentation would improve the number of lessons learned. Is it time to try this with the analysis of glider accidents?

Here is an explanation of how the editing of Wikipedia works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Editing