On Friday, April 8, 2016 at 4:40:05 AM UTC-7, Giaco wrote:
So if we are trying to actually answer Bob's initial question, the real question is how much total risk is the soaring community willing to accept?

The thing is, though, the soaring community tends to focus on risks which are real, but don't occur very often. In 25 years of flying in California and Nevada I've known about 10 pilots on a first name basis who died in accidents. Almost all were due to mundane things like missing a control connection, stall/spins in gusty/turbulent conditions on landing or PTT, hitting the rocks while trying to climb up high enough to clear that last ridge before home late in the day, etc. It's the mid and high time pilots that these things tend to happen to, low time pilots seem to mostly avoid getting into these sorts of scenarios. Statistically, off-airport landing fatalities are towards the bottom of the list of fatality causes (although destroyed gliders and injuries do happen more frequently), as are mid-air fatalities.

I think we tend to ignore risks which we think can't happen to us (because we are, of course, more skilled than those who screwed up), and focus on things that other, less skilled pilots can do to us, like hit us in a blind spot (hence strong community pressure for FLARM). The real killers here are likely things like dehydration, hypoxia, and plain old complacency about ones current skill level. I've stopped flying a number of times, when I come to the realization that complacency and infrequent flying was leading to silly mistakes that easily could have resulted in a fatal accident chain.

I've brought this up before, but I think one big factor causing that complacency is the ubiquity of high quality online soaring forecasts. Years ago most pilots would go flying just about every weekend, as we often had no good idea whether we were going to miss a good day. We'd fly whether it looked promising or not, because we were already there. Now, nobody heads to the airport unless the forecasts show conditions will be great, many pilots may only make 10 or so flights in an entire season. I suspect this is killing pilots, as well as soaring operations...

Marc