On Friday, February 2, 2018 at 9:54:53 AM UTC-8, wrote:

I don't have data on earlier accident and fatality rates but it would be great if someone smart who's inclined that way could analyze it (9B???).

Chip Bearden

You correctly identified my inclination at least.

Yes, I have a comprehensive database of all US glider accidents - fatal and non-fatal - for about 20 years. I did it a few years back, so it's not 100% current and doesn't include all the commentary It also won't include anything not reported to the feds or capture any scary moments that people got away with with only emotional scars.

Obviously we are talking about relatively small probabilities of catastrophic events, under a very specific set of circumstances - and a further subset within that based on particular human motives (where points at stake materially mattered but disinclination to landing out didn't). You'd need a pretty deliberate analytical and research approach to try to try to quantify that.

Ultimately what I think you will end up with is a conversation with a small number of dead pilots and/or broken gliders on one side, a notion of freedom on the other and in the middle some sort of view about whether the behavior in question makes a difference competitively or would respond favorably to a change in how we keep score. I think the answers to these last two questions ought to be looked at before we devolve further into a discussion about the acceptable ratio of carnage to freedom.

I remain skeptical that the proposed solution has a material influence over this sort of behavior or even if it did (assuming that we don't care about the body count aspect for the moment) that people are winning contests with a "below 500' thermalling" strategy. A SeeYou script could probably pull out all the low thermalling and the finish order would give you a sense of the competitive correlation (I bet it's negative). A "what were you thinking" survey of offenders might reveal something about whether the behavior responds to points - I think mostly not, but that's a survey of one (me).

IMO the view is probably not worth the climb, but I'm always open to looking at data.

Andy Blackburn
9B