Good points. I've noticed a few airline pilots among the particularly, er, bold contest pilots; one or two in the crash statistics including (sadly) an airline safety check pilot glider fatality, involving very low and late decisionmaking about a landout; and I have seen airline pilots particularly vocal (to the point of yelling at me using profanity) about ideas like high finish gates and hard decks, ideas they fly by every day of their working lives. Of course, I know some other airline pilots in the glider community who are absolute models of how to fly fast, efficiently, proficiently, and safely. So bottom line, there is no obvious correlation. An interesting perspective for the proposition that more education will help.

Another aspect is planning. As someone said earlier in the thread, we head off cross country with very little planning. I am particularly guilty of this, often showing up at a race with very little time spent even considering the area to be flown.

Imagine if airlines had to thermal to get from place to place. Surely every single landable field along the way would be marked, studied, in a little booklet (now computer), and you would fly "airport to airport" with conservative numerical minimums. The idea that the pilot would just look out the window, commit to his course while still far away, then find and evaluate fields from the air would be laughed at. (A paradox of our immense high performance gliders is that you really cannot evaluate your landing options from the air. At 10k AGL out west especially, your landing option can be 50 miles away, over a hill and up a valley!)

If only there were 100,000 of us, this kind of investment would be worth it..

John Cochrane