Reducing the Accident Rate

Michael wrote:

Andrew Gideon wrote
You exclude all those that recognize the risk, and accept the risk as
payment for the various benefits, but that would be even happier to gain
those benefits w/o the risk.

I sometimes wonder how many of those there really are.

Think about how you feel when you pull off a landing with a lot of
gusty crosswind and squeak it on, right on target. Or when you make
an approach to minimums with the needle(s) dead centered all the way
and the runway is right there. Intellectually, you know that you just
completed an increased-risk operation - and what made it an
increased-risk operation was the increased degree of difficulty. But
you still feel good - you were faced with a challenge and you were up
to it. You wouldn't feel nearly as good making that approach/landing
in calm winds/CAVU.

In fact, I do feel pretty damned good making an excellent approach under the
hood too. There's less risk, which I like, and there's also the same
satisfaction of having met well the challenge.

I enjoy when I nail a simulated power failure landing too...but I don't long
for real opportunities to test my skills.


How many pilots don't feel that way?

"Comfort" does not imply "enjoyment".

I wonder.

In any case - whether they enjoy it or not (and I think most do, at
some level) the fact that they are comfortable with a certain amount
of risk means that most pilots are not too interested in reducing that
risk if it means a reduction in capability.

Ah, now here we're in complete agreement. I see the risk as payment for the
capability, and the current trade-off is fine for me. Of course, my risk
profile is different from some random other pilot's, but that's each of us
making our own individual choices.

Just say no doesn't cut
it. To have acceptance and value, a safety seminar has to show you
how to reduce risk without reducing capability. That's much harder,
and in my opinion few safety seminars accomplish this. I think that's
why most people don't go.

I think that many don't "spoon feed" this, true. For example, I attended
one seminar which was a dissection of a midair. There was no conclusion
with a set of rules that would reduce risk, but I think that the
presentation and discussion provided useful information. Seeing what
occurred offers us the chance to catch the same pattern, and "break the
chain".

I think a fair number of seminars fall into this category.

[...]
I think the real solution is to have safety seminars that actually
teach you to increase safety without decreasing capability. Then
people will come and pay attention. However, you don't accomplish an
increase in safety without a reduction in capability with rules - you
accomplish it with skill and knowledge. That means we need a very
different method for choosing the people who teach these safety
seminars.

I think I'm seeing what you mean. In your experience, seminars often
present rules of the form "thou shall not". I've been to some, but I've
also been to some which draw no such simple conclusions, and that simply do
provide knowledge (perhaps from the mistakes of others).

Still, I'm going to take this perspective to the next few seminars, and see
if I note more of what you're describing.

- Andrew