Wide-ranging Safety Discussion...?

On Jun 25, 6:38*pm, Ramy wrote:
On Monday, June 25, 2012 12:06:23 PM UTC-7, Bill D wrote:
The most poisonous attitude that I fear are the people resistant to change. *They can resist for the sake of resistance and meanwhile poison the environment for everyone. *Adoption of Flarm or Transponders or Radio usage or safety practices can all be very detrimentally affected by a loud naysayer, even when the arguments lack validity.

Everyone just needs to keep trying and start with focusing on your own behaviors. *Your personal safety culture as you pointed out.

No kiddin'!

The safety of the sport of soaring for any particular pilot is only as
safe as he/she chooses to make his/her next flight.

Apparently it is not working this way. Otherwise accidents would have happened only to unsafe pilots, but the statistics is showing otherwise. Problem is that most pilots are not aware that they are doing something unsafe. Most pilots are not aware of the many different ways they can kill themselves, since we do not have an effective system to learn from accidents and incidents and figure out ways to prevent them from happening again, as oppose to commercial aviation which constantly learn from every accident as much as possible and implement lessons, resulting in contiguous improved safety. Our safet record not only not improving, but getting worse. Last year was a record year for fatalities, and this year we would have already broke this record if not for some amazing luck. And it is only the beginning of the season. *Almost every fatality I heard of since I started flying many years ago had no useful information or conclusion other than speculation on RAS and the typical useless NTSB report. Those who knows the details, and those who survives the crashes, usually prefer to keep the details for themselves. Until we manage to implement such a system, pilots will continue killing themselves without realizing they are not as safe as they choose to be.

Ramy

It works like this.
Fact: There was a crash.
Uninformed speculation: The pilot was 'safe' so there must be an
outside cause.

I've discussed this with Greg Feith, a retired NTSB investigator
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Feith). Feith says we're naturally
uncomfortable with pilot error since "they were one of us". NTSB
reports aren't useless just because they fail to list evidence the
pilot was at fault - the investigation stops when it's obvious the
cause was pilot error but the final report will stop short of calling
a recently departed pilot an idiot.

Never miss a chance to attend one of Feith's seminars. It's a
sobering, chilling experience but you will be a safer pilot because of
it. There are few accidents where the pilot was not at least a
contributing factor.

There are no secret new accident causes. It's an informative exercise
to download a couple of years of NTSB glider accident reports and
tabulate them in Excel - something I do every year. Almost every one
will be pilot error - usually gross error. Were these 'safe' pilots?
It would be a stretch to say they were. It only gets complicated if
you try to re-interpret the facts to show the pilot was somehow not
responsible. "Occam's razor" applies.