Wide-ranging Safety Discussion...?

On Jun 26, 12:21*am, Ramy wrote:
On Monday, June 25, 2012 8:38:39 PM UTC-7, Bill D wrote:
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.

I guess it all depends what falls under 'pilot error'. I agree that just about every accident you can blame the pilot, even if his rudder cable broke for example, after all, he didnt check his rudder cable before the flight.. But how many of us are perfect? Same goes to a recent fatal accident where the pilot tried to bail out too low, probably due to some sort of mechanical failure. And a recent mid air, where none of the pilots saw each other until impact. The NTSB will,of course, determine it was pilots failure to see each other. Case closed . But is it? It's been demonstrated over and over that our eyes are not able to detect collision threat on time. So I wouldn't consider those as true pilot errors, but as bad luck or outside cause, which happened to safe pilots. And yes, we do find new ways to kill ourselves. The recent Texas tragedy may reveal one. I know of other pilots who took a toddler for a flight. I am sure those who heard about this accident will think twice and hard before doing it again, and maybe, just maybe, another life will be saved thanks to sharing and speculating about the cause of this accident.

Ramy

The Texas tragedy has happened many times before - it's called
improper loading. The manual clearly states it's a two-seat aircraft
but it improper loading doesn't have to be people. There was a
chillingly similar crash at about the same time in Colorado involving
a home-built airplane.

Midair's? I've had one and it was damn well pilot error - we were
both responsible but fortunately survived. I hope someday to see
PowerFlarm in every glider.

Of course nobody's perfect but when we step up to commit flight, we
take responsibility for our actions. If we didn't check that rudder
cable (and everything else) we've chosen to accept the risk there's an
unseen problem. Not being perfect doesn't allow us to shift the
responsibility elsewhere.

Like I said before, read the NTSB reports - not just a few but a lot
of them. Patterns will emerge and the mysteries will be resolved. I
remain convinced that after 109 years of flight, there are really few
to no new ways to crash. The tragedy is we keep repeating the same
mistakes.