Hard Deck

On Sunday, January 28, 2018 at 1:53:30 PM UTC-5, jfitch wrote:
The issues are quite site dependent.

Exactly. Like Chip, I went back and looked at the BB Contest Safety Reports. If you leave aside mountain and ridge sites (technical sites), it's hard to find any crashes which would have been prevented by some sort of hard-deck. Two of the examples (Fairfield and Perry) happened near the home airport, ostensibly due to pilots trying to squeak home. We already have a rule for that (minimum arrival height). The Diana crash at Fairfield should have been a successful outlanding since the pilot did some things right (i.e. committed to a landout) but inexplicably messed up by switching fields late.

The Pegasus crash at Elmira wasn't a guy trying to extract maximum points on the day. As the report makes clear, he had already given up racing and was just trying to avoid landing out. He botched what should have been a simple field landing. Similarly, the Mifflin crash in the Stone Valley looks to have resulted from a failed ridge run, perhaps due to inexperience with ridge flying.

Now, let's consider unintended consequences in a flatlands site. Here's a very realistic scenario. Windy day. 10 mile marginal stretch with good fields on the other side (maybe even an airport). Pilot leaves with a cushion but gets slammed. 2 miles from the safer terrain and cruising at 80kts he's down to 300 feet above the "hard deck" (say 1000 feet). He's got a reasonable/safe glide to the fields, but points are on the line. He will almost certainly drop down under 1000 feet before he gets to salvation. Then, he hits a broken half knot. At least he's not going down. What does he do? The safe thing is to bounce it and proceed knowing he's almost certainly going to "virtually" land out. But points are on the line. So he stops and tries to make the half knot rotor/thermal work, only to drift back another mile while bleeding off the speed he had in the tank. After flailing around gaining on a half turn and losing on the other half, he loses the half knot entirely, but now he's got a much more marginal glide to the safe fields. In fact, he's not sure he can make it. Well that sucks.

Regarding mountain and ridge sites, can you really anticipate all of the permutations in conditions to make a one-size-fits-all hard deck? Leave aside the high ground; even the valleys have significant risks with one set of conditions and can be completely benign in others.

I don't believe that we can afford to do nothing, but I don't agree this is the solution. Couple of thoughts:

- Reading the Nadler report about the Sugarbush debacle vs. Cindy B's observations, it's clear that pilot qualifications/experience ought to be studied more carefully. CDs and CMs ought to be comfortable challenging pilots who appear to be in over their heads.

- Encourage pilot classification (e.g. Gold vs. Silver) classification rather than always grouping by glider classification at highly technical sites.. Then, ensure CDs call tasks accordingly, inlcluding being willing to cancel days (such as the rain/ridge/wave day in the Sugarbush report) for the less-experience classification.

- Encourage more sites to improve the task area briefings with more focus on never-go areas or minimum safe altitudes under specific conditions.

P3