Hard Deck

On Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 10:49:36 AM UTC-5, John Cochrane wrote:
Nice story T8

It is interesting that over the last few decades, airlines have reduced crashes essentially to zero. Ok, not quite still, but orders of magnitude safer than any other means of transportation (trains, cars, busses) and probably walking too.

Meanwhile, gliders continue on our merry way, with something like 3 fatalities per year out of well less than 10,000 active pilots in the US. Far more than driving, with far fewer hours per year.

By all rights, this should be safer than power flying. The planes are simple and true mechanical failure extremely rare. No engine? No engine failure, no engine fire, no gas to run out of. We just eliminated a lot of GA power's main problems. It is never an emergency that the engine quit. You know the engine quit from the moment you got out of bed in the morning! It is perfectly predictable that you will need to find a place to land. We don't fly at night. We don't fly in fog, marginal IFR, low cloudbases, all the get-home-itis situations that tempt power pilots to trouble. We're not trying to get somewhere. There are no passengers to disappoint.

So just why is our accident rate so awful. Well, yes, you say, training and so forth. Except the accident rate among well trained pilots is pretty awful too. Think of all the famous pilots, or your many thousand hours friends who crashed on ridges, crashed in off field landings, ran in to mountains, broke up in lennies, and so forth.

One contrast. The airlines look hard at each crash, and take positive steps to do something about it. We sit in the back and mutter "what a bozo, I wouldn't do that." Another: flying an airliner looks like a lot less fun.

John Cochrane

When ACA decided "enough is enough" with the stupid ****, we got together and started to rethink safety from all angles. We looked at every single accident and near accident/incident across multiple dimensions (pilot experience, weather, terrain, etc.) As mentioned upstream, one of our single biggest findings was that too many pilots are cavalier about XC flight and outlandings, especially in areas of challenging terrain. Another obvious issue was guys flying in really challenging weather (which often comes along with good/great ridge days).

We're making strides in education, club guidelines, etc. But one thing I can see as an instructor is that the US does a LOT less in terms of formal XC training than what I've seen flying at clubs in Europe. For example, you can be a CFI-G in the US never having been outside gliding range of the home field. In the UK, at least Basic and Full instructors have to have a Silver badge (which is still fairly minimal, but at least it's something).

Again - as mentioned up thread - I really think it's a mistake that we don't think more about experience-level competition rather than glider class. What's perfectly safe for someone with decades of competition experience across a wide range of conditions may not be at all safe for someone who just got his Silver badge two weeks before the comp. Adjusting tasking and task parameters to be a bit more conservative for the newbies won't make it any less fun.

And to ND's comment above - it's one thing to take someone with a gold badge and 20 significant XC flights under his/her belt and put them up against a Category 1 pilot. But putting a 50 hour pilot with a freshly minted Silver into the mix is a recipe for disaster IMO.