Put your money where the risk is

I'm with Eric.

"Poor airmanship" can pretty nearly be defined as being the PIC of an airplane that crashes - which isn't super helpful. The question I ask myself is: are any of us such great pilots with such impeccable airmanship that we are practically immune from accident - or even at significantly lower risk? We all like to tell ourselves we are good enough pilots not to make a fatal error but obviously some of us end up dead wrong.

I pretty regularly hear assessments of poor flying or poor decision-making following accidents of all kinds, but particularly those with fatalities. Since these accidents are only in the rarest of instances associated with pilots about whom I've also heard "that guy is going to kill himself one day" I can only conclude that we are terrible at predicting who suffers from chronic "poor airmanship" of sufficient severity to kill themself - and we are particularly bad at predicting this for ourselves the ones who end up dead wouldn't fly. So we tend to rationalize about accidents and how we wouldn't do such stupid things and it was all oh so easy to avoid. If hindsight is 20/20, hindsight about someone else's accident is 20/10.

Do I think accidents are totally random and there's nothing that any of us can do about it? No. I wouldn't get in the cockpit, close the canopy and launch if that were the case. But, I do believe there are a significant number of cases where circumstances overwhelm what 99.9 times out of 100 would be an uneventful flight or flying maneuver.

Yes, if you never thermal below 1,500' AGL, never get out of 25:1 gliding range of an airport, never fly slower than 65 knots and never bank more than 30 degrees you might reduce your risk, but not to zero by any stretch and you will likely sacrifice other flying goals in the process, so you shave a little bit here or there while still trying to be careful and safe. Then you end up is a situation where the options aren't what you'd prefer and you have to choose (simple one - land at this airport and call for a retrieve or head to that cu and risk a field landing but if it works you get the altitude you need to get home). So you choose and things can get better or they can get worse. Then you choose again, and again.

We like to think there are absolute limits and rules we can fly by to stay safe, but those are all built on a presumption of predictability - and prediction is a probabilistic exercise. Rule and procedures take you only so far. We all choose where in the probability distribution we think we are flying, but we don't really know because our accumulated experience is insufficient to know exactly where 100% safe is - and if you fly enough you only need to find the 0.01% likely really bad outcome. I know a number of highly skilled pilots with excellent airmanship who through a series of decisions that had unexpected outcomes found the 0.01% - a sequence of events that ultimately exceeded their abundant airmanship skills - in some cases only for a fraction of a distracted moment.

If everything were simple and predictable and seemingly low risk decisions didn't occasionally tend to compound in the worst possible ways, we could all just take a training flight, learn the secret of flawless airmanship and accidents would mostly be a thing of a past. I think we all know it's not so simple, which is why so many of us hunger to learn precisely what happened in each accident - what accumulation of tolerances in the wrong direction cost someone their glider or their life - so we can get a better sense of where the 0.01% is.

Andy Blackburn
9B


On Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at 11:16:46 AM UTC-8, Eric Greenwell wrote:
I think "poor airmanship" is such a broad term, it tells us nothing useful.
Perhaps the term "pilot error" is more specific and useful, particularly when
talking about pilots that clearly are good airman, yet have an accident. It gives
you a specific reason that you can avoid or learn to control. I think Ramy is
pointing out what we all know: all pilots make errors, and it is the margins we
use that determine the consequences of the error.

Somewhere near the start of this thread, it was posited that margins can erode
over time for a number reasons, and previously safe pilot becomes, unknowingly, an
unsafe pilot.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1

On Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at 1:24:23 PM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
I'm with Eric.

"Poor airmanship" can pretty nearly be defined as being the PIC of an airplane that crashes - which isn't super helpful. The question I ask myself is: are any of us such great pilots with such impeccable airmanship that we are practically immune from accident - or even at significantly lower risk? We all like to tell ourselves we are good enough pilots not to make a fatal error but obviously some of us end up dead wrong.

I pretty regularly hear assessments of poor flying or poor decision-making following accidents of all kinds, but particularly those with fatalities. Since these accidents are only in the rarest of instances associated with pilots about whom I've also heard "that guy is going to kill himself one day" I can only conclude that we are terrible at predicting who suffers from chronic "poor airmanship" of sufficient severity to kill themself - and we are particularly bad at predicting this for ourselves the ones who end up dead wouldn't fly. So we tend to rationalize about accidents and how we wouldn't do such stupid things and it was all oh so easy to avoid. If hindsight is 20/20, hindsight about someone else's accident is 20/10.

Do I think accidents are totally random and there's nothing that any of us can do about it? No. I wouldn't get in the cockpit, close the canopy and launch if that were the case. But, I do believe there are a significant number of cases where circumstances overwhelm what 99.9 times out of 100 would be an uneventful flight or flying maneuver.

Yes, if you never thermal below 1,500' AGL, never get out of 25:1 gliding range of an airport, never fly slower than 65 knots and never bank more than 30 degrees you might reduce your risk, but not to zero by any stretch and you will likely sacrifice other flying goals in the process, so you shave a little bit here or there while still trying to be careful and safe. Then you end up is a situation where the options aren't what you'd prefer and you have to choose (simple one - land at this airport and call for a retrieve or head to that cu and risk a field landing but if it works you get the altitude you need to get home). So you choose and things can get better or they can get worse. Then you choose again, and again.

We like to think there are absolute limits and rules we can fly by to stay safe, but those are all built on a presumption of predictability - and prediction is a probabilistic exercise. Rule and procedures take you only so far. We all choose where in the probability distribution we think we are flying, but we don't really know because our accumulated experience is insufficient to know exactly where 100% safe is - and if you fly enough you only need to find the 0.01% likely really bad outcome. I know a number of highly skilled pilots with excellent airmanship who through a series of decisions that had unexpected outcomes found the 0.01% - a sequence of events that ultimately exceeded their abundant airmanship skills - in some cases only for a fraction of a distracted moment.

If everything were simple and predictable and seemingly low risk decisions didn't occasionally tend to compound in the worst possible ways, we could all just take a training flight, learn the secret of flawless airmanship and accidents would mostly be a thing of a past. I think we all know it's not so simple, which is why so many of us hunger to learn precisely what happened in each accident - what accumulation of tolerances in the wrong direction cost someone their glider or their life - so we can get a better sense of where the 0.01% is.

Andy Blackburn
9B


On Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at 11:16:46 AM UTC-8, Eric Greenwell wrote:
I think "poor airmanship" is such a broad term, it tells us nothing useful.
Perhaps the term "pilot error" is more specific and useful, particularly when
talking about pilots that clearly are good airman, yet have an accident.. It gives
you a specific reason that you can avoid or learn to control. I think Ramy is
pointing out what we all know: all pilots make errors, and it is the margins we
use that determine the consequences of the error.

Somewhere near the start of this thread, it was posited that margins can erode
over time for a number reasons, and previously safe pilot becomes, unknowingly, an
unsafe pilot.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1

Andy,

I recommend that you do what I did: review ALL of the fatal glider accidents for the last two years and get back to me. Hint: those accidents did not fall into the 0.01% category.

Tom

I wonder if wing suit pilots try to convince themselves that their excellent airmanship skills will keep them alive as contrasted to their careless deceased companions.
Not equivalent risks, I know, but you get the point.
Objective data are seldom available for fatal accidents leaving us free to put our own spin on the probable causes. Like many high time racing and cross country pilots , l have lost upwards of 20 friends or acquaintances to glider accidents. I can think of only 2 that I suspected the pilot involved was “ an accident waiting to happen�.
One death for every 50,000 hours is an acceptable risk for me.
I try to be careful and current but I think I’m mostly lucky.
Dale Bush

On Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at 6:07:47 PM UTC-8, 2G wrote:

I did - 20 years worth. Read every last one of the fatals and a lot of the major damage ones as part of an article I wrote for Soaring. I can give you a full statistical rundown as well - by phase of flight, type of glider, region of the country, contest/XC flight vs local, etc.

I think you mis-understood me. A pilot makes hundreds to thousands of in-flight maneuvers every flight hour. Almost all of them executed without incident. Many of them are made based on presumptions about what the airmass, pilot workload, traffic situation, aircraft response and physical/mental capabilities of the pilot are likely to be over the next N seconds. Most of the time the consequences of being a bit wrong on where you are in the probability distribution of all of the above doesn't matter, but sometimes it does.. You can attempt to move where you are in the probability distribution of unexpected bad things by increasing your margins, but it's not a panacea.

I would speculate that many of the stall/spin accidents I've seen in the mountains had a fair amount to do with the airmass not doing what the pilot expected. You can say - well, don't fly in the mountains! I think that's not especially helpful. An awful lot of final glides gone bad are the result of persistent sink that exceeded the pilot expectation plus whatever buffer he had. I personally interviewed a number of midair-involved pilots and I can tell you that even with a very good scan your odds of picking up an aircraft on a collision course (particularly if it's head-to-head) is about 50/50. Your fovea just isn't big enough for the closing velocities of aircraft.. The Air Force, NASA and various air safety bodies around the world have studied it to death and that's the rough number they come up with. That's one reason we have Flarm - you can't train yourself to have a bigger fovea.

You can call all of that poor airmanship if you want, but I think you're whistling past the graveyard a bit.

Andy

Andy,

I recommend that you do what I did: review ALL of the fatal glider accidents for the last two years and get back to me. Hint: those accidents did not fall into the 0.01% category.

Tom

On Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 9:49:10 AM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at 6:07:47 PM UTC-8, 2G wrote:

I did - 20 years worth. Read every last one of the fatals and a lot of the major damage ones as part of an article I wrote for Soaring. I can give you a full statistical rundown as well - by phase of flight, type of glider, region of the country, contest/XC flight vs local, etc.

I think you mis-understood me. A pilot makes hundreds to thousands of in-flight maneuvers every flight hour. Almost all of them executed without incident. Many of them are made based on presumptions about what the airmass, pilot workload, traffic situation, aircraft response and physical/mental capabilities of the pilot are likely to be over the next N seconds. Most of the time the consequences of being a bit wrong on where you are in the probability distribution of all of the above doesn't matter, but sometimes it does. You can attempt to move where you are in the probability distribution of unexpected bad things by increasing your margins, but it's not a panacea.

I would speculate that many of the stall/spin accidents I've seen in the mountains had a fair amount to do with the airmass not doing what the pilot expected. You can say - well, don't fly in the mountains! I think that's not especially helpful. An awful lot of final glides gone bad are the result of persistent sink that exceeded the pilot expectation plus whatever buffer he had. I personally interviewed a number of midair-involved pilots and I can tell you that even with a very good scan your odds of picking up an aircraft on a collision course (particularly if it's head-to-head) is about 50/50. Your fovea just isn't big enough for the closing velocities of aircraft. The Air Force, NASA and various air safety bodies around the world have studied it to death and that's the rough number they come up with. That's one reason we have Flarm - you can't train yourself to have a bigger fovea.

You can call all of that poor airmanship if you want, but I think you're whistling past the graveyard a bit.

Andy

Andy,

I recommend that you do what I did: review ALL of the fatal glider accidents for the last two years and get back to me. Hint: those accidents did not fall into the 0.01% category.

Tom

The air in which we fly is not uniform, sometimes not even honest. Peter Masak, was a great pilot. He met fate flying in an area and conditions he was familiar with. While I did not view his GPS trace I did speak with a pilot whom did. Nothing unusual noted in the GPS. You can stall at any speed and any attitude. We have seen this in the Sierra's. Andy's right on about the stall/spin accidents, sometimes there are other factors. One of the things I worked with a XC student I had was noticing and calling out changes in airmass. Sailors are particularly attuned to this.

On Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 11:57:58 AM UTC-8, Jonathan St. Cloud wrote:
The air in which we fly is not uniform, sometimes not even honest. Peter Masak, was a great pilot. He met fate flying in an area and conditions he was familiar with. While I did not view his GPS trace I did speak with a pilot whom did. Nothing unusual noted in the GPS.

Yes, ridge/mountain flying presents increased risk compared to flying in the flat lands. I personally take the following precautions in order to minimize the additional risk associated with mountain flying:

I fly a short winged glider in the mountains (12.6m span).

I fly with an instrument that calculates wind speed and direction in near real time (LX 9000).

I apply good airmanship when ridge flying, by maintaining generous margins in airspeed and distance from the ridge.

I only fly competitions in flat lands.

Branko XYU

On Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 1:12:43 PM UTC-8, Branko Stojkovic wrote:
On Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 11:57:58 AM UTC-8, Jonathan St. Cloud wrote:
The air in which we fly is not uniform, sometimes not even honest. Peter Masak, was a great pilot. He met fate flying in an area and conditions he was familiar with. While I did not view his GPS trace I did speak with a pilot whom did. Nothing unusual noted in the GPS.

Yes, ridge/mountain flying presents increased risk compared to flying in the flat lands. I personally take the following precautions in order to minimize the additional risk associated with mountain flying:

I fly a short winged glider in the mountains (12.6m span).

I fly with an instrument that calculates wind speed and direction in near real time (LX 9000).

I apply good airmanship when ridge flying, by maintaining generous margins in airspeed and distance from the ridge.

I only fly competitions in flat lands.

Branko XYU

Flat lands would be more dangerous for me as 99.9 % of my flying has been in the mountains , much of that in a 26.5 meter glider. Therein lays one of the issues when trying to quantify how safe this sport is. To me it is safe enough to want to do it as often as the daily struggles of life permit.

At 21:12 28 November 2019, Branko Stojkovic wrote:
On Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 11:57:58 AM UTC-8,
Jonathan St. Cloud
wro=
te:
The air in which we fly is not uniform, sometimes not even
honest. Peter
=
Masak, was a great pilot. He met fate flying in an area and
conditions he
=
was familiar with. While I did not view his GPS trace I did
speak with a
p=
ilot whom did. Nothing unusual noted in the GPS.

Yes, ridge/mountain flying presents increased risk compared to
flying in
th=
e flat lands. I personally take the following precautions in order
to
minim=
ize the additional risk associated with mountain flying:

I fly a short winged glider in the mountains (12.6m span).

I fly with an instrument that calculates wind speed and
direction in near
r=
eal time (LX 9000).

I apply good airmanship when ridge flying, by maintaining
generous margins
=
in airspeed and distance from the ridge.

I only fly competitions in flat lands.

Branko XYU

Yes, interesting approach to mountain flying. However a 12.6m
wingspan (low performance) is going to mean you spend a LOT
more time down near the rocks than if you were in an 18m ship?
It's been suggested that European Alpine statistics show that
15m ships have a worse accident rate than 25m ships? I don't
know how these figures were generated: there are a lot more
15/18m ships flying than 25+m ships; is the analysis based on
Alpine hours flown? For sure it's dangerous; just look at where
most French glider pilots die: the Alps.
Dave Walsh

On Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 11:57:58 AM UTC-8, Jonathan St. Cloud wrote:
On Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 9:49:10 AM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at 6:07:47 PM UTC-8, 2G wrote:

I did - 20 years worth. Read every last one of the fatals and a lot of the major damage ones as part of an article I wrote for Soaring. I can give you a full statistical rundown as well - by phase of flight, type of glider, region of the country, contest/XC flight vs local, etc.

I think you mis-understood me. A pilot makes hundreds to thousands of in-flight maneuvers every flight hour. Almost all of them executed without incident. Many of them are made based on presumptions about what the airmass, pilot workload, traffic situation, aircraft response and physical/mental capabilities of the pilot are likely to be over the next N seconds. Most of the time the consequences of being a bit wrong on where you are in the probability distribution of all of the above doesn't matter, but sometimes it does. You can attempt to move where you are in the probability distribution of unexpected bad things by increasing your margins, but it's not a panacea.

I would speculate that many of the stall/spin accidents I've seen in the mountains had a fair amount to do with the airmass not doing what the pilot expected. You can say - well, don't fly in the mountains! I think that's not especially helpful. An awful lot of final glides gone bad are the result of persistent sink that exceeded the pilot expectation plus whatever buffer he had. I personally interviewed a number of midair-involved pilots and I can tell you that even with a very good scan your odds of picking up an aircraft on a collision course (particularly if it's head-to-head) is about 50/50. Your fovea just isn't big enough for the closing velocities of aircraft. The Air Force, NASA and various air safety bodies around the world have studied it to death and that's the rough number they come up with. That's one reason we have Flarm - you can't train yourself to have a bigger fovea.

You can call all of that poor airmanship if you want, but I think you're whistling past the graveyard a bit.

Andy

Andy,

I recommend that you do what I did: review ALL of the fatal glider accidents for the last two years and get back to me. Hint: those accidents did not fall into the 0.01% category.

Tom

The air in which we fly is not uniform, sometimes not even honest. Peter Masak, was a great pilot. He met fate flying in an area and conditions he was familiar with. While I did not view his GPS trace I did speak with a pilot whom did. Nothing unusual noted in the GPS. You can stall at any speed and any attitude. We have seen this in the Sierra's. Andy's right on about the stall/spin accidents, sometimes there are other factors. One of the things I worked with a XC student I had was noticing and calling out changes in airmass. Sailors are particularly attuned to this.

Masak's accident was a CFIT, the most avoidable of all accidents. This occurred in a contest when he was trying to clear a ridge with a suitable landing field within reach. Every other pilot in the contest did not attempt this. Bottom line: there IS NO contest worth dying over; after all, we are not at war.
https://app.ntsb.gov/pdfgenerator/Re...Final&IType=LA

Tom

“I make my own luck�. I like that, I think I will use that line on my wife the next time a friend dies in a glider accident.