How dangerous is soaring?

Ian wrote:
On 31 Oct, 23:08, jeplane wrote:
On Oct 31, 2:11 pm, Marc Ramsey wrote:

How many cars are on the roads you use to get to the gliderport?
How many gliders fly at at the gliderport?
So you are telling me driving is safer than flying? Not sure if I
would drive or fly with you!...:-)

There are about 30,000,000 licensed drivers in the UK. About 3,000
people get killed on the roads every year. That's 1 fatality per
10,000 drivers.

From memory, there are about 5,000 members of UK gliding clubs. About
2 - 3 people get killed gliding per year, on average. That's 1
fatality per 2,500 pilots.

The everage driver does 10,000 miles per annum, which is 200 hours at
50mph. The average gliding club member does something like 10 hours
per annum.

So that's 1 fatality per 2,000,000 driver-hours against 1 fatality per
25,000 pilot-hours.

I'd welcome correction on the figures - I'm doing this from memory of
stuff I looked up ~10 years ago, but I'd be very surprised if driving
risk came within an order of magnitude of soaring risk.

10 hours/year sounds low to me. I'd have guessed 20-30 hours at least.
In support of that figure I did what seemed like very little flying this
year, but found to my surprise that I'd managed 35 hours. I'd guess that
I'd do 50-70 hours in a year with more normal weather.

I thought I'd read that the UK had around 8000 active glider pilots but
I won't argue with you over a change that has relatively little impact
on your argument.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |