Wide-ranging Safety Discussion...?

On Wednesday, July 4, 2012 6:56:09 PM UTC-4, son_of_flubber wrote:

The obituary section in the magazine (Final Glide) does not even mention if the death happened in a glider... not even an asterisk next to the name.

I opened the latest Soaring Magazine to find a safety-related letter to the editor by a competition pilot recently killed during a competition, and the mention of another such pilot in the rankings of another competition. That's food for thought.

People (that is, the general public) generally misjudge the risk involved in anything when rare events are involved. It is a well-studied fact that people cannot correctly estimate probabilities of low-frequency events (see Nobel prize winner Kahneman & Tversky's work), and if people are told about these events (as in the media), they become very salient and their probability is over-estimated (see Barron&Erev).

Thus, there are sound reasons why a public magazine does not discuss actual fatalities in a timely manner; however, I agree that this does not serve the soaring community well.

I like the "Never Again" column in AOPA magazine. Perhaps that would be a good compromise.